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<\/a>He sat down next to us and took off his boots, not to rest his feet but to inspect his right ankle. He\u2019d twisted it the previous afternoon. It was red and swollen, and he was walking on it conditionally, not sure how long it would hold up or whether he\u2019d have to \u201cretire\u201d from the Challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We invited him to join us. Normally, he was an upright, long-striding machine. Crippled, however, he might be in our league. He said he\u2019d love to walk with us (and he has been ever since).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our interim destination was a bothy partway up the glen (the river was flowing north) that I\u2019d seen in 2015. Back then it was like most bothies\u2014 dark and dingy, more interesting than inviting. Since then, the owner of the estate (which comprises most of the glen) had spent more than $350,000 turning it into a show piece. <\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nIt was about 200 years old. Everything had been removed down to the lintels over the windows. The wooden floor was pulled up, and three feet of dirt–the original dirt floor–dug out. A two-story addition, with sleeping rooms upstairs, was added.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The owner of the estate, it turns out, is a Dane, Anders Holch Povlsen, who made a fortune in clothing. He’s the largest private landowner in Scotland, with 221,000 acres. In 2020 he was the 255th richest person in the world, Ole told us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Greeting us outside as we took off our packs was an elderly man named Lindsay Bryce, the official bothy host whom I\u2019d met on the previous visit. He wore a plaid sweater and a herringbone flat cap.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nLindsay had made enough money in oil and gas to retire at 45. (He\u2019d had long stretches in India and Congo Brazzaville.) He has a house in Glasgow, which he gets down to every other month; he spent 42 days there last year. Most of the rest of the time he’s at the bothy, sleeping in a non-private room upstairs and serving walkers tea and fruit for free.<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a>There was a wood fire in a stove and a kettle continuously boiling. As he served us, four more people arrived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI cannot fault him in his vision,\u201d Lindsay said, understatedly, about the Danish proprietor\u2019s renovation project.\u00a0At one point, he put up two hooks in the upstairs rooms, anchoring them with Phillips head screws. \u201cHe spotted them,\u201d Lindsay said of the owner. \u201cHe asked me to replace them with domed slot-head screws, as that was the design style for a building like this.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nIt would have been nice to stay there. Besides Lindsay, there were only two guests set for that night. (The record is 42; I should have asked what the weather was like that day). But we had a long way to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Where we\u2019d end up was uncertain. We were hoping for another bothy, given the flimsiness of my tent (and Mark\u2019s too), but there were none in walking distance. Lindsay did tell us, however, there was the remains of a pony shed (probably floored in dung, he warned) and the ruin of a structure one might be able to crawl into, about seven miles away. We headed for it.<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThe trail was a long, steady climb, on a single path through the heather and grass. At places the path was eroded, with a long slide down to the river if one lost his step.<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nWe soon hit what became our modus operandi\u2014Ole and Mark at least five minutes ahead of me, sometimes out of view.<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nWe walked, and we finally got there. In all, we\u2019d walked 18.4 miles that day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Across a small burn on a high spot was a red tent. Bernie Roberts, a 76-year-old man on his 23d crossing, stuck his head out of the door and said hello. Not far down the hillside from him was a tiny building with one intact wall and a metal roof. The dung, thankfully, was long gone.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nCarved into one of the remaining pieces of woo, and barely legible under lichen was a date: \u201cAD 24 – 10 – 00\u201d (October 24, 1900, presumably when it was built).<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nThere was just enough room in it for my tent, whose pitch I improved by cinching the top of it to the remaining underlayment of the roof with a piece of parachute cord. Mark and Ole pitched outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By that time it had started to rain. We retired to our tents to cook and eat alone, talking like the aforementioned \u201ckinsmen met a night\u201d in adjoining tombs. It eventually got dark and eventually we fell silent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next morning after breakfast I climbed up the slope. Bernie was long gone. A low and incomplete set of walls was all that remained of a small building, purpose and age unknown. There was nothing one could have crawled into to get out of the weather. <\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nNext to it, perceptible only by a change in the mix of mosses at its perimeter, was the buried remains of an attached room, probably for animals.<\/p>\n\n\n