Mountains, Midges, and the Rebels
For as long as I’ve been hillwalking, Knoydart has held a particular fascination...It’s a bit of a cliché, but that last wilderness tag is pretty alluring when you live in the city centre. It’s supposed to be demanding terrain days from anywhere, but just how rough are those Rough Bounds? How remote is it? It’s hard to get a handle on the details if the view from the office window is a brick wall. Equally intriguing was the political backdrop. Back in the eighties, the athlete Chris Brasher and some like-minded hill folk got together to form the John Muir Trust. They spooked the MoD (Ministry of Defence) enough to prevent them purchasing the area for military training. Later, the beleaguered local community formed the Knoydart Foundation, and with a little help from their friends, bought the land themselves. I’d long been inspired by this heroic tale of a rebel alliance rising up in the name of nature and local community — it seemed to be a perfect marriage between people and place. I imagined myself standing on a weather swept summit, surrounded by a sea of high peaks divided by deep green glens, in a primal land populated by wild animals, anarchist crofters and mad aristocrat landowners. It was only a matter of time before my curiosity got the better of me. Rather than opt for the easier and more usual entry point of Inverie via Mallaig on a boat, I decided to start from the road end at Loch Arkaig, walking into the peninsula from behind. I planned to spend six days covering as much high ground as I could manage, visiting both Inverie and the Trust’s land on my way.A proper challenge deserving of the place, I thought.The name Knoydart derives from ‘Canute’s Bay’. King Cnut was a Norse king who took the English throne in 1016 after centuries of plunder and trade in the northwest, an important staging post between Ireland and the ports of Scandinavia and Denmark. A fiercely independent community, the Gall-Ghàidheil grew over generations of contact between cultures. After the Norman Conquest, the Viking hold on the country diminished, but these tribes of ‘foreign Gael’ persisted, spread thinly along the west of coast of Scotland and throughout the Hebrides. This history, as well as more recent events, is key to understanding why Knoydart became such a powerful symbol for resistance and self-determination. The peninsula itself is a self-contained world of sea and summit, water and rock enclosed by the ocean on three sides, sandwiched between Loch Nevis in the south and Loch Hourn to the north. Adding further to the myth and mystery of the place, Nevis translates as ‘heaven’ and Hourn as ‘hell’ in some readings of the Gaelic.Was I was about to spend a week in a Viking purgatory? The wind was fierce as I made my way over the pass towards Glen Kingie. I followed an Argocat track, an all too common sight on modern stalking estates. Bored of the mud, I took a narrow deer path following the edge of a stream bank, which made for easier off trail walking. This was a pattern that was to repeat many times over the coming days. The wind was fierce as I made my way over the pass towards Glen Kingie. I followed an Argocat track, an all too common sight on modern stalking estates. Bored of the mud, I took a narrow deer path following the edge of a stream bank, which made for easier off trail walking. This was a pattern that was to repeat many times over the coming days.
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