The Lost Valley
We once again delve into the Trail archives and find gold with this Glen Coe adventure from 2009
To celebrate Trail’s 30th year, we’re dusting off our archives to resurface a selection of favourite mountain adventures from the past three decades. There are no bikes, tents, ropes or helmets involved in this month’s instalment; just a beauty of a hillwalk through an atmospheric, historic valley right in the heart of ‘Britain’s most illustrious mountain arena’. So join our former editor Simon Ingram as he explores the green wonderland of Glen Coe’s legendary Lost Valley.
The Lost Valley, Glen Coe. I had heard the name and jumped in the car purely on faith. It did have a lot going for it to make it a reasonably sure thing, of course. It’s smack in the middle of a mountain meat market.
It’s got a name worth priming your glands over. There’s a famous, big mountain involved. It must be worth a 400-mile punt.
My reasons for going to Glen Coe on this particular morning were just that shallow. You can’t give an impulsive wally like me a colourful book with names like The Lost Valley in it and not expect such a reaction. The more I read, the more the image galvanised itself in my mind. You don’t have to be Indiana Jones – or even wide awake – to smell the appeal in a place like this, and you can be forgiven for letting your imagination unravel with comprehensive enthusiasm.
The legendarily fantastic Clachaig Inn was nearby, which meant fires, beer and soft furnishings beneath windows onto Highland majesty. The trophy peak hereabouts was the spidery-named Bidean nam Bian (1150m), which I couldn’t put a solid image to but had regardless decided must also be as good as it sounded. The weather would be moody. The views would be gothic and scary. The breakfasts would be unhealthy and fantastic. It would be wonderful. It couldn’t not be. Could it?
Several hours later, we entered the black, presence-filled wastes of Glen Coe towards the seductive lights of the Clachaig. I had driven this route many times, but had never actually breathed Glen Coe air before. This was, frankly, a shocking lapse and probably the reason for my anxiety. Glen Coe was Britain’s most illustrious mountain arena, and this was to be my first taste: I didn’t want it to be a bad one. But, then, we were climbing Bidean via the Lost Valley. It certainly sounded good.
Installing myself at the bar, I was painfully aware I hadn’t been able to answer any of Trail photographer Tom’s questions on the way up as
to the origin of the curiously misplaced nature of the valley’s name, the mountain’s style and structure, and exactly what the perfect day’s walk in this most muscular of glens would entail. I borrowed a book so I could do some longoverdue research, intending to brim myself with anecdotes for tomorrow’s walk.
After an unhealthy and utterly magnificent breakfast, we started fresh and early at one of Scotland’s most impressive sights. I’d driven past the Three Sisters of Glen Coe in all weathers and moods, and had always wondered what lay beyond what was – if the gaggle of tourists working themselves up into a collective lather of excitement around us were anything to go by – the greatest roadside mountain façade in Britain. Bidean is usually invisible from here, though you sense the presence of something bulky lurking behind the three sentinel massifs. The Sisters – Beinn Fhada, Gearr Aonach and Aonach Dubh – recline watchfully from the car park, where a helpful sign gives insight as to their physiology. Raised, between the Sisters, are Bidean nam Bian’s valleys. From above, they look like the gaps in a comb – long and thin, stretching antennae-straight from the mountain towards the road. One of these valleys began high, in a cleft between Beinn Fhada and Gearr Aonach. It was like a raised mezzanine, a hard-won but worthwhile space set back and tucked away, which looked as if it might be a bit of a fiddle to get to. The sign indicated that this was Coire Gabhail: The Lost Valley.
Dropping from the roadside, the path took us beneath drenched post-downpour trees and over a bridge across a narrow, deep river gorge which separated the road from the mountains. Soon the way began to steepen, ushering us through dark paths dotted with a cave and waterfall, before the air above us opened out, the views of the mountains around us lost their tangles of branches and I felt the sun hit my face. In front of us above I could see the head of the Lost Valley, a dip in the relentless steepening ahead.
I couldn’t wait to look inside – but I wanted the full effect. Bearing left off the path, we scrabbled up a scree slope towards a raised outcrop which promised a pedestal view down into the valley.
The Lost Valley’s atmospheric name inevitably has its origins in something considerably less romantic than we adventurous rascals might hope. It isn’t ‘lost’ in the locationally elusive manner of the dinosaurs, or my glasses: it’s so named because things that happen into the valley have a tendency to escape attention for a while. ‘Lost Valley’ is a nickname, teased from its Gaelic name – Coire Gabhail – which actually means Valley of the Booty, so named for the MacDonald clan’s habit of secreting rustled cattle up inside it. Two collapses of glacial moraine blocking the head of the valley gave it its unusual flat-bottomed, hanging-valley structure, which hides its depths from the road. This is probably also the reason why, as legend has it, the valley was also a refuge – and frozen grave – for MacDonalds escaping the murderous atrocity that befell them in 1692 and became known as the Glen Coe Massacre. Both give this place an atmosphere that positively whispers to you as you walk.
Whatever the origins of its name, the valley is a knockout. Unexpectedly enormous, and card-table-flat at its floor, from which it elegantly bowls up the slopes of the towering mountains, a circle of cragged faces peering down on the valley floor. Two slightly smaller faces – Tom’s and mine – joined them, as we stopped for a lunch break on the raised promontory we had been braving pathless ascents and scravalanches (knackering avalanches of scree which in assault are similar to walking up a down escalator) to inhabit.
It was entirely worth it.
From here, Bidean howls its dominance with impressive gusto. It’s a complex and very high mountain. Most arresting is the brilliantly named Stob Coire Sgreamhach, a forbidding triangle of rock that dominates the head of the Lost Valley. Bidean’s highest point – our 1150m
“THIS PLACE HAS AN ATMOSPHERE THAT POSITIVELY WHISPERS TO YOU AS YOU WALK”
MURDER IN THE GLEN
During the 1600s, the economy of the Highlands rested on a currency of rearing and stealing cattle. The MacDonald clan of Glen Coe were the masters, stealing from near neighbours – the Campbells of Glen Lyon – and others as far away as the Cairngorms. The MacDonalds used the Lost Valley to hide said booty, presumably affecting a theatrical shrug when its return was stroppily demanded. Yet cordiality was practised between clan chiefs, despite acts against each other’s citizens and property ranging from the cheeky to the abhorrent.
By the 1690s, King William’s new government of army-enforced legality in Scotland was demanding allegiance. The MacDonalds were late to take oath, probably as the result of conspiracy. In 1692, intent on making an example of them, the government utilised the Campbell-MacDonald feud and Highland hospitality to take advantage. Led by a Campbell, a group of soldiers were entertained by the MacDonalds for five nights, before rising from their beds in the early hours of 13 February and murdering their hosts. In all 38 were slaughtered, the rest escaping into high corries – in particular, the Lost Valley. It was a cruel February: a further 40 died from exposure in the aftermath. Later condemned as the crime of ’murder under trust’, the event would become known as the Massacre of Glen Coe.
“AONACH EAGACH RIDGE STOOD AS TALL AS US, THE SHADOWS OF LARGER MOUNTAINS REPOSING BEHIND CLOUD IN THE DISTANCE BEYOND”
objective – lay to the right of this, within a tumult of ridges and outcrops which, amid the contours of a 1:25k OS map, are terrifyingly convoluted. The Harvey map is considerably more straightforward, and shows that the best point to aim for is a scrambly gully where the steepening, teardrop taper of the valley ascends to join the mountains. To reach it, we descended to the valley floor and began a leisurely wander along it. It’s unlike any mountain space I’ve ever been in: extensive, open, flat, green, yet high – not unlike an alpine meadow. Looking back towards the raised head of the valley had a weird feeling of elevation, like looking over an approaching waterfall. Beyond it, the huge bulk of the Aonach Eagach ridge looked back at us on the other side of Glen Coe.
But there was something peculiar about Coire Gabhail. It was missing something. Tom was clearly thinking the same thing, and nailed it: “There’s no river.” The weather was, granted, as dry as Glen Coe gets. But the waterfalls lower down and the deep streams cut into the hillsides around us all had to go somewhere.
“I bet it’s underneath us, you know.” Tom said, scuffing the gravelly tilth at our feet. The whole of the valley floor was covered in this stuff. Old stream deposits and remnants of the landslides which blocked the valley in the first place had grouted the crevices and dips of the valley into an environmentally skimmed flat floor, like sand in an hourglass. As sand is porous, the river ran through it beneath our feet. Who’d have thunk it – the Lost Valley had a lost river.
I’m ashamed to say it, but summiting Bidean was something of an anticlimax after the Lost Valley. Though that wouldn’t last.
We took the rough gully onto the bealach between Stob Coire Sgreamhach and Bidean proper, passing the huge Lost Valley Buttress en route. The view from the bealach was predictably astonishing: the backstage areas of Glen Coe and its remote neighbour, Glen Etive. I’d heard that backpacking between these two was a great trip: looking at this view, I could believe it. Back the way we had come, Aonach Eagach ridge stood as tall as us, the shadows of larger mountains reposing behind cloud in the distance beyond: possibly the frontage of the Mamores, possibly the rump of Ben Nevis. In the increasingly squally afternoon, a guess and a shrug was all we could manage.
We turned right and began to climb towards Bidean’s summit. Dark shapes which may or may not have been the summit loomed towards us out of the claggy air again and again as we climbed, until eventually a large, triangular pile of rubble signalled the highest point we could reach. The view had completely disappeared and we were in a world of murk.
The ambience of the walk was now starting to get rather closer to my spicy expectations. What had started as lush and enjoyably jungly had shifted into medieval and sinister, which had always been my image of a walk in the higher reaches of Glen Coe. Now all we needed to do was survive my expectations.
After immediately making a cock-up and taking us the wrong way off the top (seriously: have your wits about you up here – you’ll need them) we began a gentle descent onto what looked to be a narrow skywalk above bowel-knotting drops. The clag spared the detail, but made navigating the warren of towers, balconies and dead-end ridges between Bidean and its scary subsidiary peak, Stob Coire nan Lochan (1115m), a nightmare. Eventually we emerged onto its compact top, where an obvious ridgeline descended in a manner comfortingly in agreement with the map towards three distinctive pools, which signalled the start of the route we’d elected as our exit: Coire nan Lochan, running parallel to the Lost Valley.
As we emerged back onto the road and the Three Sisters’ murky outlines reappeared, I felt rather chuffed that my expectations of Glen Coe, the Lost Valley and Bidean had been satiated nicely. If you haven’t been, you must trust me and go immediately. It’s one of the few occasions where a place with a name as fluttery as the Lost Valley is every bit as good as it sounds.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve just spotted a place in Torridon called ‘The Rift of the Screeching’ that requires my attention...