Britain’s Wildest Trail
Sleep deprivation, tendonitis and some of the most spectacular and wild terrain imaginable awaited Damian Hall and Beth Pascall as they attempted a Fastest Known Time on the 230-mile Cape Wrath Trail in the Scottish Highlands. This is their story
The Cape Wrath Trail is 230 miles long. It will take you to the edge
We all need more darkness, despair and waist-high bogs in our lives, right? And less sleep. I can only imagine that’s what we were thinking...
The Cape Wrath Trail (CWT) is Britain’s wildest and toughest trail. In fact, it’s not really even a trail. The unmarked route winds 230 miles north from Fort William through some of Scotland’s most remote and rugged scenery to Cape Wrath, the northwestern-most point of the British mainland.
My good friend Beth Pascall and I were in the mood for a winter running adventure. We had known about the CWT for a while, but didn’t know of anyone who’d run it in the depths of winter. Logic told us there was probably a good reason for this, but it also added to the appeal of the challenge. We hoped to be alone with the stags and the eagles, and to enjoy some of the magnificent wildness Britain still has to offer. And, of course, there was the chance of a record.
Trekkers do the CWT in around three weeks. The biannual Cape Wrath Ultra multi-stage race takes place over eight days. The Fastest Known Time (FKT) – the generally recognised speed record – was seven days and nine hours. We fancied having a crack at it.
Despite only having around seven hours of daylight per 24 (we were making our attempt in mid-december) and even though we expected some unfriendly weather, we hoped to average 40-50 miles a day. We would go self-supported, meaning we could pick-up supplies en route, but have no support team. Not even a change of socks.
We’d both covered similar distances before, but I was nervous all the same. The route is often many hours from a road, there’s little to no phone signal (a good thing, but also – potentially – a very bad thing) and, fed by frigid winter rain, the river crossings can be a bit serious.
‘ It is hard to improve on this pithy warning,’ says Iain Harper in his excellent guidebook, Thecapewrathtrail (Cicerone). ‘This is rough, unforgiving country that should not be underestimated. There are no pack-carrying services and often there are not even any clear paths, only bogs and leg-sapping terrain. This is absolutely not a route for beginners or those unfamiliar with remote, rugged mountain areas.’
A very experienced fell-runner friend had warned me not to go. The risks felt bigger than simple failure, so we’d be carrying Open Tracking GPS trackers with an SOS button to alert Mountain Rescue if things went haggis-shaped.
‘ If you’re coming up here tomorrow, you’d better bring a body bag,’ said the gamekeeper cheerily, the day before our attempt. Maybe he was just trying to scare the tourists, but there’d been a lot of rain and rain makes river crossings – of which there are many on the CWT – treacherous. Anything above waist height could knock us off our feet and smash us against rocks, submerge us or lead to hypothermia. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency website, which gives real-time river-depth data, rated one key crossing as two metres high. I was spooked; Beth, on the other hand, was a study in serenity. Sanity told us to come back in the spring, so we agreed to postpone the start – by one day. To keep ourselves out of mischief, we ran up Ben Nevis.
chilly but blissfully rain-free. the sunday morning was Our Suuntos officially started at 7:48am, as the ferry left Fort William in the dark, for Camusnagaul. The first section was road and we moved pretty quickly early on, powered by the inevitable excitement of beginning, but my pack – holding a sleeping bag, mat, stove, food, spare layers and GPS tracker – already felt heavy. The road didn’t last long; we soon turned off into Cona Glenn, the type of glorious, long, golden glen that would characterise our trip – remote, silent and compelling. And it wasn’t long before we became casual about spotting majestic stags; they seemed to be everywhere. At Glenfinnan we passed under a viaduct now known for its appearance in a Harry Potter film; then the terrain switched abruptly from good, fast trail to boggy ground.
We planned to sleep in bothies ( basic mountain huts) but we reached the first one – at Corryhully, 24 miles in – too soon, at around 8pm. We stopped for dinner (or two dinners, in my case), then pushed on to the first serious river crossing, at River Carnach. I’d been nervous about it all day, so it was a huge relief to find it only knee-deep. Wet feet seemed a small price to pay.
FORT WILLIAM TO MAOL BHUIDHE BOTHY total time :26 hours total miles :82
The night seemed to last forever. We climbed mountains, ran through snow, veered off-route briefly owing to exhaustion, but progress felt good. As morning finally arrived, we felt weary and took a five-minute power nap. We simply lay down on the trail – I didn’t even remove my pack.
The morning brought us sunshine, snow-dusted summits, golden glens with huge herds of deer, a precipitous descent by the Falls of Glomach and, finally, the Maol Bhuidhe bothy, said to be the UK’S remotest. We had hoped to get here for around 5am and sleep for a couple of hours, but it was already past 10am and to waste precious hours of daylight seemed folly. So we scoffed an early lunch and pushed on. our reward for oh- so reluctantly leaving the haven of the fairy-tale bothy was a long battle with huge, thigh-high tussocks mounted on deep bog. I ran some distance-to-effort equivalency maths in my head and concluded a mile up here was worth three English miles.
Then I did something idiotic. The map showed a long climb contouring around a huge hill. I was tired and simply couldn’t face climbing as high as Beth, so I decided to stick to a lower contour, keep her in sight and rejoin her later. All went to plan for a good 10 minutes; then, suddenly, I couldn’t see her above me. I tapped on my Suunto to get the route GPX (a file format for storing coordinates) data and headed for it, higher up. But when I got there, still no Beth. I shouted. There was
no one but us for miles. If we couldn’t find each other it was likely to be mission over for one of us. For the first time in my life, I used one of those emergency whistles attached to running packs. No response. I shouted again. Nothing. Should I go back along the route, or continue on? Was Beth behind or in front?
I gambled and ran ahead, shouting and whistling. After another five minutes I heard a shout from Beth. She was ahead, waiting for me. I apologised. She was far more forgiving than she should have been.
Fast, hard trails followed, but then energy-sapping, trackless bog, all the way to Strathcarron, where we encountered an obstacle too great to overcome: a pub! It was amazing how quickly our intentions of relentless progress evaporated at the chance of a half-hour sit-down somewhere warm. Locals kindly didn’t mention our distinctive aromas as we downed pints of lemonade and cleaned the establishment out of Double Deckers and salty crisps.
We reached the Coire Fionnaraich bothy at around 5pm, lit a fire, warmed dehydrated meals and lay down with an alarm set for three hours later. My only kit fail was my sleeping mat. Hard floorboards and sore limbs aren’t a good mix. After what felt like just a few seconds, the alarm sounded. ‘Another half hour?’ I croaked at Beth. When that horrible alarm sounded again, I still felt shocking: cold, damp and sore.
‘IF YOU’RE COMING UP HERE TOMORROW, BRING A BODY BAG’
MAOL BHUIDHE BOTHY TO COIRE FIONNARAICH BOTHY total time: 33 hours total miles: 95
10pm, initially on undulating, we started out at around rocky single-track under another clear night sky. I was discovering that a large helping of spicy beef isn’t the perfect pre-run meal. Beth was discovering that if your running companion has eaten a large helping of spicy beef, leading the way is the more attractive option.
There are variants of the CWT route, but we wanted to stick to the one detailed in Iain Harper’s guide. However, he’d recommended that we skip the section around the back of Beinn Eighe, as it’s ‘really rough’. How rough could it be?
Really rough, it turns out, means really rough. Beth described this section as the ‘slowest terrain of my whole life’. It was often very steep, the rocky ground covered in heather and peppered with tank-sized boulders. There was no path. River crossings popped up to soak and freeze us. It felt as if everything up there hated us and tried to stop us. And the fact that this battle took place between 1am and 5am didn’t help.
Before setting out, we had calculated two schedules, one labelled Optimistic, the other, Pessimistic. We now found ourselves firmly on the Pessimistic schedule, but we would still break the record, if we could stick to the plan.
Leaving Kinlochewe at about 7am we paused for another power nap. I don’t know if I slept. Then the sun appeared and the path rose into a glen that carried us to Lochan Fada, where we climbed up on the col. Pools of icy water glistened all around us, snow perched on the heather and mountains loomed in every direction. And it was all ours. I didn’t want to carry on. I would have happily stayed there forever.
COIRE FIONNARAICH BOTHY TO KNOCKDAMPH BOTHY
total time: 59 hours total miles: 153
Lunch was at the magnificently remote Shenavall bothy, then we powered through to another power nap at dusk. This was always a hard time of day, as we were entering 16 hours of darkness. And now I was at my lowest point. I had hoped to get back to Wiltshire for my children’s nativity play, but it was now obvious that wouldn’t happen. A long zigzag climb in pine woods from Inverlael didn’t enhance my mood. Nor did the howling winds and the peat bog labyrinth that followed. Chilli peanuts only just kept me awake on a ravine edge. When we sat for a snack, I promptly fell asleep.
But something wonderful was waiting for us when we reached the Knockdamph bothy at about 11pm. On seeing two mattresses we almost danced with joy. We agreed on five hours’ sleep and allowed one press of the snooze button. despite the revitalising snooze, it was a huge effort to swap the desperate comfort of warm sleeping bags for our wet socks, wet shoes and wet running tights. But light came quickly and we were on good trails all the way to the River Oykel. We paused briefly to down chocolate puddings for lunch.
Glenmore Forest – a huge, steep-sided glen – was glorious, especially when a young gamekeeper we stumbled across generously donated us his lunch. I can only imagine how hungry we must have looked to him. We ran down towards Inchnadamph as the lochs glistened in a magnificent orangegold sunset. Then darkness came again, bringing a harsh Atlantic wind for company. The next few hours, on rocky, narrow, cliff-top paths, were accompanied by constant angry white noise in our ears.
At around 11pm, we finally reached Glendhu bothy, where we planned to sleep for about three hours. It didn’t work out. We both kept waking because, well, pain. ominously, we needed a power nap not long after leaving the bothy. Barring disaster – and we’d both developed copycat tendonitis on our left shins, making downhills painful – it looked like we would break the record.
After a couple of hours of bogs and climbing in the windy dark, the sky exploded into orange, purple and pink. Swept up in the dawn-induced euphoria, we missed a key turning, but, thankfully, realised the error and scurried back on course after 10 minutes.
KNOCKDAMPH BOTHY TO GLENDHU BOTHY total t ime: 80 hours total miles: 192.5
We reached the wind-battered village of Rhiconich around lunchtime, but the remaining 17 miles felt a long way to go. Two portions of chips and a huge pot of tea in a cafe went down quickly. It felt odd to be in civilisation again. Everything was so clean. We didn’t seem to belong anymore.
The last few hours of daylight were sucked up by slow progress over squelchy bog, and reaching Sandwood Bay at dusk was a little emotional. My tendons were angry, but I was whacked up on Pro Plus and paracetamol. We continued over peat islands and waist-high bog. It felt like we were running to the end of the world.
An hour or so after dark we reached a track and suddenly there were white buildings, cars, lights, people and a towering lighthouse. Beth joked about a sprint finish to see who’d claim the FKT. We touched the wall (the official end point) at 5:31pm, four days, nine hours and 43 minutes after we’d started, a full three days faster than the FKT. We had done it. So we drank some whisky to mark the moment.
It felt good to touch that wall. But also a little sad. The adventure was over and I was going to miss all these majestic, places. I’d also miss how uncomplicated our lives had become; just eat, drink, rest very occasionally – and keep running north.
But Cape Wrath had a little more adventure in store. Rough seas meant the cancellation of our ferry ride and so we stayed the night at the lighthouse. Lighthouse keeper John and his daughter Angie put us up and fed us a three-course meal, and James, John and Stuart put on an extra bus and boat service for us in the morning. My head filled with thoughts of my family, but I could feel my heart lingering in the wildness.
‘WHEN WE SAT FOR A SNACK, I PROMPTLY FELL ASLEEP’
Watch Summit Fever Media’s five daily videos of the Cape Wrath Trail FKT at runnersworld.com/uk/capewrathtrail, or download their director’s cut from Amazon (search for ‘Wrath’).