WIDER HORIZONS
DO YOU REMEMBER before the pandemic? Do you remember how you felt before this new landscape of fear, fight and flight we’ve grown used to? It feels like years, not months ago. This is a story about a winter walk in the last days before our first lockdown. Looking back now it seems like the end of a more innocent era.
The advice from Mountain Rescue on what became that final weekend of freedom was to minimise risk, and we were mindful of it. We allowed ourselves the buffer of an extra day and talked down our expectations for a fairly long and quite isolated route choice. But the weather was tempting and for my friend Mick – a senior nurse – we had the sense that this might be his last leave for some time. We opted to avoid anywhere busy and head for the wilds north of Inverness – a big area of hill ground far from main roads.
The Fannichs – remote, austere, grand. A high, hard place in winter. We took the first awkward steps of stiff winter boots on hard tarmac, past the hydroelectric substation, past winter feeding stations and herds of semi-domesticated red deer, to the brutalist post-war architecture of the dam, its massive pipes spidering out across overgrazed moors. A surreal
