Our Walk Along the Great Glen Way

“In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy Making Trail Choices With Wainwright’s Coast to Coast, the Pennine Way, the West Highland Way, and now the Great Glen Way behind us, we found ourselves at a point of decision. We have only a few days remaining before returning south to Southampton to reboard Queen Mary 2 for the voyage back to New York , and then onward to Canada, where we will take a train - the Canadian - back across the country home before returning to our ongoing #Hike4Birds there. We have enough days remaining – left either as contingency should one of the earlier trails take longer than expected, or if the opportunity to continue on presented itself. Yet standing here in Inverness, at the end of the Great Glen Way , the choice was no longer theoretical and was tempered by the fact that we were now very tired – perhaps more than we were allowing ourselves to fully...

“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Ralph Waldo Emerson An Incomplete Feeling Journey When we arrived into Inverness and completed the Great Glen Way , it did not end as we had expected - reroutes and detours in the busy city centre had complicated what should have been a simple final approach. Even reaching the final trailhead became a challenge owing to castle renovations. Because of all of this, the sense of completion never quite arose. This wasn’t the result of any single moment, but reflected the accumulation of disruptions en route. Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t angry, just exhausted, and disappointed – I admit it is possible to walk a route fully and still have it feel unfinished. So we chose to end it differently. Rather than stopping where the route told us to, we continued on - out toward the coast, to finish the walk on our own terms, at the edge of the water. This feeling may also have been the r...

"I was free. I was affronted by freedom. The day's silence said, Go where you will. It's all yours. You asked for it. It's up to you now". Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning The Decision to Walk On   Hiking is often described in terms of distances – stages, total kilometres, end point – but in practice it rarely feels that way. The fact is that trails are not defined by the kilometres they cover – whether in total or each day – so much as the decisions made along them. Hiking is, at its core, more about the changes that take place inside as much as the terrain one crosses. Our writing, we hope, reflects something similar. We have never set out to document distance alone, our goal is to relay the experience of moving through a place, exploring an area, and seeing the world from the trail. In this way, much of what we talk about are the moments that shape the journey and decisions made en route. The Great Glen Way  was a trail that was noted in...