Taking a Walk: Round Loch an Eilein

Each lungful of Highland air was unfathomably pure, as if it was richer in oxygen than the ordinary stuff. If it were bottled and sold, it would be marketed with pseudo-scientific claims that it boosted energy, alertness and vitality.

Then again, I concluded, any air would appear bounteously life-giving after ten hours of wearing a mask on a train. This, hopefully my last stroll under lockdown, was one of those necessary walks, urgently required to unwind after a day of travelling for work.

I’d got lucky: I had been booked into the only hotel open near Aviemore in the Cairngorms. One unadvertised feature was a convenient footpath into the woods. The rain stopped just as I arrived; there was an hour of light left. Gulping that air, I hungrily followed the path, which dived straight into forest.

At that moment, this became the most welcome assemblage of trees and shrubs I had ever encountered. Spread between rocks and tree roots, there was a duvet of hummocky heather and blaeberry. Above them was prickly juniper, leafless birch and then handsome Scots pines, not in serried ranks as we’re used to seeing in southerly plantations but higgledypiggledy and of varied age.

Best of all, the whole place was festooned with lichen which resembled the fake cobwebs hung up for Halloween in rather tasteless pubs and shops. The grey-green lichen dripped from the trees, and the rain dripped from it. Fallen clumps, torn off by a recently passed storm, made ornamental hedgehogs on the ground.

A cold wind caused the tops of the trees to sigh, but beneath them there was stillness and the sharp call of tiny birds – goldcrests, coal tits and mice-withwings that I couldn’t identify. The chaffinches sang with a different lilt here.

I followed the Old Logging Way across a small lane, past sheep pasture and several small crofts, which were now summer residences only and still shut up.

To the east, the high bulk of the Cairngorms was still covered in snow.

Through the trees, my destination, Loch an Eilein, shone silver.

My goal was to circle the lake; there’s an excellent track through the woods and around its shore. In the near corner, there was a small island of trees containing unobtrusive ruins. I knew they constituted a castle only from the map. I chose clockwise, starting from six o’clock on the imaginary clockface, where the pines grew taller and in plantation formation. It was about 6pm in real time, too, and a glimmer of sun flared up for a minute or two before it disappeared over the westerly horizon.

Every colour in this Highland landscape was a kind of grey, and none the less beautiful for that: the rocks, the water and the sky, as well as the silvergrey trunks of birches and their purplegrey branches and twigs. Last year’s bracken was copper grey. Last season’s heather was umber grey.

During the long, slow, quiet northern twilight, each colour leeched imperceptibly from the greys. Then the greys deepened to charcoals. Still the silver loch snaked on, longer than it looked on the map.

I was only at ten o’clock on my circumnavigation of the imaginary clockface of the lake. It was now 7pm and virtually dark. I decided to admit defeat. I had no torch and no desire for a night walk on this occasion.

I turned back on this gentlest of Highland walks and enjoyed the forest of dripping lichen again before the greys turned completely black. I trust that an

Oldie reader will complete my walk in the sunshine when we all stroll out of lockdown, and all savour that special, rejuvenating, free air.

It is a three-and-a-half-mile walk around Loch an Eilein on good tracks with no hill-climbing (and an extra three miles if you’re walking from Coylumbridge, as I was). Parking at Loch an Eilein – two miles south of Aviemore; grid ref: NH897085