Their story, in their words…..
The challenge we set ourselves was a week-long hiking trip in the Scottish highlands surrounding Fort William. From the get-go the weather was amazing, so quickly after setting up the tent, we started our first walk of the trip (Inverlochy castle), stopping for food on the way back.
The next morning was spent in Fort William as we bought a map and immediately re-worked our entire holiday. With the map informing us, we began to see some issues with our initial plans, such as walks that would have taken us along A-roads and along footpaths that didn’t exist. As such, we shuffled most of our initial walks onto different days and decided to fill in the gaps by taking on our biggest challenge of the trip – Ben Nevis.
After this planning session, we set off onto our first route, Cow Hill, in which we immediately made a mistake by following the signs for the Cow Hill Circuit rather than our plan. This worked out in our favour though as, although the hike was steeper and more challenging, the weather was amazing and the views spectacular. The next day was Ben Nevis. We set out early, waking at 6.30 to have time to prepare. None of us started the walk believing we could finish it: struggling up the first section we all thought that, with only Cow Hill as a practice, we would have to give up halfway. The further along we went, however, the more we started believing in ourselves and the less afraid we became. There were some hard sections – rocky outcrops, sheer drops with loose stone paths, and once even a helicopter hovering only 10 meters from us – but in the end, we were rewarded by being the tallest people in Britain (if only for the 5 minutes we had our photos taken!). The experience was challenging beyond anything we had ever done before, and helped grow our confidence in ourselves!
The next day we completed another walk up to Dun Deardail, following along the start of the West Highland Way. This, surprisingly, felt harder than scaling Ben Nevis as we were in full sun and were already tired from yesterday’s trek. Once back at the tent, we were preparing for sleep when we got our next biggest problem: while we had been planning our final walk for the day we left, we got the news that our train had been cancelled and the only other available train ran 6 hours earlier. We spent the next morning in a panic as we frantically packed all our bags, leaving us with just enough time to spare in getting to the station. The 6 hours in Glasgow while we waited to switch to the coach were spent walking around the city, visiting famous sights, statues and parks as we made the most of our impromptu stopover. While we enjoyed it, we did miss the opportunity for our 5th walk, which was a great disappointment.
We had an amazing time and had some amazing (if surprising) experiences, such as Taylor’s shoes breaking halfway up the tallest mountain in Britain, and are so grateful that Mark Evison has helped make all this possible!
