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<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nMy friends Deborah and Paul Richard, who live in Argyll at the Kyles of Bute on the west coast, had graciously hosted us for three days. On the day we arrived we squeezed in a visit to the ruins of St. Blanes Monastery on the Isle of Bute, a short ferry ride from Colintraive, the village where they live six months of the year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019d been to St. Blanes on a previous visit. It\u2019s where some of the earliest Christians in Northern Europe lived and prayed in the 600s, until the place was sacked by the Vikings. Living there, and being valuable enough to be destroyed\u2014it\u2019s all a bit hard to believe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is nothing from the monastic days left but piles of stone that might have been the walls of monks\u2019 cells. The ruins of a church from much later telegraphs to visitors that this is a site where people thought about God. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We visited in part because my walking partner is a man of the cloth, the former Episcopal bishop of Newark, New Jersey, and before that a parish priest in many places.<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a><\/a><\/a>Deborah and Paul delivered us to Arrochar to begin our journey north. We had the jitteriness of kids being delivered to college for the first time. We were sorry to part company, but it was getting close to time to walk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When we disembarked at Lochailort\u2014a stop you have to ask for, as it\u2019s so obscure\u2014we walked to the Lochailort Inn with a man who became, Challenge-style, a great friend in under 24 hours. His name is Ole Hollesen. He\u2019s a 59-year-old Dane who looks minus-10 his age, a Challenge first-timer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ole lives just north of Copenhagen, and is a military veteran whose current job is to handle finances and logistics in movies. He even had a bit part in one that won the Academy Awardin 2021 for best foreign film. It was called “Another Round.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ole has done a lot of walking. Brief conversation and a look at him reveals he\u2019s somewhere between an ultralight and ultrafast walker. He walked across Iceland\u2014500 kilometers, or 310 miles, in 19 days, with one resupply (which means he carried food for half the trip with him at the start). He\u2019s hiked in Columbia, Majorca, and all over Scandinavia. He speaks nearly accentless English, along with the other Scandinavian languages, German, French, and a little Italian. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He has a tough route, going alone. We hope to run into him again.<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a>We signed out on a register at the hotel, as required by Challenge rules, and began our walk at 10.23 a.m. on Tuesday, May 10. Here is Mark and me, the picture taken by a fellow Challenger at the inn who was outside for a smoke.<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nWe proceeded down the road and then off to the left on a path, past a crew doing some sort of digging with heavy machines. We walked along a stream, gaining elevation. The weather was good and the sun was out, but we took no solace. It was going to rain, it was just a matter of when.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The route I chose for this walk was borrowed\u2014actually taken, with permission\u2014from two people I\u2019d met on a previous Challenge, Andrew Walker and Alan Sloman. The photographs of it on Andrew\u2019s website were spectacular. Eager to please, I chose it for Mark\u2019s inaugural, and probably only, walk across Scotland. This may turn out to be trying to please too much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The route involves miles and miles of no-path walking. In other words, navigating by a route laid down electronically on a topographical map, or by interpolating on a paper map, but with no visible path underneath your boots. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It requires all sorts of things to go off trail as much as this route requires. The big three are: knowledge of navigation, good judgment, and perseverance. It turns out Mark and I had only the last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After a while of walking up the stream\u2014or “burn,\u201d as they\u2019re called over here\u2014Mark and I turned 90 degrees and climbed up a treeless, heather-and-grass covered hill. I\u2019d call it a mountain in a land of small but endless mountains, like Scotland\u2019s Highlands. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s easier to describe the next five hours if you see where we were. Here are few pictures.<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nIt\u2019s immense open space, empty in a conventional sense, but clearly not in a historical sense. It\u2019s surprising the amount of metal one encounters (mostly remains of fencing), and the inexplicable piece of garden hose-size pipe sticking out the peat every once in a while. It\u2019s hard to believe anyone needed to move water around up here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pictures don\u2019t do justice to the conditions we encountered. The day\u2019s route was meant to be 8.5 miles, by the mapping app used. We ended up walking, by the Apple watch calculation, 17.03 miles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Who cares which was less accurate? What\u2019s clear is that we walked a great deal longer than we planned to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was because neither of us had studied the paper maps closely enough to have topological \u201chandrails\u201d in our minds as we looked at the hills and cliffs around us. We also (and more embarassingly) didn\u2019t have adequate facility even with following a course on the GPX route on my phone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mark was unprepared in both regards. I\u2019d done insufficient review of both skills, assuming they’d come back in real time. They did not. We walked in the equivalent or circles (although not actually) for a long time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The idea was that we would ascend the side of a hill at the river-end of a long chain of hills, and then walk along the tops for miles. \u201cThe tops,\u201d of course, isn’t what it sounds like. It\u2019s up and down, up and down, not just across. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But that wasn\u2019t the biggest problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It began to rain, and then it began to blow. I would say steady at 40 mph, gusts to 50 mph; Mark said 50 mph, gusting to 60. Whatever, it was hard to stay upright at times. Twice we thought we\u2019d encountered hail, but it was just the force of the raindrops hitting our jackets and hats. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We couldn\u2019t seek shelter by moving lower because lower meant going down cliffs on either side. There were, to my surprise, few outcrops that provided real lee from the wind. The only way out was through. I had to cinch my hat tighter to keep it from blowing away. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are no pictures of all this because it was too cold and difficult to do anything but move forward. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We were forced into diversions around the equivalent of tide pools, here at the top of the Highlands. I\u2019m glad I did a lot of rock-hopping in Maine as a kid.<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nIn places there were undercut banks of peat forming what are called \u201cpeat hags\u201d in these parts. <\/p>\n\n\n