A LAND FOR great JOURNEYS

Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’… Walkin’ with a toothache in my heel Bob Dylan, Ain’t Talkin’

I HAVE BEEN HERE before, but everything was back to front then. In May 2019, I’d walked west from Tomintoul, on what should have been the first day of this long-planned four-day circuit of the Cairngorms, to camp here amongst the trees near Ryvoan bothy on the fringes of Abernethy Forest. I’d shivered in my light summer gear, a freezing wind tearing through the canopy, wondering at the wintry surprises May so often springs. Next morning, with a cold brewing, I looked across to the freshly whitewashed plateau, then down at my light trail shoes, and turned tail back through the forest.

Now it’s August and I’m back, frazzled, dusty and happy. I’m heading through the woods, closing in on Tomintoul, having tackled the route clockwise instead. It’s been a new type of experience for me, in the most familiar territory.

The Cairngorms were my formative mountains, a place of pure distilled magic before I knew anything about the politics of land ownership and conservation, before I could read the scars on the land. Immersing myself again in this landscape in middle age was an unsettling prospect: no-one wants to threaten their own foundations! Back in the 1950s, my grandparents purchased