Dalwhinnie to Fort Augustus – 61 miles
Like almost everything else in Dalwhinnie, breakfast options were few and far between, so we felt blessed by the full Scottish on offer at the Snack Shack Café and Bar, a large low-slung eatery with a neon sign saying ‘Open’ in one of its windows. The place felt like it had been relocated brick by brick from a one-horse town in Montana, but the food was good and we left fully refuelled.
Our usual breakfast route-planning chat revolved around one question: could we risk taking a track marked ‘General Wade’s Military Road’ straight over the mountains to the north of Dalwhinnie and down to Fort Augustus, or should we play it safe and make a significant V-shaped detour westwards along the main A-road to Spean Bridge and then northeast along the Great Glen. General Wade’s track looked marginally more promising than the sheep paths through Rannoch Moor that had ruined our breakfast the day before. At least there was a double dotted line that continued all the way after the tarmac petered out at Garva Bridge. But the contours were bunched fiercely together and the terrain looked forbidding. Even though the Spean Bridge detour would add twenty miles to our day, we had no desire to be komooted again, not in this wild corner of Scotland, so we opted for the safer option.
We began to notice the words ‘General Wade’s Military Road’ all over the map of northern Scotland, sometimes designating a mere track, sometimes small yellow roads, some brown B-roads and even certain stretches of A road. Quite a road-builder that General Wade. It turns out that he was an Irish-born soldier and politician, who grew up in Tangiers where his father served in the Tangiers garrison and went on to distinguish himself in military campaigns in Flanders, Spain and Portugal. He also served at the MP for Bath and was one of the original backers of the Royal Academy of Music in London. A renaissance man if you like.
More relevant to our breakfast route-planning conference was the mission entrusted to Wade by George 1st in the 1725. The first Jacobite uprising of 1715 had taught the English a lesson about fighting a local guerrilla army in the wilderness of the Highlands, a lesson they weren’t ready to forget in a hurry. The King appointed Wade to the post of Commander in Chief of His Majesty’s forces, castles, forts and barracks in May 1725, tasking him with the job of opening up the Highlands and preparing it for total British military domination. In the next decade and a half, Wade built over 240 miles of roads (most of them, like Roman roads, straight and ‘to the point’), as well as bridges, forts and military barracks. His efforts contributed to the Crown’s defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobite army in 1745. Thanks to General Wade, the Highlands were slowly ‘tamed’. They’ve become so tame in fact, that sexagenarian southerners can cross them on two wheels whilst munching wine gums and cracking jokes in cod Scottish accents. Progress?
We left on the smaller of the two A-roads going north, looping round the white sprawl of the Dalwhinnie whisky distillery with its two pagoda-like chimneys, then over the main train line to Inverness. Amazingly, this was the highest point of the entire day; apart from the usual dips and undulations it was downhill all the way to Spean Bridge. We cruised along the main road, another of General Wade’s creations, to Laggan and then veered south west, through the wonderfully named Strath Mashie and along the A-road that runs high above Loch Laggan for mile after mile, skirting forests of commercial pine that stretched across both sides of this huge glacial valley, providing epic vistas to the south. There’s no doubt that our lungs had grown and our muscles had hardened since leaving Lands End, seemingly aeons ago, and we cruised with ease now, clocking 17mph on long stretches, modest in absolute terms but fairly mind-blowing for us.
As we came down into the Great Glen, I was out in front of the pack and I decided to race past the café at Roybridge in favour of a stop in Spean Bridge itself, which was only a couple of miles away. When we finally pulled in, Jools said that he could have murdered me, such was his desperation for coffee. I sympathised, but there was something magical about that ride from Laggan, the new-found kinetic force in our legs, the exhilaration of hitting a kind of cardio-vascular peak as we sped through all that widescreen grandeur. It made me want to keep going. The compensation was coffee and cakes at the Bridge Café at Spean, which, being on the main road from Fort William to Inverness, was very busy with ‘motorised’ tourists. It felt strange, after the sparse atmosphere of Dalwhinnie, to see so many people. The feeling of being a unit, the four of us, on two wheels, in our bubble, seemed more intense.
The cakes weighed heavy as we climbed up from Spean Bridge to the Commando Memorial, with its impressive views west to Ben Nevis and a host of other Munros. I read that this location was chosen for the memorial because it was on the route that new recruits took from the railway station at Bridge of Spean to the commando training centre at Achnacarry castle. Straight off the train, wet behind the ears, the newbies would be loaded up with 16kg of gear and weaponry and speed marched to the castle, seven miles away. Anybody who didn’t complete the march in 60 minutes or under would be driven straight back to the station and put on the next train south. Pacifist or otherwise, you have to admit that’s impressive. We were happy to cycle ten miles in under sixty minutes.
We crossed the Caledonian Canal at Gairlochy and cycled up the north side of Loch Lochy. Through copses of broadleaf native trees we caught flashes of the lake, shimmering and placid in its cradle of surrounding peaks. The effect was classically romantic and beautiful, like a more epic version of Windermere or Rydal Water. After the village of Clunes the tarmac disappeared and we were on the Great Glen Way, a stony bridle path that required more effort and concentration. But the compensation was an eye-feast to our right, over the lake to the mighty slopes on the opposite shore. Tim and I, the photo snappers in the group, started to lag behind, so great was the temptation to stop and capture all that Highland grandeur.
After a while we came to a little roadblock, manned by a woman in an orange hi-viz vest with a walkie-talkie in her hand. She asked, very politely, if we could stop for moment because there was a team high up on the hillside above us cutting down some huge pines. Most of the hill had already been razed, a sight that evoked the photos I’d seen of deforestation in the Amazon. The sound of distant chainsaws buzzed in our ears. I knew that these were non-native ‘crop’ pines, not the precious mixed canopies of the Amazon rainforest, I knew about the equally precious jobs that logging provides in the region, I knew that we were about to have pine shelves installed in my new office at home, but it was still sad to see an entire hillside being shaven in this way.
Phil and Jools struck up a conversation with the walkie-talkie woman. She asked where we were going, and when Phil answered, she wondered if we would be travelling north through Loch Naver to Betty Hill, then east to John O’Groats. ‘That’s it,’ Jools said, ‘Spot on.’ ‘Oh, you’ll love it up there,’ she answered. ‘It’s God’s own country.’ It turned out that her father worked as a ranger on an estate near Lairg and she’d grown up in those parts. I had long been anticipating that penultimate leg of our journey, more than all the others, and her poetic endorsement whetted my expectations even more.
Further along the lake, by an ‘official’ wild camping site (surely an oxymoron), Phil stopped and proposed a swim. He’d been proposing a swim for quite some time. The idea was welcome in theory: we’d been carrying trunks and spare towel in our panniers all the way from Land’s End, but apart from that semi-dip below the viaduct north of St Austell, we hadn’t yet made use of them. But what about the cold, the midges, the…well…everything!? Phil wasn’t diverted from his goal by our reluctance, and having wheeled his bike down to a small pebbly beach, he began to strip off. We followed. What else could we do? Jules also prepared himself to take the plunge. And so did I, eventually, more out of a wish to avoid the shame of wimping out, though that wasn’t the only reason. There was something magical about the idea of plunging into that placid expanse of water. Phil walked to its edge and took tiny steps, burring his lips loudly. In contrast, Jools roared like a bear as he ran to the edge and threw himself in. My approach was half Phil, half Jools. The water was cold and I screamed expletives into the still mountain air. When the statutory two-minutes of torture began to wane and my body temperature began to ‘equalise’ with the that of the lake, I was able to do some breast stroke, gliding through the rippled water under those broad mountains, cleaving the stillness with my arms. That was magical. Tim joined us, despite not knowing how to swim. It was a running joke…we were going to teach Tim how to swim before John O’Groats, come hell, come high water. But he just sloshed about, splashing water all over himself with hoots of delighted pain. After the swim, inevitably, we all felt fresh, vigorous and truly wonderful. Thank-you Phil.
The track became a tarmac road again at Kilfinian. We rested there and snacked, looking out over Lock Oich and the mountains beyond. The view was so perfect it might have been arranged by a weekend landscape painter. The Great Glen Way continued through woods, then along the southern shore of Loch Oich and finally along a stretch of canal tow-path that was broad and fairly smooth (nothing like the tedious narrow towpaths of southern England), all the way into Fort Augustus. Despite its military name, the place is tiny and jewel like, nestling quietly in the embrace of trees, mountains, sky and water, boats bobbing in its tiny harbour and along the Caledonian canal.
We headed straight for the Bothy Bar and Restaurant, and decided to stay there until we’d eaten and drunk our fill. We’d learned that, what with early-closing kitchens and a remarkable upsurge in people dining out in pubs, putting accommodation before food and drink was a dangerous policy. It was almost dark when we cycled the short distance to Morag’s Lodge. Morag had been stirring our imaginations in a burlesque-sensual way ever since we’d crossed the border into Scotland, with visions of russet-haired beauty and lemon drizzle cake. But Morag turned out to be the name not of a Scottish damsel, but of legendary monster, not Nessie, but another one from another part of Scotland. The place was huge, an hostelling institution, with its own bar and endless bunkrooms named after the heroes of Scottish history, many of them en-suite. We arrived shortly after a huge group of German geology students from Berlin, who tinged the atmosphere with youthful intrigue. I chatted to three of them for a while outside, whilst having a smoke. They had been brought here to study the effect of glaciers on the landscape, and to look at some of the oldest rocks in the world. They were also dying to visit a Scottish pub, and down a few drams of whisky, which their stern long-haired professor hadn’t allowed them to do yet. I tried my best to foment rebellion and then retired to bed at a very sensible hour.
Andy Morgan.
Just love the bit/photos about the swim :}xxx