SCOTLAND


are heading. We explain we plan to walk to Dalwhinnie station, where we will catch a return sleeper to London in three days. In our rucksacks there’s food and shelter to sustain us; fastened to the straps are ice axes and crampons to traverse snowbound gradients. Minutes later we are on the platform, watching the train sweep into the distance, the rails ringing in its wake. In the silence that follows, Alec’s words echo in my head: “Rather you than me, lads.”


The ghosts of the Bealach Dubh You may have seen Corrour station in the 1996 film Trainspotting, in the scene where Tommy takes the group to the Highlands. “Now what?” asks Sick Boy “We go for a walk,” says Tommy. “Are you serious?” The group gets roughly 100m from the


station before turning back for Edinburgh. Our first miles take us along a track by Loch


Ossian, through shoreside forests of larch and Scots pine. The winter sun clears the hills, blessing bronze moorland with its golden rays. To our east, ranks of grey clouds assemble, heavy with snow yet to fall. For now, the weather is merciful. A lone buzzard watches us from a treetop. Around lunchtime we meet the only other walker on our trail: Jessie Guilliatt has been foraging in the forests, returning with a handful of hedgehog mushrooms. She is from the Mornington Peninsula in


the Australian state of Victoria, and has come to Scotland after selling her farm. Seeing the Northern Lights dancing in the skies above Cape Wrath in the northwest was, she says, the closest she has come to sensing the divine. “You just get a feeling here,” she says of the Highlands. “The sense of space. The fact that you could never see it all, even in a lifetime.”


92 NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC.COM/TRAVEL


Beyond the eastern shores of the loch, the


forests thin out. Past the lodge at Corrour, the track narrows to a vague trail and begins its ascent to a desolate pass: the Bealach Dubh (black pass). Here, our route shadows quickening streams. We cross them, balancing ourselves on stepping stones lacquered with ice. Midway, Jessie peels off to cook up her mushrooms with coriander and noodles. Many Highland passes have their ghosts.


Bealach Dubh has more than most. In December 1942, a Wellington bomber was on a training mission from RAF Lossiemouth when it went off course, crashing into a mountainside during a blizzard. From the crew of six there was a lone survivor — air gunner Sergeant Philip Underwood, himself seriously injured. After checking for signs of life in his comrades, he set out on our path — albeit in the opposite direction, out of the pass. For a few lonely miles, the snow raged around him, his injuries doubtless smarting with every step. By a miracle, he found help at the hunting lodge at Corrour, and later recovered. So remote is the crash site, the wreckage of the Wellington has never been fully cleared. Bits of the engine can be seen rusting in the hills. Nine years later, another disaster took place.


Five members of a local mountaineering club were caught in a storm just before New Years’ Eve 1951. One hundred mph winds thundered through the night and, one by one, four young men succumbed to exposure. Again there was a lone survivor — the wife of one of the men, who traced the lonely miles to Corrour Lodge. The intended destination of the club


members that New Year had been Ben Alder Cottage, a bothy by the shores of Loch Ericht. On a more peaceful winter day, it is ours, too. Scotland is full of bothies — shelters often


Clockwise from top: Dawn over the Ben Alder massif, looking back towards Bealach Dubh; a whisky tasting flight and historic equipment at Dalwhinnie Distillery


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