Sandwood Bay

I had an excellent weekend away with my brother and a friend. We spent three excellent nights in the wonderful Inchnadamph Hotel, with the main target being an ascent of Suilven. We only had two full days, so we picked the better of the two for the main event and spent the other one visiting […]

Fort William to Bealach a’ Chaorainn

This should be a Cape Wrath Trail report, broken into 7 or 8 different days, but if you’ve read my previous post you’ll understand why it’s not. For those that haven’t, I only managed about 30 miles of the trail before sacking it off and heading home early. As such, this is a one page […]

The End of the Road

I made a decision last week. I’m not planning any more long-distance backpacking routes. It turns out that I love the idea of them – love the prospect of walking for days completely self-supported, but when it actually comes down to doing it, I hate it. It’s hard to admit, but I’m just not cut […]

Heading North

I’ll be heading north about 6am tomorrow morning, so just enough time to write a very short post about plans and stuff. My pack is bulging with 5 day’s food and all the other gear I’ll be humping across half of the North West Highlands for eight days. The final figures are in and the […]

Cape Wrath Trail Planning #2

This is the second of three posts related to the planning process for my Cape Wrath Trail walk, in May 2019. This post is going to look at kit, not so much the kit I plan to use, but at the Kit List spreadsheet I have developed that allows me to find the best mix […]

Cape Wrath Trail Planning #1

As I write this there are only 8 weeks until I begin my Cape Wrath Trail walk; one of the toughest long distance paths in the UK. It runs for about 230 miles, from Fort William to the most northwesterly tip of the county and the lighthouse at Cape Wrath. Along the way it passes […]

Looking ahead into 2019

I wrote a similar post to this one, in March last year, setting out my plans for the coming year (see here) and I didn’t do too badly in the end. I walked the Eden Way and completed the guide book for that walk. I only managed a couple of days along the Tributaries Walk, […]

A Change of Plan

Even the best laid plans sometimes fall to outside influences and it seems that my plans to join Chris on his Cape Wrath Trail later this month have done just that. Chris has had to postpone his walk until later in the year, which left me all dressed up with nowhere to go. Fortunately, we’ve managed […]

Cape Wrath Trail – Kit

This will be my first extended backpacking trip, so I thought it worthy of a discussion on the kit I will be taking with me. I’m leaving for the Affric Kintail Way (AKW) in just two weeks and I will be using that 3-4 day walk to test some of the new kit I’ve purchased […]

Cape Wrath Trail – Planning

Although I’m not actually walking the whole of the Cape Wrath Trail, the 100 mile section I am doing will form the backbone of my long distance walking plans for 2016, so it seems only right that I address it with a couple of planning posts. In some ways the planning for this walk is […]