The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Remote but not lonely in Scotland
Scotland is a compact country – wherever you are you are never more than 50 miles from the sea. Even in the centre of our largest cities we are in easy striking distance of open countryside with stunning scenery, solitude and peace.
Glasgow has Loch Lomond and the Trossachs nearby while Edinburgh has the Pentland Hills on its doorstep.
Sure, some visitors to the countryside need the security of crowds and don’t want solitude but it’s there if ever they should.
The late Tom Weir showed us in his TV series, Weir’s Way, just how varied our Scottish landscape is.
The climber, author and broadcaster travelled round the country taking us into lonely places few of us would otherwise see and talking with people we likely would never meet.
It’s not difficult to find remote places in Scotland – drive to the end of the road, pull on your walking boots and walk.
Look at a map of any rural part of Scotland – a good example is Glenesk and Glenanar OS Explorer OL54 – and see how much of it shows only contour lines and hill names and not a sign of habitation.
Go to the head of any of the Angus glens and you’ll soon know what remoteness is.
Carry on past the head of Glen Clova into Glen Doll where Jock’s Road finishes.
Named after shepherd Jock Winter, the track is an old drove road linking Braemar with Glen Clova and from there on to the cattle trysts at Crieff and Falkirk.
Get caught in a winter storm on some of the high parts of the road (you skirt round several Munros along the way) and you’ll appreciate the insignificance of man in lonely places.
The Crask Inn between Lairg and Altnaharra on the A836 in Sutherland is one of the most remote habitations I know, sitting on a high plateau surrounded by rugged mountains disappearing into the trackless parts of Scotland’s high, hilly places.
There are no artificial urban lights within 10 miles in any direction so it is the archetypal dark sky destination.
What a welcome sight the inn must have seemed when the road would have been a waterbound track and the sense of remoteness more profound.
Travellers then were better used to the idea of remoteness but the idea of a sustaining dram would likely have helped hurry their steps along.
Fishing on Loch Maree, Ian the gillie points out where a shepherd’s cottage lay in a fold in the hills.
His children walked, doubtless barefoot in the summer, four miles every day along lonely sheep tracks to get to school and four miles back. I’d call that remote.
OK, “remote” is relative. Compared to the vastness of the Himalayas there are fewer places in wee Scotland that can be judged as truly so.
Some years ago I received a letter from Nepal.
My correspondent was Lt Col John Cross, one of the most renowned British Officers in the history of the Brigade of Gurkhas.
He had been given a copy of the second Man With Two Dogs books, Tales From The Scottish Countryside, and he wrote to tell me how much he had enjoyed it.
From the stories he told the similarities in our lives are distinguished by their contrasts.
From his windows he looks out on 200 miles of Himalayas.
When the weather is clear he wakes to the sight of five peaks over 25,000 feet and 10 over 20,000 feet.
By comparison the Grampians are scarcely foothills so I suppose remoteness for some is a state of mind and for others it’s a geographical distance.
It was driving up to the Black Isle to spend a weekend with son Robert and his family that brought on this rush of reminiscences.
From the top of Cairn o’ Mount, through Deeside and Donside and the long climb over the Lecht with the panorama of the Cairngorm National Park the journey is a series of horizons of distant peaks, some of them Munros but ranged among them the lower peaks of Corbetts, mere hills between 2,500 and 3,000 feet high.
Each morning I take Inka and Robert’s two dogs, Porridge and Tiggy, a walk along a ridge with yet more views across to the Cairngorms, with Cairn Gorm itself in the far distance.
It looks remote and isolated but there’s a funicular railway up to the Ptarmigan Restaurant at the summit and a track for mountain bikers. Not what I had in mind for remote.