Backpacking Holiday
I was immediately struck by how easy it was to lose sight of man-made intervention, and how remote the little burn felt, replete with dwarf oak and rowan coming into blossom. Desending towards Kinbreack bothy, I was confronted by the barren emptiness of Glen Kingie laid before me. The old mill ruins at the foot of the Allt à Chinn Brich speak volumes about what’s absent. The legacy of the Highland Clearances hangs heavy here, it’s a haunted place. The door of the bothy creaked as I opened it, of course, setting the scene perfectly. I followed an arrow up a set of wooden steps and opened the hatch. I hadn’t planned to stay the night, but the clean and cosy room was too good to pass up. Laying out my gear, I collected some water from the burn outside and put on the first of many brews. The rain came, the plastic roofing shook, and the building groaned in the wind. I read the bothy book until it grew dark, and to my surprise slept soundly. It felt very lonely here, but strangely peaceful.Crossing the glen the following morning meant wading thigh deep through the mire before finding a shallow place to ford the river. The wind had dropped and the midges were now out in force. I sweated through my head net, then gave up as intermittent showers straffed my ascent of Sgùrr na Fhuarain on its east side, to begin the walk towards today’s target, the Munro of Sgùrr na Cìche. Showers turned to heavy squalls as I climbed higher, but at the summit and right on cue, the weather settled for a few hours and I was blessed with a ridge walk of a lifetime. The highline west takes in a further two Munros and a few subsidiaries. It rises and falls over many hundreds of metres, sometimes following the broken line of old iron fence posts or dry stone walls, then climbing up through smooth slabs to reach flattened, gritty summits. It was a graceful, and appropriately strenuous way to enter one of the more remote parts of mainland Britain.I was especially impressed by Gharb Chioch Bheag, sitting on its haunches in a heavy grey tortoiseshell cloak, the fabric of the mountain laid out over the fingers of a splayed hand. There was a sudden stinging rain storm on my ascent, an easy scramble over cold, wet granite and a burning highland twilight afterwards. I stopped short of the pyramid shaped Sgùrr na Cìche in order to camp, but clambered up early the following morning in heavy rain and high winds.
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