Our Walk Along the West Highland Way

“Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered.” Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain   Hiking Scotland The West Highland Way was Scotland’s first official national long-distance route, opened in 1980. Today, it sees roughly 120,000 walkers each year, with tens of thousands completing the full route end to end. It is well marked, well supported, and deeply embedded in the country’s walking culture. It is also part of a much larger network.  The trail forms a segment of the International Appalachian Trail - a series of paths tracing ancient geological connections across continents. We had already walked parts of that system on the Trans Canada Trail in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Quebec, often without realizing at the time how those landscapes were linked. Standing at the threshold of the West Highland Way, we chatted about and remembered those earlier trail days, amazed that long walks are rarely isolated and often give way to c...

“The great affair is to move.” Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes   Toward Scotland, Between Hikes   After hiking fourteen days on Wainwright’s Coast to Coast and then sixteen days along the Pennine Way, we found ourselves with fifteen days left to explore the UK. We had not arrived with a completely fixed plan for this part of the journey, and so we began casting around for a trail, or perhaps a combination of trails, that could fit into the time we had remaining.   After almost a month of near-constant rain in England, the decision to shift regions began to feel increasingly appealing. According to the weather forecast, Scotland was due to be drier for the coming week, and that was enough to catch our attention. In the end, we decided to head north to walk the West Highland Way and Great Glen Way before returning to England to take on yet another small national trail – if we had time.   It was a plan that depended on steady progress, a ...

Hiking the West Highland Way Trail Walking North Through History, Rain, and the Highlands  The West Highland Way stretches for 154 kilometres from Milngavie, just outside Glasgow, to Fort William at the foot of Ben Nevis. Following old drovers’ roads, military tracks, and loch-side paths, it traces a route through the Scottish Highlands that is both historic and shaped by the land itself. As Scotland’s first official long-distance trail, it has become one of the most well-known walks in the UK and Europe, drawing hikers north.  We arrived here already carrying the experience and exhaustion of distance. After completing Wainwright’s Coast to Coast and finishing the Pennine Way, we had only a little more than two weeks remaining in our UK journey before returning once more to the Atlantic aboard Queen Mary 2. What began as a spontaneous decision to continue north quickly became something more complex - a walk defined not only by the beauty of the Highlands, but by the rea...