My challenge was to go to work, drive up the road, run to the most remote loch in Scotland, swim for as long as I had heat reserves, run back, camp and go to work the next morning as if nothing had happened. The date was 20th June, so the days were long and the nights nearly non-existent. I had done my preparation, which was to be fit, carbo-load and lighten the pack.
Loch Loch is aptly named, lying nowhere near habitation. Why would the mapmaker give any other reference? Nearly 2km in length, twice pinched as a beetle with head, abdomen and thorax, the target lay six miles, as the crow flies, from the nearest stretch of tarmac. My professional session complete, I shut the laptop and tanked the thirty or so miles northwards, to the roadhead above the village of Blair Atholl. All the time I wondered: is this the most sensible thing to do with my time? However, the body was doing the action, merely following the heart. I parked up, spied where to sleep later, shouldered my bag, and started to run. The sun had given the air stillness, and I settled for a slow trot, steadily uphill.
After three miles, I turned off the track to follow narrow paths through the heather. A couple riding their mountain bikes, shepherded by their Border Collie, stopped to chat. Where are you from? And where are you going? But the patter of adventurers tends to be brief and so I continued, with the Beinn a’Ghlo massif to the north, domineering, sanctioning shadows to slide up the hillside.
For a more direct route to my objective, I left the trail completely, and tramped tangentially. On unrelenting ground the minutes seemed to spin faster, and the bog and midges became my enemy. I saw myself as this miniscule dot across time and place, remembering that this estate helped mark Scotland distinct with access to private, open terrain, through a trespassing botanical expedition and leading, some sixteen decades later, to the Land Reform (Scotland) Act. Was this just my luck, roaming free across the sphagnum moss, armed with the remit to visit and commitment to leave unchanged?
Finally, I saw the loch, and traversed an octave of stegosaurian ridges down to the water’s edge. Here, at the intake, embosomed by the slopes each side, now pilfered of the sun’s glow, the drink was gabbro black. I stripped to trunks, relaced my shoes, insulated the head, and waded in. The plan had been the full length, but I knew that, near naked, my body was not up to the task. Settling in for the first third, to where the profile hourglassed, I performed a fast crawl along the midline, enjoying the sensation that everything was in my own hands. Self-reliance and knowledge would keep me sane, alive, afloat. After ten minutes, I emerged, and ran back shivering along the scrubby, boulder-scattered periphery. My biking acquaintances had rocked up by my folded clothes, via a less direct route, and were configuring an encampment on the sandy borderline, where insects could not match the breeze. We smiled, not needing words to express the serenity and our experiences of being.
All this while, I’d been considering the return leg. The demi-tour would be easiest, while more arduous was the beeline over two cols, but the trip north into Glen Tilt would be most demanding, a journey of nearly 20 miles. Somehow, that’s what I picked. Staying lochside to start I picked up pace on the gradient beyond, footloose across a pathless, meandering watercourse to take the racing slant. The odd trio or quintet of sheep dodged my attack until I hit the flatness, an hour later.
Knee-deep, I waded the boulder-floored River Tilt to gain the track beyond. The territory was familiar. To this point I’d previously been twice before, cycling and on foot, and both times amazed by the distance from civilisation and by the burn’s arrow-trueness, canal-straight, with a grand debt to geology. I limped on, weary with the light greying, laboriously marking off sporadic landmarks, of plantation, lodge or footbridge. Would I wish for smaller expanses, such as those in England, where the land ownership does not give right and responsibility but regulation and restriction, and young people question why can’t we…? At this point, yes, because I would have murdered for a bus service or a pub. Certainly, the mind was wandering.
The midsummer night had come by the time I turned off the gravelly drag to take a short cut along muddy tracks. A phone signal reemerged after 11pm. The self-desocialisation for several hundred minutes had been liberating but, now so late on, others might be worrying, and I had started being anxious about them fretting about me. Yes, perhaps they were right, I could have had a more relaxing evening. Finally reaching the car, I put up the tent and crashed out.
Images
Loch loch, Atholl Estate
Upper reaches of the River Tilt
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