Beyond the Great Glen Way - What’s Next?

“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 acknowledge.

In the past forty days, we had moved from one trail directly onto the next, with only a handful of rest days between them. The distances by now have been substantial, but it was the continuity from one to the next that had begun to feel heavier.  Added to which that throughout it all we have not really taken a break – only a couple of days off the trail, but no real time spent stepping back from the routines of backpacking to simply resting.

To continue on now would mean exactly that, continuing on – once again moving directly from one route directly into another without a break. A bus south, a train to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and then five more days on foot along Hadrian’s Wall, followed by another transfer back to Southampton. There would again be long days on the trail and little that could be considered rest.

For the first time in this sequence of walks, we found ourselves asking a question we usually avoid. Should we continue, or should we stop?

Not because our bodies had failed - they had not - but because the total number of days on trails had begun to blur intention as well as our love of the experience. What had started as exciting backpacking, bird watching, and exploring across landscapes was increasingly something that was becoming more automatic – continuation driven less by interest than momentum.

Our unfinished feeling at the end of the Great Glen Way only deepened that uncertainty within us. It made us wonder whether we were still fully present in what we were doing, or simply moving forward because that was what we had been doing for weeks. Was continuing on an act of commitment and still a means of exploring the UK, or simply blind habit now?

And yet, stopping carried its own cost. Hadrian’s Wall Path had been part of the plan for a reason. It offered a different kind of experience than the other trails had here in the UK. Hadrian’s Wall Path is a route shaped by history rather than geology, by the remains of a boundary that once defined an empire. To walk it at all felt worthwhile - especially given Sean's years spent studying Classical History in university. But to do so without the energy or attention it deserved would undoubtedly shape (if not diminish also possibly) that experience.

In the end, there was no clear answer. On the trail, as in life, there rarely is.

So we left the decision unresolved, throughout the evening in Inverness and as we travelled on the bus the next morning and took the trail throughout the afternoon, knowing that a choice would need to be made soon – very soon in fact. Continue walking or stop and sleep?

Regardless of what comes next, it was simply wonderful to stop for the evening with another trail behind us. For now, it was ok, no matter the decision, to allow the question to remain undecided. One way or another, the answer will present itself in the morning.

See you on the trail!