Reflecting on the West Highland Way

“Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.”

 

John Muir

 

Arriving at the West Highland Way

 

It is important to begin by saying that we did not come to the West Highland Way fresh. By the time we stepped onto the route in Milngavie, we had already been travelling for a month and a half. We had crossed Canada by train aboard VIA Rail’s Canadian, crossed the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Southampton aboard Queen Mary 2, walked Wainwright’s Coast to Coast, and then made our way north along the Pennine Way before arriving in Scotland. In other words, the West Highland Way was not day one of a new adventure for us. It was closer to day thirty-one of a much larger journey already shaped by foul weather, fatigue, logistics, and the effort of pushing on.

 

This context matters because every trail is encountered through the body, mind and attitudes you bring to it. We arrived with stronger bodies, but also with very tired ones. We arrived ready to continue, but not exactly at our peak. And we arrived with a love of experiences we have enjoyed on quiet trails and solitary landscapes that we hoped would continue in Scotland.  All of this shaped how we experienced the West Highland Way, and it would be unfair to pretend otherwise. The trail did not meet us in a vacuum. It met us as we were – on the edge of exhaustion.

 

Reflecting on the West Highland Way

 

The West Highland Way is often described as one of the UK’s most approachable long-distance paths, and in many ways that reputation is deserved. It is well marked, well supported, well maintained, and popularly enjoyed. The route passes through stunning landscapes, from lowland paths and wooded corridors to the shores of Loch Lomond, over Conic Hill, across the open terrain of Rannoch Moor, up the Devil’s Staircase, and to Fort William beneath the shadow of Ben Nevis. En route, there were regular cafés, pubs, honesty boxes, wild camping possibilities, campsites, hostels, and hotels – each of which makes it a joy to trek along.

 

But approachable does not mean effortless. Beginner-friendly does not mean without challenge. This is perhaps one of the most important distinctions we came away with. The West Highland Way may not be technically difficult in the way a high alpine route or remote wilderness traverse might be, but it still asks things of you. Given that it is in Scotland, it asks you to walk through a region known for its rainfall, strong winds, and midges while dealing with a few stretches of ascent, steep descents, and challenging rocky shorelines.  In addition to this, given its popularity, hikers should be prepared for accommodation pressures, tourism costs, and large numbers of people on the trail. 

 

Popularity

 

For us, the West Highland Way was beautiful, accessible, and well-loved, but its popularity changed how we experienced nature and the degree to which we could hike at our own pace. On quieter trails, the landscape often has room to come to the forefront.  Birds, weather, light, water, and small details reveal themselves because there is space to notice them. On the West Highland Way, there were certainly moments like that, but they had to be found within a much busier flow of a lot of other hikers, day walkers, tour groups, first-time trekkers, and tourists moving through the same narrow corridors.

 

That was one of the bigger adjustments for us. We have walked crowded Caminos before, and we have experienced busy sections of trails in Canada and Europe, but the West Highland Way often felt different. At times, it seemed less like a line of walkers moving through a landscape and more like a queue stretching from stage to stage. People worried about being passed, about losing their place, about keeping up, about not being seen as slow, about getting ahead while also not appearing to be doing just that. It was a social rhythm we never fully came to terms with.

 

Trail Culture

 

Perhaps part of the difficulty was that we had arrived with our own assumptions about UK walking culture. Without much personal experience, I think we had imagined something gentler: tweed caps, small packs, binoculars, walking sticks, pints in old pubs, and people out for a thoughtful ramble through the hills. And don’t get me wrong, there were certainly people like that, and we met kind, interesting, and thoughtful walkers along the way. Yet we also encountered a more competitive, anxious, compressed version of trail culture: people rushing to pass only to stop, hikers who spread across narrow paths, and those who came to a dead stop – mid-trail – to consult phones and guidebooks or change into or out of a sweater or rain gear.  All seemingly with little regard for others on the route.  

 

That is not to say that one culture is better and another worse. It is more honest to say that we struggled to understand it. We were trying to walk the West Highland Way through the expectations we had formed on other routes: the Bruce Trail, the East Coast Trail, the Trans Canada Trail, the Camino Francés, the Camino Portugués, the Camino Primitivo, and the Via Podiensis. On those routes, people certainly stop, rest, picnic, struggle, and occasionally behave badly too. But the social rules felt different. In France, even breaks seemed to take place with a kind of elegance, tucked under trees or beside fields. In Canada, the challenges are more often distance, bears, long road sections, or isolation rather than the need to negotiate around the movements of hundreds of other hikers. On the West Highland Way, the challenge was often simply learning how to share a narrow path with many people who seemed to have very different understandings of trail etiquette.

 

Trail Language

 

There were other cultural adjustments too, some of them funny in retrospect. We learned a small vocabulary of hiking Britishisms: not simply rambling instead of hiking, fells instead of hills, dales instead of valleys, or the language of trig points and bagging Munros, but the wonderfully imprecise ways distances and directions were sometimes described. We were told to “toodle up and around,” or that something was just a little jaunt, a higgle, a jongle, or somewhere “over that way.” 

It reminded us of the North American habit of saying something is “a mile, mile and a half away,” which usually means very little in practical terms. These phrases were charming, but they also reminded us how much local walking culture depends on shared assumptions that visitors may not yet understand.

 

Perceptions of the Outdoors

 

The West Highland Way also made us think again about wilderness. As Canadians who grew up around places like Algonquin Provincial Park, Jasper and the West Coast of British Columbia, and who have trekked through Gros Morne, Banff, and across the nation on the Trans Canada Trail, our idea of wilderness is shaped by scale, remoteness, and wildlife that can include bears, moose, elk, wolves, coyotes, and long stretches without services. In the UK, we often hear treed corridors, city parks, squirrel sanctuaries, and managed landscapes spoken of as wild or noted as “untrammelled wilderness”.  At first, this was disorienting. Over time, it became a reminder that wilderness is not a fixed idea. It is shaped by history, density, land use, memory, and what remains to be protected.

 

In that sense, the West Highland Way is a fascinating trail precisely because it sits at the intersection of so many forces. It moves through beautiful Highland landscapes, but also through managed forests, working farms, conservation zones, along historic roads, and to tourist viewpoints. It is a route through nature, but not away from people. It is a national trail, but also a tourism corridor. It offers access, but access brings pressure. It invites people into the outdoors, but then asks hard questions about how people behave once they get there.

 

We saw wonderful examples of care along the way: honesty boxes, wildlife conservation signs, helpful campground owners, thoughtful rangers, protected areas, and people respectfully enjoying the route in their own way. We also saw the need for more awareness around Leave No Trace principles and trail etiquette. On several occasions, we found bags of rubbish left behind near trees, fence posts, fire pits, or shelters.   These are not reasons to dismiss or critique the trail. Instead, they are reasons to talk honestly about the responsibilities that come with using busy and beloved landscapes.

 

Solitude in Nature

 

And yet, despite all of this, the West Highland Way is absolutely worthwhile. Loch Lomond was beautiful even when its shorelines demanded full attention. Rannoch Moor was vast, waterlogged, and unforgettable. The Devil’s Staircase was less dramatic than its name suggested, but the views beyond it were extraordinary. Kinlochleven was more interesting than some guidebook descriptions implied, and Fort William, though busy and tourist-driven, was a welcoming place to conclude the trail.  The route gave us rainbows, waterfalls, wild goats, sandpipers, old roads, moorland, rivers, and long views across a landscape that has been travelled for centuries.

 

What it did not always give us was peace.

 

Perhaps that was the hardest lesson. We had come to the West Highland Way hoping for beauty, movement, and time in nature.  We found beauty and natural wonders, certainly.  We found a landscape worth walking through and which was easy to enjoy. But we also found a trail where solitude was difficult to come by and where the human presence was impossible to ignore. By the time we reached Fort William, the end of the trail felt less like a triumphant culmination and more like a release from a busy trail back into a busier world.

Still, not every trail needs to give the same gift. The West Highland Way did not give us the quiet we had hoped for, but it gave us perspective. It reminded us that popular trails are popular for a reason, and that popularity changes the experience for everyone. It reminded us that accessibility and solitude often sit in tension with one another. It reminded us that a route can be well-marked, beautiful, and approachable while still being mentally and emotionally challenging. It reminded us that we carry our own expectations into every landscape, and that sometimes the hardest part of a journey is not the climb, the rain, or the mileage, but adjusting to a version of the trail that does not match the one we imagined or saw on a YouTube video.

 

In the end, we did not dislike the West Highland Way. We simply struggled to come to terms with the kind of journey it offered us. That distinction matters. The trail is stunning, beautiful, and very much worth walking. But for us, it was not a simple escape into the Highlands. It was a lesson in cultural assumptions, large crowds, fatigue, and the ongoing work of trying to remain attentive when the world around you feels anything but quiet or kind.

 

Perhaps that is what we will remember most. The West Highland Way was not the trail we expected. It was the trail we encountered. And as with every long walk, that made all the difference.

 

See you on the Trail!