Kinlocheven to King's House
(9 miles/705 metres ascent)
I got up eventually and had a very welcome shower, after which I felt much brighter. (Not at any stage bright enough to remember to take a photo of the camp, though: whoops...) It was another sunny morning, and the other campers on the field were already up and having their breakfasts. One bloke had already taken down his tent, and was drying it out on the fence: good idea, I thought!
I made a flask of coffee, and ate a bit of flapjack as I packed my things up in a leisurely sort of fashion. There were useful little tables scattered around the camping lawn (it was more of a lawn than a field), and it was very helpful to have somewhere dry to put my kit while I moved the tent to a sunnier spot for a while, in order to help it dry out.
I'd hoped there might be another Challenger or so on the campsite at Kinlochleven, but there didn't seem to be any. On the way back from the water tap I chatted a bit with two blokes in the next tent. They were walking the WHW but had camped a day ahead, as it were, and so they were going to get transport to King's House and walk back to their tent at Kinlochleven for the night. That sounded like a good idea to me!
I'd developed one small/medium sized pressure blister on the inside of my left heel, and so I took advantage of the sunshine and lack of hurry to do something about it. I didn't seem to have a pin, so for form's sake I waved the tip of my little penknife through a lighter flame a few times, and then I pierced the blister to let the fluid run out. I know there are different schools of thought about this sort of thing, but my experience is that turgid, fluid-filled blisters are painful, and if I have to walk on then I prefer to pop them. I stuck a bit of zinc oxide tape over the top, and put my boots on, by which stage everything felt much better :)
I'd also woken with a backache (ugh...) but had attempted to zap it with a mega-dose of Panadol Extra, and by now it was improving a bit. It was more or less 11am (11AM??!!) by the time it had gone, and I left the site and wandered over to Spar to continue the perpetual search for cheese & onion pasties and flapjacks. The search was once again unsuccessful, though - don't y'all eat cheese and onion pasties in Scotland, then??? - and so I ate one of my Ryvita/cheese sandwich thingies (it quickly became clear that it had come to the end of its natural life, and I jettisoned the others...) and my one surviving apple, for brunch.
Some of the blokes the previous evening had suggested that there was a very steep climb out of Kinlochleven towards King's House, but I was maintaining my policy of not studying the daily map in any real detail until the last minute, and I'd thought they were pulling my leg. It turned out they'd been serious, though: this was a steep haul that went up and up and up, and I think it eventually took me about 3 hours to get to the top of what is laughingly - in comparison - known as the Devil's Staircase, and goes down the other side of the hill into Glen Coe. Whoever thought the miniature Devil's Staircase was a major climb had clearly never attempted the walk in the opposite direction! Anyway...
I didn't really mind the climb, and the views on the way over were really quite stupendous.
I attempted to use the panorama setting on my camera to capture some impression of how awesomely beautiful it really was, but I couldn't work out how to do it.
The hills seemed to stretch on endlessly, in every direction...
...and it was still possible to see snow on the more distant tops.
As I neared the top I turned back for one last picture of the tail end of the climb from Kinlochleven - see the WHW walkers who've made a late start from King's House, on their way down!
After reaching the top I sat down on what appeared to be a tick free rock and got out my flask, some remaining flapjack and my bag of GORP. Although the sun had been very hot indeed on the other side of the summit, the wind whipped up from Glen Coe rather sharply here, and so I had to pull on my warm jacket and hat before firing up the mobile to check for messages, and getting out my book to read.
There were two blokes working on the path. Bearing in mind the sharp wind, it must have been very cold work, as well as hard. As they passed by we chatted briefly, and they turned out to be clearing the path drains.
Frustratingly, the mobile signal wasn't strong enough to allow me to collect voicemails, but I was able to collect a couple of texts and so that kept me going. I sat looking down the so-called Devil's Staircase to the little patch of woods at the bottom, and remember the last time I'd been there in 2001, sitting on a rock at the bottom in the sun, and waiting for my sister to arrive along the road before nipping up the hill.
I eventually got my things together and walked down the staircase to the bottom, where once again I sat on a rock in the sun and this time made a couple of phonecalls home. About 20 minutes later I got the pack on again and set off towards King's House. There's a track along the bottom of the hill on the left of the road, but I chose to walk along the road instead because I was hoping to spot a nice wild-camping spot at the side of the river, down to the right. I knew it would be possible to camp near the King's House Hotel, but from what I'd read it sounded as though that wasn't a particularly attractive place to stay, and so I kept a sharp lookout on the way down.
I wasn't able to see anything, though, and by the time I reached the junction with the small road that leads left to the Hotel I wasn't quite sure what to do. There was still plenty of time, though, and so I decided to turn right instead, and see if I could find a good place some little distance away. Ideally I wanted to be close enough to go over to the King's House for dinner, and so anything within a radius of about a mile would probably have been ok.
I turned to take a picture back in the direction from which I'd come...
...and walked down towards a little group of trees that I could see spanning the road further on, at the point at which the river made its crossing.
Being rather geographically challenged, I didn't realise until I got further down, and saw a sign, that this was the way to Glen Etive.
The point at which the river crossed the road was absolutely beautiful, and I took off my pack and looked very carefully for a place flat enough to take a tent. The water in the river was crystal clear...
...and, looking back up Glen Coe, the river ran up towards a rather attractively pointy shaped mountain.
I didn't realise until the way home a week and a half later that this was the famous Buachaille Etive Mor, one of the most photographed and beautiful of Scottish mountains. I'm quite sure no-one would ever have given it a second glance, if they'd had to rely upon my photograph to describe the beauty of the place!
There was a carpet of wood anemones down by the little river...
...and this was where I hoped to make a camp. The ground was too steep, though, and the only place that looked as though it might be flat enough also showed faint signs of being some sort of path. I didn't want to put my tent in the middle of a path, no matter how rarely used, and so I moved on to look elsewhere.
Interestingly, I saw some stalactites hanging down from the underside of the bridge - lime, presumably? - and stopped for a quick picture.
I tried another little piece of woodland a little further up the road towards Glen Etive, but that was no flatter, and therefore I reluctantly concluded that it would have to be the camping ground at the hotel for me. All was not lost, though, because on the way down towards Glen Etive I heard a most beautiful, warbling birdsong emanating from a birch tree at the side of the river. I stood and stared at the tree for quite some time, trying to make out the bird that was making the sound, but I was able to see nothing until it eventually decided to move along a bit, and so flew on to a tree a little further along the river bank. It was a tiny little thing, and I was very surprised that it was able to sing so loudly. The song was a crystaline sweet stream, starting on a high note and dropping lower, lower and lower again by degrees, a bit like a sort of avian 4-bar blues :) More cheerful than a blues, though, it was truly lovely, and reminded me of the Gilbert and Sullivan song about the little tit willow.
I made my way back towards the King's House...
...remembering the pleasant evening I'd had there on the WHW in 2001, and wondering where the camping ground was. I'd actually tried to book a room several months earlier, but they'd been all full up. I couldn't see any other tents, or any sort of indication on the map of where the camp might be, and so as I drew up to the hotel itself I asked a man with a van, and he pointed over to the other side of the stream, no more than about 20 feet away. It wasn't beautiful, but I have to confess that it wasn't as bad as I had feared, and it didn't take me long to put up the tent on the edge of the water. I was very lucky that the midges had not started yet, as normally I'd expect such a camping spot to be an absolutely lethal choice! At this time of the year, though, it was fine.
There were other tents around, but the bridge over the river bisected the camping ground, and the other tents were all on the other side. By the time I had the tent up it must have been about 6pm or so, and I made my way into the bar at the back of the pub. It was basic in there, but welcoming and perfectly comfortable, and I was soon sitting back with a large bottle of Magners and considering the menu. I decided on veggie haggis with potatoes and carrots, but I wasn't convinced that that would be enough, and so to be on the safe side I ordered a bowl of chips and a green salad too. Yum, yum! :-)
I started writing up my notebook as I waited for my food. The bar was quiet, with just one other table of 4 people chatting away and sharing a couple of bowls of chips. My meal soon arrived, though, and it was pretty good for a hungry person. I like the veggie haggis, although I've got no idea what's in it, other than oatmeal. The mashed potatoes and carrots were a bit miserable looking, but the crispy chips and salad made up for them. It rather seemed as though someone had up-ended a whole jug of vinegary dressing into the salad, but fortunately I like it that way; I bet they were surprised I ate it all, back in the kitchen ;-)
As I was eating another camper came in and sat down at the next table. He chatted for a while with the others, and it turned out that they were all doing the WHW, but then he and I fell into conversation. His name was Jock, and I'd noticed his Macpac Microlight on the other side of the camp ground earlier on. He said he was very pleased with it. He'd been having a good time, but had only a couple of days left, now, before he was finished. We chatted about this and that, and after an hour or so decided it would be fun to try out one of the other interesting Scottish malts. I asked him to choose, and I can no longer remember what it was called (as I'd never heard of it before), but it was very good. Not quite as peaty as the Laphroaig, though.
I had an early night, retiring to the tent about 10pm, and lay down with my book to go to sleep. Before we left for our tents, Jock had suggested that the hotel might do breakfast in the morning for non-residents. That actually sounded like rather a nice idea, so I went to the bar and asked whether they did. I was assured they did, and told to turn up any time between 8 and 9.30am, so I decided not to make an early start, and retired to my book in the tent.
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