I got the idea to walk this route when I learned that parts of the Moray Coast had been used to practice amphibious landings in World War II in advance of the Normandy invasion.

It turns out very little has been written on this subject.  Winston Churchill devoted two sentences to it in his six-volume history of World War II.

“One British division with its naval counterpart did all its earlier training in the Moray Firth area of Scotland. The winter storms prepared them for the rough-and-tumble of D-Day.”

Information from various sources, however, reveals that exercises occurred from December 1943 to March 1944.  They involved principally the 3rd Infantry Division of the British Army, as well as Navy and RAF  forces.

These “combined operations” we’re unusual and unpredictable, given the different command structures and cultures of the military services.  People paid with their lives getting the kinks worked out (as a later post will describe).

Some sources say the two shores of the Moray Firth were chosen because they resemble the beaches of Normandy where the invasion of France was to take place.  How true that is I don’t know.  I’ve never been to Normandy.  I know, however, that the beaches I walked on where the rehearsals occurred do not have high bluffs over them, as I’ve seen in some photographs of the Normandy beaches.

What this area clearly offered, then and now, are long beaches (several over five miles); tides that leave huge expanses of sand when the water is out;  cold, rough water; and relatively few people.

On November 11, 1943, the village of Inver on the Tarbat Peninsula that forms the north shore of the Moray Firth was told it had one month to finish the harvests and move all inhabitants and animals. The affected area was 15 square miles and had about 900 residents. There were 56 children in the Inver primary school, which closed November 26.

A “displenishing sale” was held at the nearby town of Dingwall, where 1,050 cattle, 8,000 sheep, 60 horses, and 50 pigs were sold. (Chickens weren’t sold; they were taken or eaten before the evacuation). The prices were low because of the season and a prohibition against widespread advertising of the sale for reasons of war security.

Tarbat was a the site for live-fire with tank weapons, as well as a limited amount of shelling from ships.

About the same time, a sparsely populated area just west of the mouth of the River Findhorn, including a hamlet named Kintessack, was given by three weeks to evacuate.  Eighteen Italian prisoners of war were brought in to help with the threshing of grain and the digging of potatoes and sugar beets.

Personal accounts of the exercises are rare.

A 2007 doctoral dissertation by historian Tracy Craggs (University of Sheffield) quotes a veteran named Peter Brown, who recalled a mock assault in November 1943.  He was immersed after jumping out of the landing craft.

” ‘Our objective in this exercise was a wood about fifteen miles inland across rough countryside. By the time we got there and had dug a slit trench I was in a pretty poor state. My clothes had partially dried but as darkness fell and it got colder I could not stop shivering and began to think I would not last the night. However about three in the morning the exercise was called off and we were able to light a huge bonfire and this, together with a generous rum ration, probably saved my life’. ”

(I personally doubt the beach assault was followed by a 15-mile walk inland.  Fifteen-hundred yards is more likely.  But who knows?)

The historian writes that “in January, three days were spent at Burghead Bay during Exercise `Grab’, with the intention `to practice assaults on beaches and the capture of initial objectives by assault battalions’. There was also emphasis on night operations, including breaching minefields, compass work and direction finding, as well as time spent on the range.”

It was a difficult time of year to undertake such maneuvers, with winter seas and only six hours of daylight.  It’s intimidating enough now, when the weather is pretty good and there’s useful light for about 19 hours a day.

Exercises at Burghead on December 22 and January 9 had landing craft leave from Fort George, cross the firth, and return to the southern shore  to simulate a crossing of the English Channel.  There was apparently much seasickness.

The biggest exercise was on March 30-31, also at Burghead, where 204 Sherman tanks, 32 Stuart tanks, and all the infantry of the 3d Division, plus cruisers and destroyers, took part, according to the pamphlet “Evacuation:  Tarbat Peninsula 1943-4” (undated) by Dr. James A. Fallon.

There were surprisingly few casualties.  One occurred in February and involved so-called “duplex-drive” tanks, which were outfitted with watertight collars that allowed them to float and move with a propeller connected to the engine. Two tanks swamped and one person drowned.  In all, five tanks were lost in the rehearsals, according to records.

In April, the troops moved to the south coast of England, where larger, more complicated, and in one case disastrous, rehearsals were held involving American and Canadian forces as well as British.

In May, the local people were allowed to return to Inver.  The government paid for damages to houses and farm buildings.  In many places, however, the ground had been compacted from tanks and took years to recover.  Purebred herds that had taken decades to build were gone.  Farmers removed unexploded shells from the ground for a long time, according to a pamphlet “The Evacuation of Inver” put together by the village’s schoolchildren a number of years ago.

It was all chocked up to “doing your bit” for the war effort.

There were other, subtle disruptions, too.  The Inver school reopened at the end of August, and the logbook for September 1, 1944 notes:  “Attendance is disappointing. Some of the boys absent themselves from School for no apparent reason.”

A newspaper account sent to me by Tim Negus, one of the volunteers at the Findhorn Heritage Center, whom I met when I passed by, included this observation from a woman who was a schoolteacher when the area near the Findhorn was evacuated.

“All stoppers from the sinks were removed.  I understand that the troops carried their own personal stoppers wherever they went.  But I hasten to add the soldiers took the stoppers only.”

A number of years ago, Tim tried hard to find someone who remembered the assaults.  They would have been visible from the village of Findhorn, which was not evacuated.

“It must have been like a hundred Guy Fawkes Days,” he said.  But he could find nobody who recalled seeing them.

It turns out a plaque on the beachfront at Nairn may tell the whole story.

Silent we came

Silent we left

To strike a blow for freedom

In the spring of 1940, with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in a non-aggression pact, France overrun, and Norway in German hands, Great Britain feared it might be invaded from the north, along the eastern coast of Scotland.

Few military planners believed German forces would advance south to England from such a landfall. But with Northern Scotland occupied, the important ship-harboring Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands in German hands, and British forces damaged from the losses evacuating Dunkirk, some speculated the pressure to make peace with Hitler might be irresistible.

To help prevent that, a massive campaign to protect Britain’s coasts was begun. In Scotland, and especially along the Moray Firth, much of it remains.

By the summer that year, planners concluded that 125 miles of coast needed defending by means of physical obstacles and armaments. These included concrete cubes, ranging from 3.5 to 5 feet high; tall metal scaffolding; pillboxes for men with small arms; large pillboxes with 4-inch naval artillery pieces; tank ditches;  mined beach exits; poles to prevent beaches and mudflats from becoming landing grounds for enemy gliders; floating barriers with old herring nets attached to foul the propellers of landing craft; and tons of barbed wire.

The part of the coast I’m walking along has some of the longer unbroken stretches where such defenses were built.  They include 4.5 miles east of Nairn, 7 miles along Burghead Bay, and 2 miles on the west side of Lossiemouth and 9 miles on the east.

The most obvious of these today are the concrete cubes.  You can see them in the distance here.

Many are exactly where they were poured 75 years ago. Some are crumbling because of salt in the concrete.  Erosion and evolution of the shoreline has brought some onto the beach and into the water.

Some were reinforced with steel bars, and have loops protruding from the tops, where barbed wire would be attached.

There is a wide variety of pillboxes, most specified by military architects, although some apparently with local design modifications. There were supposed to be two every 1,000 yards. Some were “bulletproof,” others “shell-proof,” and specs said they should have a perimeter of barbed wire at 40 and 60 yards to prevent the approach of flame throwers.

A motley crew of builders constructed the defenses. They included civilian contractors, British army units, members of engineering battalions from the Polish Army in exile, and village boys.

One of the last, Donnie Stewart (about whom I’ll write a later post), was 10 at the time. The war brought great excitement (and some tragedy) to Lossiemouth, the village where he grew up. In the fall of 1940, he and his schoolmates spent a lot of time watching the defenses being constructed. The concrete was mixed on site and shovelled into wooden forms. The boys’ job was to find flat stones to put at the bottom of the forms to keep the concrete from leaking out too much.

Mr. Stewart recalled that one day the officer supervising a crew chewed his men out in an incomprehensible tongue for scratching their initials into the wet cement at the top of a cube. He concluded years later they were probably from a Welsh labor battalion.

Some of the blocks show evidence of having their height raised by a second pour. That was apparently by order of an Admiral Dreyer, who visited the Burghead-area defenses in August 1940. The source for this, and most of the information in this post, is the book: “If Hitler Comes / Preparing for Invasion: Scotland 1940” (2013) buy Gordon Barclay.

The effectiveness of the barriers was formally tested in May, 1941. It was found they delayed the advance of tanks by only 70 to 90 seconds, and were easily destroyed with one or two shots from a tank’s guns. In May, 1942, the order came down to stop building them.

Fifteen miles between Findhorn and Kingston (which I passed through yesterday) was supposed to have wire-and-steel scaffolding barriers. None were built, although 85 percent of the material was delivered to the beach. You can’t see any of it now.

The anti-glider poles are still visible in some places, as in this tidal mudflat area.

Poles put on the beach didn’t prove stable if they were just placed holes dug in the sand. To solve that problem, the crews buried a steel barrel filled with concrete and then placed a  pole in it. You can still find pole stubs, with the outline of the barrel at the level of the sand.

On some popular beaches the concrete barriers were eventually removed. Jean Turner, a retired surgeon whom I met last year and who grew up in the coastal village of Portsoy, recalled that when she was girl “we used to use the spaces between them as changing rooms and picnic spots.” (Jean, at 76, is this year’s senior Challenger.)

Less picturesque and romantic than ruined castles, they will nevertheless be here for a long time to testify to the belligerent history of this beautiful coast.

The walk from Nairn to Forres was along an empty beach that turned to grassy mudflats cut through by meandering streams.

Along the beach in many places were wooden poles in states of decay. Some were mere stubs, a few were 15 feet tall.

I had seen these since Fort George. At first I thought they were poles erected early in World War II to prevent  gliders from landing safely during an invasion. I had read that such poles remained visible, 75 years after they were placed.

It turns out, however, that most of what I saw in rows going out into the firth were remnants of the armature of salmon nets. Vast numbers of Atlantic salmon once came down the coast seeking their natal rivers–the Ness, Findhorn, Spey–that flowed north out of the hills and mountains of the central Highlands.

The right to set nets along specified stretches of the coast has been bought up by estates and sporting companies in recent decades, I was told.  Those owners, in turn, have closed the commercial fishery in favor of a sport one.  All that remains of the working salmon industry are the poles.

The beach was lovely.  When a high dune appeared on the water side of the hard-packed marsh, I climbed it and descended to the sand on the other side.

I hadn’t seen a soul since passing two women on their daily, four-hour dog walk hours earlier.

There are always things to see on a beach. I’m happy to report I didn’t pick up a single stone.

I knew the long dune was a peninsula of high ground on a tidal marsh.  I also knew it would end long before the land did.  The map showed a channel of water through the mud flats. As the tide was more than half-way out, I figured the channel would be crossable, or at least wadeable. (The black target-like icon is my position when I went over the dune).

Near the end of the dune I encountered a colony of seals. There were at least a hundred up on the beach. They took to the water in batches and looked at me with great curiosity.  Here are some seal tracks, going to sea

and coming back to the beach.

Wanting to save a little time, I didn’t go all the way to the end of the dune. I climbed back up on it, expecting to see mudflats with a channel running through it. Instead, I saw a vast bay, completely uncrossable, despite what the map suggested.

There was only one conclusion: I had to walk all the way back.

This was discouraging news for someone with a pack on his back. I felt like sitting down and calling an Uber. Or the Coast Guard. Or something.  But there was no choice. I started walking–this time into the wind.

The mudflatted area (now covered in water) also had poles in it. I later found out they, in fact, were the anti-glider defenses. They were so remote that they hadn’t been scavenged for firewood or fence posts after the war, as had happened to those closer to settlements.

There were many tributary channels feeding the head of the bay when I finally reached it. I stepped and jumped over as many as I could, until I finally decided that as an alternative to backtracking even farther I’d start wading.

This was a bigger decision than it might seem because it required taking off the boots and getting them into the pack, which wasn’t easy. However, it felt good to cool off my feet.

This stretch of coast was bisected by the mouth of the River Findhorn where it met the Moray Firth. I’d planned to walk up to the western edge of the mouth and then turn upriver a mile or two to a bridge.

However, having done a lot of walking I hadn’t planned on, I decided to take a more direct route–namely, on logging roads through a huge forest. It saved me at least a mile.

At one point there was a traffic jam–two logging trucks and one walker, all stopped.

I eventually got out and crossed the River Findhorn at the Broom of Moy, which is quite close to the Snab of Moy, Wester Moy, and Moy Ho.

The next day, I walked downstream on the other side of the river, back toward the mouth of the Findhorn.  I eventually got to the village of Findhorn, which lay right across the place where I’d been the day before.

I went to the local museum, where two volunteers–Sue Finnegan and Tim Negus–were most helpful in showing me around and answering lots of questions. Sue was one of many people I’d corresponded with by e-mail while doing research months earlier.  Tim knew a huge amount of local history and archaeology.

Nearby, Sue’s husband, also named Tim, was manning the Ice House, a historical structure rehabilitated in the early 2000s.

In the old days, at the end of each winter ice would flow down the Findhorn, piling up on the shore. Enterprising people built a stone building, most of it below grade, with a hole in the roof, through which tons of ice was shoveled. The ice lasted nine months. Fishermen caught salmon, packed them in ice in wooden boxes, and shipped them to London. This worked until more than half-way through the 20th century.

Tim took me up on the berm behind the ice house and pointed out another, rounded-top ice house next to it.

Alas, it was soon time to close up.

He lowered the Scottish flag, and I walked on.

So here’s a little about the Moray Coast, much of it thanks to the book, “Portrait of  The Moray Firth” (1977) by Cuthbert Graham, former weekend editor of The Press and Journal, a newspaper in Inverness.

The Moray Firth is an isosceles triangle lying on one of its equal sides. It’s roughly 100 miles from Inverness to Fraserburgh (where the land makes a 90-degree turn south), and 100 miles along the southwest-to-northeast diagonal whose apex is Inverness. The other side, which connects the headlands in Caithness and Aberdeenshire, is about 75 miles long.

Moray Firth is a drowned river system.  The upper side of the triangle–which is to say, the northern shore of the firth–likes along a geological fault line that includes Loch Ness, the Caledonian Canal and various other lochs down to the Firth of Lorne on the Atlantic Coast.

Creating Loch Ness’s fabled depth, the rift is like a deep saber slash running diagonally across the Highlands.  In the Moray Firth, it is evident as a trench, known locally as “the Trink,” a half-mile wide and15 fathoms below the rest of the sea bed.

For reasons that are not obvious to me, the coast gets less rain that other parts of the Highlands and points west.  Nairn, which is the next town of any size east of Inverness,  gets about 25 inches of rain a year, half that of Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides.

Neolithic people built many tombs, some of which remain as stone circles or ring cairns, the ground-level outlines of the burial chambers.  However, they are easier to find on the map than on the landscape.

After the start of the Common Era, the Picts were carving stones with pictographic inscriptions, and later, after their conversion, with Christian and Celtic crosses.  They left no written language, and the meaning of many of their stones can only be guessed.  One of the better known and later ones, Sueno’s Stone, which I walked by, is thought to depict the course of a conquest, culminating in the beheading of the vanquished.

By 875 the Norse had conquered the land north of the northern side of the firth, which remained a Norse province for 350 years.  The southern side of the firth was a buffer between the Scandinavian invaders and the Scottish kingdom to the south.  Its rulers sometimes claimed, or usurped, the Scottish throne.

The most famous was Macbeth, who in 1040 killed the Scottish King Duncan.  Duncan had killed the brother of Macbeth’s wife, Gruoch (whose name Shakespeare wisely chose not to use), in order to consolidate power.  Duncan died not in Inverness Castle, but at a blacksmith shop near Elgin, inland from the mid-Coast.  Macbeth was subsequently killed, in 1057, by Malcolm Canmore, who later unified Scotland.

This is Macbethland.  I’m walking near Cawdor and through Macduff.  I’m spending the night at a B&B in Forres, the village that is the site of the scene in Act 1 in which a wounded sergeant reports Macbeth’s battlefield heroism to King Duncan.  Birnam Wood and Dunsinane Hill, however, are farther away.

Various wars and battles, both religious and secular, occurred along the Moray Coast over the centuries. The 1746 Battle of Culloden, the last great battle fought on British soil,  ended the Jacobite Rising and began the legal suppression of the clan system.

The coast received people during the Highland Clearances in the late 1700s when subsistence farmers were replaced with sheep on huge, often absentee-owned, estates.  At various times the area’s industries included flax spinning, herring and salmon fishing, whisky distilling, and farming.  In the 20th century, there were a number of big military installations, most now closed.  Golf-based tourism appears to be important today.

In its western and central segments  the Moray Coast has sand beaches that are a quarter-mile from wrack line to water at low tide.  Yesterday, as I walked from Findhorn to Burghead, I turned around and saw a gigantic anvil-based cloud illuminated by the late afternoon sun.  (The sun which wouldn’t set for another four hours).

About the middle of the coast cliffs start to appear, and they eventually dominate the eastern end of the coast.

National Geographic Traveler magazine in 2010 asked a panel of 340 experts to rate coastal destinations for “authenticity and stewardship.” The Moray Coast was 11 out or 99 (tied with Italy’s Cinque Terre).

It’s a placed that moved the aforementioned Mr. Graham to write:  “Nothing in fact can be so exhilarating as to climb up over the Spartan uplands of Aberdeenshire or Banffshire till one reaches the windswept  plateau overlooking the coiffed coast .  .  .  where a breeze from the north-west is ruffling the manes of the waves’ white horses while, on a really good day, the thin blue line of the Sutherland hills is faintly visible on the water’s far horizon.”

I can’t attest to all of that.  But it’s pretty nice so far.

I was the only guest in John Ross’s B&B, which he operates more or less when he wants. He makes money installing closed-circuit TV systems. His wife died a dozen years ago and he lives alone. His four children–all boys–are long out of the house.

He also plays the guitar, banjo and mandolin, and is the creator of a weekly live-music night in Ardersier, a village of about 1,500 people. Unfortunately, it was the night before I arrived.

On the wall of his kitchen are photographs of relatives going back several generations. One of them was an uncle, Donnie Ross. He was a sniper with the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders during World War II. He was one of the 10,000 members of the Highland Division that surrendered in St. Valery on the French coast near Dieppe, on June 12, 1940, when it was clear a Dunkirk-like rescue wasn’t possible.

He survived transfer by foot and cattle car to Poland, and then five years as a prisoner of war. He might not have survived the first day, his nephew said, if a fellow soldier (also from Ardersier and also named Donnie Ross) hadn’t thrown his friend’s sniper rifle in a pond and cut the sniper insignia off his uniform. Otherwise the Germans might have shot him on the spot.

Donnie (the uncle) had been a farmer, and worked on a farm in Poland. “That’s probably the other thing that saved him. There was more food,” John said. Every five years, he returned to St. Valery to reunite with other survivors. He died a few years ago in his upper 90s.

With military matters in mind, I headed out in the drizzle once more, with the destination Fort George, an 18th-century fort at a headland two miles to the north. It’s a historical site and also an active garrison, with a small number of soldiers still stationed there. It was built after the Jacobite Rising of 1746 and has never been under attack.

It’s beautifully maintained.

Out of the rain under an arcade I met Glenn Lawson, who was putting the final paint job on a WOMBAT anti-tank gun, one of the few left in existence. It has an American-made 50-mm spotting rifle (which fired phosphorus-tipped tracer bullets) mounted on top of a 120-mm artillery piece.

He’d retired from the British Army as a sergeant major after 25 years of service. He was one of the last people to fire the gun, in 1986 when the  British military installation in Belize was closed. Seven WOMBATs were dumped in a lagoon by helicopters, and this one was taken home for historical purposes.  It had spent much of the last three decades incorrectly assembled and out in the weather.

This was Lawson’s fourth trip up from his home in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in England, to work on it. He was almost done.

By this time it was mid-afternoon and I’d hardly started walking. So I turned in the audio guide, left the fort, and made my way to the beach.

Almost immediately, I came across what I believe is the remains of a pillbox, part of the network of defenses built along the northern coast of Scotland during World War II. I expect to see more of these.

The tide was out. The views were beautiful. My feet got wet.

On the outskirts of Nairn, my destination, I had to cross an annoying stretch of bogland between the beach and high ground. I was glad to finally see this.

The caravan park and campground was on the far side of the village. It wanted £17 to pitch a tent. That seemed a bit high, so I staggered on, out past the wastewater treatment plant to the dunes east of town and found my own place. It was again after 8.

One of the aspirations of this trip is to walk the Moray Coast–roughly 100 miles, from Inverness to Fraserburgh–within view, and if possible within touch, of the water.

The Moray Coast Trail, a recreational path for walkers and bicyclists, runs for only half the distance, and isn’t always on the water.  Much of the rest of the shoreline is industrial park, military reservation, nature preserve, and private farms.  How much will be accessible, even given Scotland’s remarkable public access law, remains to be seen.

The first test was at the northern end of Inverness.

I walked into town on the end of the Great Glen Way, crossing on pedestrian bridges over the River Ness, which connects the Caledonian Canal and Loch Ness to the Moray Firth.  On an island in the river I finally saw the Loch Ness monster, come ashore.

I passed an old block of stone cottages.

I passed a World War I monument under renovation.  I always stop for these.  This one says it was dedicated in 1922 “By Colonel the Mackintosh of Mackintosh / Lord lieutenant of Inverness-shire.”

It listed an unbelievable number of engagements.  About 750 men from Inverness died in the war.

Inverness has several handsome bridges over the river.

The route to the much larger Kessock Bridge, which spans the confluence of fresh and salt water, goes through an industrial area.  In this day and age that means more storing and selling than making.

This would be a first-strike site for some of the Challengers I’ve met in past years, who view wind farming in the Highlands as an abomination. These objects, which I first thought were some sort of boat, are turbine blades.

These are pieces of the tower.  It’s hard to show scale, but they’re gigantic.

I walked past the home stadium of the Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club.  Soon after that I got to the entrance of a landfill, which is still active, although the sign out front says it stopped taking general refuse a dozen years ago. The driveway went by a building next to a raised truck-weighing ramp. Parallel to it was the exit lane, at grade level. That’s the route I took. I could see the hair on the top of the head of the man minding the scales. He didn’t turn.

There was a slight smell of garbage, but most in evidence were masses of residential trash bins, recycling boxes, and bulk trash containers full of broken bicycles and other metal goods.

I walked down the road until it stopped. To my surprise, at the end was a small building and a “Highway Maintenance” truck parked next to it. Fifty yards away a man was standing; possibly he was urinating.

I figured that if I got past him, every step would make it harder for him to catch up and confront me. So I kept walking into the field of wet grass and gorse. I didn’t look back.

Soon I was at a rip-rap shore at a cove that was mostly mudflats, as the tide was out.

I was where I wanted to be.  I cut across the mudflats where I could, but frequently came to places where a trickling tributary made the water just deep enough to ensure that over five hours my feet became thoroughly wet.

I passed a golf course, which had several holes paralleling the shore. For the next several miles–long past the links–I saw golf balls in the water. At least 50. Some in groups, carried up the coast by tide and wind.

I walked and walked, and eventually got to my destination, Ardesier.

It had once been a fishing village, with 50 boats taking Kessock herring  and salmon coming and going from the fresh-water tributaries. I’d heard there was a tradition, here and elsewhere on the coast where the tide exposes huge mudflats, of fishermen’s wives carrying their husbands on their backs across the mudflats to their anchored boats, so the men wouldn’t have wet feet at the start of the day. It seemed hard to believe, but a historical marker I later passed confirmed it.

In any case, it was time for me to slow down.

It had rained on and off all day. I was very happy to make landfall about 8 p.m. at a bed and breakfast run by a man named John Ross. The first day of bushwhacking had worked out.

I spent nearly the whole open period of the one-room Beauly library (10 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.) using the Internet and listening to the chitchat between the half-dozen visitors and the librarian.

Then it was down the road again. I passed a horse. Or perhaps it was a donkey.

I passed something that was marked Moniak Castle on the map. The wall was covered with vines. This door hasn’t been closed in a while. I peeked into the driveway but didn’t see a castle.

I eventually got to a forest with a small parking area and the trail head of several short hikes. My route, however, had me going up a hilly road and into the woods in another direction.

I did this, but soon found myself on a gravel road not on the map and, according to the GPS signal, not on my route. Bushwhacking to get back to the path seemed like a lot of work, so I decided to continue on the road as long as it was going uphill, as I knew I had to go over the top of a ridge eventually.

By this point it was drizzling, which it continued to do for the next five hours. The road eventually terminated at a large chalet-style building surrounded by construction equipment and split wood covered with a blue tarp. There were also a few old cars, but none that appeared to have been recently parked.

I walked onto the back porch and considered taking the pack off and eating a snack. A skeleton key was in an old lock in the back door. I looked in and saw carpentry tools and two pairs of boots. I tried the door. It was locked, so I turned the key, unlocked it and stuck my head in. I called hello several times. I heard music coming from upstairs and called again.  No answer.

I decided I didn’t want to go tramping up the stairs and surprise whoever was there, so I headed off through all the stuff to the open hillside, going in the direction I knew the path must lie. The ground was wet and it was cold. I stopped and put on mittens. I found the path eventually, crested the hill and came down.  It was a bleak and beautiful landscape.

The path eventually connected with the Great Glen Way, a walking and biking trail that goes from Fort William to Inverness in a diagonal across  the Highlands. As I was coming down the final hill into the outskirts of town I saw about 20 people running up the hill in the rain. I asked if they were a triathlon club. One of them managed to get out: “We’re a hill-running club.” They passed me again, running downhill. And then again, running uphill.

By the time I arrived at a “caravan park” in Bught Park on the south end of town my boots were soaked and I was pretty cold. I checked in and paid my £10. The place had at least a hundred trailers, and in a separate area, five tents. Three of them were occupied by Challengers, and in one of them was Anthony Driscoll, whom I’d walked with earlier.

Soon after I set the tent up the rain stopped. After I got the boots off and different pants on, and the freeze-dried “Moroccan couscous, with chicken and mild spices” under my belt, I felt better. After dinner, I invited Anthony and another Challenger named Mark Janes over to visit.

Anthony brought a half-bottle of wine, Mark a wee dram of Glenlivet, and I served honey and ginseng tea with a side of chocolate bar.  Anthony told us about one of his early Challenges when he went over seven Munros in a day and was caught in a snowstorm that turned his boots into shorty skis, making the descents adventurous.

Mark talked about moving from southern England to Tain, north of Inverness, four years earlier with his wife (who was with him on the Challenge, but had gone to bed). They have 40 acres of land, from which they cut Christmas greens for income. The only thing Mark said he didn’t like about his new home was the period after New Year’s, when the holidays are over and the sunlight starts to fade at 2 in the afternoon. That’s when he and Carol go to Morocco for a month.  Not for warmth, but for light.

There was still a little light left for us, however, when we said goodnight at 10.30 and headed for our tents.

On one of the early days I walked about four hours through a forest and down a glen until I came to a bothy.

Bothies are buildings open for public use, the public in this case being walkers quite far from civilization.  For that reason, an expected level of respect and responsibility generally obtains.  They aren’t trashed and covered with graffiti.  In many cases, they have a small supply of emergency provisions–a few tins of food, the remains of propane fuel bottle, candles, occasionally even an unfinished bottle of whisky.

They are almost always owned by the “estate” on which they lie, which is to say to owners of vast tracts of land in the Highlands.  Estates all have names (often ancient ones) and are the size of townships or counties.  The owners are individuals, or families.  Rich, of course, and sometimes foreign.

This is Luipmaldrig bothy, as seen from the stream (“burn” over here) I crossed to get to it.

Bothies are usually former farmhouses or tenant cottages.  They vary in size and architectural sophistication.  This was one of the bigger ones I’d seen.

It was well kept, with a bright and recent paint job.

The front door led to a stairway, and to the right to a door to a room with two wooden storage bins (one assuredly for wood and peat).  There was the remains of a cast iron stove in the fireplace.

Finishing a tea break were Jean and Tony Pitchforth, an English couple who’d done the Challenge numerous times. Tony, a retired physician, at 75 was a year younger than the most senior walker.  They were an example of the remarkable number of fit and adventurous older people who year after year come out for this event.

We talked a while and shared some gorp before they moved on.  I explored the house. Upstairs at the head of the stairs was a mounted deer trophy with a single strand of spiderweb between two prongs of its antlers.

I soon left, too, and headed across a bridge onto the south side off the River Orrin.  It turned into the Orrin Reservoir, which was river-like much of its way because there hadn’t been much rain recently. .

There was no path on the south side of the reservoir.  I was apprehensive about this when I drew up my route.  The estimable Roger Hoyle, who provided this route–he’s the father of a Times of London correspondent, whom I met on a visit to Moscow three years ago–told me that a person’s map-and-compass skills had to be “up to scratch” to take this unmarked route. (Mine are adequate, nothing more).

He had walked it several Challenges ago when it had been raining for three days.  The sky was so foggy he couldn’t see the reservoir as he walked.   To make matters worse, the streams coming out of the hills from the south–water flows north in this region of Scotland–were “in spate,” which is to say, in flood.  As a consequence, Roger and his companion had to walk upstream (and uphill) every time they came to one in order to find a safe place safe to cross.  It was a memorably exhausting day, he recalled.

It was a memorably exhausting day for me, too.   And I was walking under relatively clear skies with the streams low.

I passed Jean and Tony pitching their tent, briefly considered stopping there, but moved on.

There were things to see along the way.  Because the streams were low, what they’d excavated by their flow was visible.  Ancient parts of trees, buried in the peat for centuries, appeared like the bleached bones of extinct ruminants.

Walking over heather, grass, and sphagnum moss for hours is exhausting.  It’s like walking on ground covered with sprung mattresses. (Not, of course, that I’ve ever done that).

The sun was going down, and I was still going up and down, when I decided I didn’t have to get as far as I’d planned that day. So I looked for a place to stop.

Coming down a steep slope I descried a stream.  On the near side we’re a few small terraces of grass.  On the far side was nothing but steep heather.  I stopped and chose one of the terraces.

This violated one of the rules of Scottish hill-walking, which is that if you camp beside a stream, camp on the far side.  That’s so if it rains in the night and the water rises, you’re already on the side you want to be on when you take off the next day.

I, however, had no choice.  In fact, I barely had room for the tent.  This was the tame equivalent of the cliff-hanging “campsites” that rock climbers sometimes must create.

It was hard to tell which end of the tent was higher than the other.  I actually changed my mind and switched in the middle of the night.  You can see the interior lines aren’t plumb.

It didn’t rain in the night.  I crossed the stream easily.  And I walked on.

What’s underfoot is often beautiful.  Here’s a picture.

I passed another bothy off the trail and saw from a distance a figure in black outside.  I didn’t investigate and walked on.  Soon enough, “Butch Cassidy”-like, the person was gaining on me.

I got to a place where the path ended and trackless navigation was necessary, and he caught me.

His name was Anthony Driscoll (pronounced “Antony”), and he was a semi-ultralight serious walker.  He works in the quality-assurance department of Bentley Motors’s parts division.  Bentley doesn’t make its own parts; it has 800 suppliers, and assembles the cars.

Anthony has a wife and a 12-year-old daughter, and he does the Challenge with their indulgence.  He moves fast.  Several years ago, he started one three days after everyone else.  It never takes him two weeks.  On this day, he wanted company.  So we conferred on compass bearings and headed off over the heather.

He was a good companion.  He even volunteered to take a break at one point.  He smoked a small cigar and shared his water, as I had none.

I was heading to a bed-and-breakfast in the town of Beauly.  Anthony, harder core, was walking just south of Beauly to a camp spot.

Soon we approached the village.  This Highland cow was waiting to welcome us.

Soon we parted ways.  But it wasn’t the last I saw of him.

One of the great things about The Great Outdoors Challenge is that there’s no dedicated path.  That fact is its own challenge (also great) to first-timers, off-islanders, and all who hope to have direction provided. One time or another you can count me among them.

Instead, what Challengers walk on is what other people created when they had more important things to do than walk for pleasure.

It’s interesting that it’s possible to walk across a country, including a largely uninhabited quadrant of one, on such paths. As it happens, five of the 12 miles I walked today was across open ground and on no path at all.

But that’s rare.

The paths have many histories. Some are drovers trails along which stockmen moved cattle from the Highlands to markets in the south once a year. Some are stalkers trails that hunters wore around the brows of hills so they could spy deer without being seen or smelled. Most, of course, are just ways to get from one place to another. Social trails (including paved ones), although that designation doesn’t express their seriousness and necessity.

Wherever we are, it seems there’s good reason to be somewhere else fairly soon. Even for the most unfree, unable or unadventurous that’s true. “Somewhere else” can be close. Just not here.

It’s impossible not to think about this when you’re walking along. Most of the time your only companion is the slightly cleared area in front of you. And when she isn’t there, you’re missing her.

Here are some of the trails I went on today.

There’s the paved road that led from the end of the loch where I camped.  As with most rural roads in Scotland it is one lane, with passing spots.

There was an impossibly steep road up through a forest. It’s hard to imagine a vehicle going up or down, although it’s built for that purpose and I was told trucks loaded with just-felled trees use it.

Here’s a little path that keeps your feet from getting wet.

The paths that get to me, though, are those just wide enough for people walking single file, and often worn into a shallow trench that makes even that width confining.

Some of these are undoubtedly animal trails, with the animals capable of making them in this part of the world being cattle, sheep,  horses, and of course deer.

But even if they began with animals, you can be certain that numberless people for numberless generations have walked them, too.

People going to buy or sell, to borrow or repay, to visit or seek solitude, to find a mate or leave one, to pursue or flee, to come back in a few hours or never come back.  And for thousands of other reasons, and reasons in between.

At one point the side of the hill I was walking on changed from a gentle slope to nearly a cliff edge (albeit a cliff of vegetation, not rock). The path, having someplace it wanted to get to, continued straight along the verge.

Far below, a stream of clear tannic water flowed over pink granite boulders.  Along it were bright patches of grass surrounded by brown heather, like an ancient bolt of velvet that had lost almost all its nap.

I thought about the hundreds of thousands of people who had walked on it for centuries. Not only the ordinary folks but the exotic ones, too. The Rob Roy types, rustling cattle; the “heather priests,” who spent their lives traveling from one settlement to another; the Covenanters and the Jacobites, and their English tormentors; the tenants driven to the coast in the Highland Clearances; the writers like Robert Burns and Wordsworth, who put the place in words.

Just about then on the iPod shuffle–a great addition to a Challenge, I have to say–came a song from Bruce Springsteen’s “Seeger Sessions” concert in Dublin.

Further up the road, further up the road
Where the gun is cocked and the bullet’s cold
The miles are marked in blood and gold . . .

Further up the road, further up the road
I’ll meet you further on up the road.
Where the way is dark and the night is cold,
I’ll meet you further on up the road.

There’s a break near the end where an echoey penny whistle plays the melody. It sounded like it could have been coming up the glen.

The concert was in Ireland and the song isn’t Scottish, but it was music for the moment nonetheless.

The manager of the hostel where I stayed the first night out has an interesting story. I just caught a bit of it in the morning before I left. I was uploading a post and pictures. I was of course the last of the guests to leave.

His name is Joan Saura. His father was from Catalonia. Joan is the Catalan equivalent of Juan, or John.  As in Joan Miro.

However, Joan, who is 35, is Swiss. He grew up in Lausanne. He speaks perfect English with a French accent. At home he spoke French, Catalan and German. He studied ancient history and philosophy at the University of Toulouse. As he laid the fire in the living room of the hostel, his iPod mix was playing “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

Joan spent the winter at the hostel, hiking the hills in the crusty snow and helping out. He isn’t paid, but he doesn’t pay either. The owner of the hostel, who inherited it last year, is away. Until June, Joan is the boss. He was a good host, giving a tour of the place, explaining how the balky shower worked, and of course making room for an unscheduled guest. He doesn’t hesitate to set limits, however. He makes the guests dry and put away the hostel dishes they use for their meals. “It is self-catering,” he tells them.

Joan spent more than 3 1/2 years nearly bicycling around the world. He left Switzerland and rode east for 1 1/2 years, taking copious notes. He sojourned in places along the way, including a month in Kazakhstan. He pedaled to the base camps of several large mountains in Nepal. It wasn’t as hard as he expected. On one ascent he met a 72-year-old man smoking cigarettes and biking the same route.

Eventually, he got to the Sea of Japan. He took a boat to British Columbia, with the idea of riding the Pan American Highway to Patagonia. He took a nine-month rest in Mexico. In Panama, he hurt his knee and had to stop. He’s still rehabbing and is told he will be able to ride again. He came to Scotland in November 2015.

He makes his living writing twice-a-month pieces for the Swiss newspaper Le Temps, and contributing travel stories to a Chinese website, travelplus.com. (He writes in French and the articles are translated).

“Oh, so you’re a journalist?”

“No, not a journalist. I never studied journalism. I am just a writer.”

For his Chinese audience he is mining a vast stack of notebooks (“perhaps forty,” he said) for stories of strange events and unusual people. Georgia and the Caucasus were particularly fertile territory. A friend asked him to do it. “It is very exotic for the Chinese to hear about such things,” he said.

He realizes, however, that he’s coming to the end of that string. Not because he’s run out of stories but because they’re getting a little old. “The Chinese want new things,” he said. He’s not sure what’s going to come next.

He has a website, cyclosophe.com.

I told him he had a pretty interesting story himself, and perhaps should write a book.

“Perhaps I could. But I only want to write a book if I have a great drive to do it.” As for his interesting life, he said, with charming nonchalance: “Everyone has an interesting life.  It is a matter of curiosity and time to discover it.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. The problem was it was noon, and I was out of time.