Janet Christie's My Week - Walking the West Highland Way

Buachaille Etive Mòr, at the head of Glen Etive, from the Devil's Staircase. Pic: J Christie

Call it Flow, call it Mindfulness but I call it putting one foot in front of the other.

This week I swapped the screens for scenery and walked from Milngavie to Fort William along the West Highland Way. It's 96 miles on paper but my phone says my two mates and I clocked up 120 plus (must be the ups and downs) and the only regret was we didn’t have time to keep going - up the Great Glen all the way to Inverness.

Top sightings apart from the majestic sweep of the mountains and the beauty of bleak Rannoch Moor included impassive feral goats, lizards, numerous birds from blue jays to cuckoos to stonechats, fuzzy drinker moth caterpillars and orange tipped butterflies, and Country Girl got very excited over a butterwort.

There was also a ghostly white bum, like the face of a barn own bursting up from the trees in a midnight graveyard, emerging from a pool in a mountain burn when we stopped for lunch in the sunshine as a fellow walker skinny dipped.

Wild Goats on the West Highland Way. Pic: J Christie

“Dad behaviour,” says Youngest Child, and he was indeed, his adult son and friend bemused by his antics. We looked on (not in a stalkery way - we were there first) as he alerted us with a running commentary: “Don't look! I’m taking my shorts off now! I’m taking my boxers off now!, “I’m coming out of the water again now!” etc. as Country Girl shouted encouraging things like: “Seen it all before!” and “I can see your bum!”

Good on him - if you’re wild camping along the Way you’ve got to take your chances for a dip, but lugging a tent wasn’t for me, and I’m too soft for bothies - I like textiles, and beds, cooked breakfasts, showers and shortbread nestling beside a kettle.

Also unexpected and somewhat deflating was the nursery class of toddlers amassed atop Conic Hill at Loch Lomond. Respect. But then I’ve never underestimated the power of a toddler. Especially in numbers. Imagine if they all turned on us? Carnage.

With nothing to think about but not falling over a boulder we ambled along, enjoying the majesty of Glen Coe and Glen Nevis, with OldSchoolFriend updating us on our fellow walkers’ progress because she does the socials - “Julie’s come a cropper” and “The Lone Walker’s daughter-in-law is driving up from Glasgow to check on him so that’s OK”, I switched off and walked. You could call it Flow, Mindfulness or Being in the Moment, but I prefer to call it just putting one foot in front of the other.

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Janet Christie's My Week - Walking the West Highland Way

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