Overseas Walks: West Highland Way - a walk that is hard to beat

My wife Helga is Scottish and she moved to New Zealand with her immediate family when she was nine years old, leaving behind all her grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins etc.

We have made a few trips back over the years and last year we were due to visit again. This time we decided to combine the family catch-ups with a walk and, having failed to convince our teenage children that this was a good idea, we ended up going on our own.

It turns out that there were all sorts of walking options in Scotland (www. visitscotland.com/en-nz/see-do/activities/ walking) but we settled on the West Highland Way, a 153 km hike from the northern outskirts of Glasgow to Fort William on the Scottish northwest coast.

The walk follows the banks of Loch Lomond before heading up over the highlands through a series of valleys before arriving at the sea and it can be done in as few as five days but we chose to do it over seven days.

There are several companies that can facilitate these walks and we decided on ‘Easyways’ mainly because they seemed to focus on Scotland rather than the whole of the UK. They provide a service for transporting backpacks from one overnight stop to the next so all we carried was a day pack with lunch, water and wet weather gear. Yes, wet weather gear, “you’ll need that I hear you say; this is Scotland after all”.

As it happens we were incredibly lucky with just one half day of drizzle over the seven days of the walk. This was particularly fortuitous given that we travelled in April rather than in the summer.

We chose spring because summer is peak time for the west coast ‘midgees’ (little sand-fly like bugs which can appear in great clouds and are pretty horrible) and because we wanted to avoid the chaos and extra expense of visiting at the same time as the Glasgow Commonwealth Games.

Easyways can arrange accommodation at different levels from campsites to cabins to hotels and we chose the more expensive option with the expectation that a warm shower and a comfortable bed would be most welcome at the end of each day.

The West Highland Way (WHW) starts from Milngavie (pronounced ‘Mil-guy’) on the northern edge of Glasgow and it was easy to get there on the train from downtown.