Globetrotter and TV presenter Alice Morrison swaps camels, sunshine and a backup team for solo wild camping in one of Scotland’s most beautiful glens. On the Affric Kintail Way in the Scottish Highlands, she sets out on a four-day, 44-mile (71km) walk that is cheap, close to home and almost entirely self-supported.
‘I miss my camels. I miss the sun. I miss the vast emptiness of the desert plains …”
Those are Morrison’s thoughts as she pushes through thick conifer plantations and her fifth consecutive hour of rain at the start of the route. Her previous major adventure was a world first: she became the first recorded person to walk the full length of Saudi Arabia, north to south, from Jordan to Yemen. That journey took three years to organise and then 112 days of walking half a marathon a day, with a backup team and Juicy and Lulu, her “naughty but nice” camels.
It was a “fantastic, life-enhancing, often brutal, endeavour” but it is now over. Morrison says adventurers have to keep adventuring, and she wanted something inexpensive in her own country that required little organisation or support. A proud Scot, she says she feels a strong emotional pull to her homeland, an almost physical attachment to the landscape and to the thousands of ancestors who have walked it before her.
Scotland has many long-distance walking trails, and after spending many happy hours checking the options on , Morrison settles on the Affric Kintail Way. The route is manageable at 44 miles (71km) over four days, easy to reach from Edinburgh by bus, and, according to her brother Robbie, Glen Affric is one of the most beautiful areas in the country.
How did she prepare for the walk?
Preparation is straightforward. Morrison buys a map, reads all the information on the dedicated , downloads the route on the AllTrails app and packs her rucksack. She is travelling solo, self-supported and wild camping, so she has to carry everything herself while keeping the load as light as possible. In the end, her pack weighs around 12kg, which she describes as not bad. Her luxury item is four Ferrero Rocher chocolates given to her by her mum — one for each evening.
The bus drops her off at Drumnadrochit and she walks straight up into the forests. The rain is constant, but she enjoys the sharp smell of the conifers and the sound of the cuckoos. There is plenty of climbing, but the route is easy to follow along the Forestry Commission tracks. She keeps checking her weather app, which promises a half-hour break in the rain, because it is much better to pitch a tent in the dry. By 6pm, she gets the tent up just before the rain starts again. She has covered a respectable 5 miles or so since the bus dropped her off, in about four hours.
What does she find along the way?
The next morning, Morrison drops down into Cannich and history is waiting for her after a long pull up out of the village. Her plan is to walk about 11 miles that day. Comar Wood Dun lies about 250m off the path. It is a jumble of stones perched at a lookout point over the strath. Once, it was a drystone fortified house and home to a family and their animals between 400BCE and 200AD. Life must have been so hard. It is cold and wet even in June. Barley was the main crop, grown in small clearances in the wood, augmented with meat and milk from the livestock.
One of the great pleasures for Morrison in walking wild places, whether in the Highlands of Scotland or the deserts of the Arabian peninsula, is finding echoes from the past and wondering what life was like then. Were the people happy? Were there compensations for this hard life? How did they deal with all the extremes of nature that modern people have managed to smooth out with air conditioning and heating? By hiking and camping, she says, she is trying to get closer to them in some way.
She spends the night beside Dog Falls and the following morning is another haul through the forests. Sitting in her midge net at the Glen Affric car park overlooking the inlet to Loch Beinn a’Mheadhoin, hunger kicks in and she wolfes down a roll, a big bag of Revels and her emergency veggie sausage rolls — a large chunk of her provisions.
She has been walking steadily up and down through woodlands, interspersed with farmland. The area is one of the UK’s most ancient natural woodlands, more than 10,000 years old, and is dominated by gnarly Scots pines and silvery birch.
Her heart yearns for the open spaces, though, and she is glad when it starts to open up and she sees the hills rise on either side of Loch Affric. She is alone almost all of the time: in four days, she meets just eight people. It is just her and the green of the hills and the deep black of the loch between them. Her heavy pack hurts her shoulders and her feet are sore from the hard tracks, but she feels so alive. She relishes the adventure of being on her own, self-reliant and with no one to worry about or answer to.
When the rain stops and the sun comes out, the grassy uplands glow almost neon-bright. She stops to drink peaty water from a burn and fantasises about living in the tiny wooden hut on the sandy shores of the loch. It is her third night of camping and the best so far, just her and the geese, but she feels completely safe and relaxed within nature.
What happens when the hostel is closed?
On the fourth day of the trail, Morrison is on a mission. She needs to get some provisions from the Glen Affric hostel and complete a solid 10 miles so that she has only a shortish walk the following day to catch the bus. She hikes as fast as she can until she finally sees the hostel ahead. The tiny outpost is among Scotland’s most remote hostels. She puts out her tent to dry on their fence and goes to the door, only to find:
“Shut between 10.00 and 17.00”.
Disconsolate, she sits at the side and contemplates her life choices. Then a woman shrieks when she sees her unexpectedly — Chrissie, who runs the hostel, and who kindly lets her in to buy chocolate, crisps and a fizzy drink. Sugar and fat consumed, Morrison feels whole again and happily shares a story of camels and Saudi hospitality for the sound art project Chrissie is doing. She is recording poems, stories and songs from people who stay in the hostel for an exhibition.
Morrison continues onwards, struggling on the climbs. With a couple of miles to go, her pack feels as if it is full of rocks. She tries to focus on the waterfalls all around her, dashing loudly down the rocks to meet the rivers Affric and Croe.
She walks down to a small, flat clearing beside one of them. It is the perfect camp spot, but if she stops now she has failed to reach her 10-mile goal. The sun comes out and she sees there is even a flat rock to sit on. She throws her manufactured goals and failure guilt to the wind and pitches her tent.
No billionaire is richer than she is that night in that place. She sits on her rock looking out over the peaks and listening to the music of the water. Tomorrow, she will eat her porridge and walk out by the river to the bus and everyday life. But for tonight she is queen of the world.
Where can readers find more information?
For more information visit: , the Affric Kintail Way and . The bus from Inverness goes to Drumnadrochit and picks up at at Kintail (). Morrison’s website is ; she is also on .
Key Facts
- Alice Morrison walks the Affric Kintail Way in the Scottish Highlands as a solo, self-supported wild-camping trip.
- The route is 44 miles (71km) and is completed over four days.
- Her previous major adventure was walking the full length of Saudi Arabia, north to south, from Jordan to Yemen.
- That Saudi Arabia journey took three years to organise and 112 days of walking half a marathon a day.
- She carried a 12kg pack and had four Ferrero Rocher chocolates from her mum for the trip.
