SCOTLAND


Easy Highland walks


LOCH OSSIAN CIRCUIT Loch Ossian can be walked as a simple, well-defined circuit out of Corrour station, following flat, well-marked tracks for nine miles through pine forests. Use the OS Explorer 385 map.


LOCH AN EILEIN Another much-loved walk unfurls 25 miles north east of Dalwhinnie. Follow paths for three miles along the shores of Loch an Eilein, with views of a little island home to a medieval castle, and the foothills of the Cairngorms rising beyond. Use OS Explorer OL57.


WEST HIGHLAND WAY Disembark the West Highland Line at Bridge of Orchy to tackle part of Scotland’s most popular long-distance path, the West Highland Way. This 36-mile section, taking two or three days, finishes at Fort William, passing through the landscapes of Glencoe and under Ben Nevis. macsadventure.com


repurposed from derelict crofter’s cottages. They are without electricity, bedding and flushing toilets and are all unstaffed — unless you count the resident mice. They offer little more than a roof over your head — and sometimes even this leaks — and yet after long hours tramping through the Highland wilderness, their appearance can be a profound blessing. In the pantheon of Highland bothies, Ben


Alder Cottage ranks high, partly on account of its remoteness, but also because it’s said to be its most haunted. Nine hours’ march from Corrour we fling our packs on its stone floor, and hunt out firewood for the hearth. Soon the only sound is the toothless whistle of the wind in the chimney and the crackle of pine cones in the fireplace. When we switch off our head torches we are part of a scene unchanged for centuries: wayfarers huddled by a fire, the flicker and shadow duelling against the walls. There are many stories of hauntings at Ben


Alder Cottage. One ghost is a woman who sought refuge here with her child in a storm, and — when driven mad by hunger — ate her offspring. Another is a resident gamekeeper who hanged himself in this lonely hut. Both are historically dubious, yet the bothy guestbook is full of reports of unexplained footsteps and sudden chills. It’s a place to seek the ghosts of the past in more benign ways, too. One recent entry is from a visitor who had been here on their birthday, to this Highland sanctuary where their parents had met 50 years previously and bonded over a bottle of brandy. The two were married three weeks


after. “[Dad] is no longer with us, and so we came here to raise a glass of brandy,” goes the entry, “... and to sing.”


The snows of Ben Alder We rise before dawn to push to the summit of Ben Alder. With every metre gained the temperature drops; clouds of vapour plume skywards with every spent breath. And then I hear a ringing sound — like the tinkling of distant bells — and think it’s a warning. The ringing grows louder. Resting on a granite outcrop, I realise what it is: the water bottle in my backpack clinking with freshly formed ice. Ben Alder is the 1,148m mountain that


stands sentry over the gap between the railway lines. The Bealach Dubh had been a place people escaped from; yet Ben Alder’s remoteness had cast it as a place to escape to — somewhere you might become anonymous. Bonnie Prince Charlie, the leader of the Jacobite Rising fighting to claim the throne for his exiled father, is said to have hidden here in the wake of his defeat at the 1746 Battle of Culloden. He was joined by fugitive clan leader Cluny Macpherson, who somehow survived for nine years in the Highlands, undetected by the authorities. In 1996, Ben Alder hit national news after


the discovery of a body near the summit. The so-called ‘Man with No Name’ had shed all forms of identification, cut labels from his clothing and climbed Ben Alder to kill himself with an antique-style revolver. His final view had been from a rocky outcrop, overlooking a little loch. His corpse had lain undiscovered


MARCH 2024 95


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