THUNDER ROAD

I CONFESS that I’m intimidated to write about the Cape Wrath Trail for The Great Outdoors. There’s so much baggage attached – my own as well as others’. The 240-mile trail has a fearsome reputation, but before May last year I’d never really considered it 'my' walk. Over a dozen years ago, Kathleen Jamie wrote persuasively and provocatively about the cult of ‘the lone enraptured male’, as a criticism of much outdoor and nature literature. Jamie satirises white middle-class men boldly venturing forth to conquer the wilderness, an endless succession of rugged-and-well-educated individuals taming nature and challenging themselves in the colonies. Jamie’s modern Aryan knights wield pens, not swords, but her critique is equally true of the hyperbole surrounding the Cape Wrath Trail, almost to a fault. Nearly every one of these hackneyed motifs is used about the route – all these, and especially, ‘tough’.

I’ve been known to tell the odd tale of borderline sadomachoism in these pages, but pseudomilitarism isn’t my thing. The draw of the Highlands for me is in ‘stravaiging’ – the roaming free, the learning about, the being with, the sinking into. Why would I want to follow someone else’s