Scottish mis-government
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011
I love Scotland’s wild backcountry landscape. During my 13 years on TGO Magazine I spent many weekends and weeks (yes, and midweeks) backpacking and hillwalking around the country.
Since moving back to Yorkshire I’ve realised just how much I miss those wide, wide open spaces. Yes, Yorkshire is the most beautiful county on Earth but while it has rolling moors, iconic hills and moors that sometimes seem to spread to the horizon, it doesn’t have that unbound feel that Scotland has.
If you follow this occasional blog you’ll know that I’m a regular on the TGO Challenge – having done ten, for better or worse I’m classed as a leg-end.
More than anything else, it’s through those TGO Challenge coast-to-coast backpacks that I’ve come to discover my favourite parts of that country. One of those favourite places is the Monadhliath Mountains and it ranks among my favourite places in the world.
Resident of the Monadhliath
When I first crossed their wilder stretches during my second, 1997 crossing, I saw them as a Peak District on acid: a similar expanse of wild peaty uplands, only vastly larger in scale, with mountains, deep valleys, wild rivers. The richness and abundance of wildlife there was on a scale I’d not experienced in the British Isles before: harrier, eagle, mountain hare, red deer, lizard, adder…
I’ve passed through the Monadhliath on all my Challenge crossings since then. Perhaps because of its relative lack of 3000ft mountains, the Monadhliath attracts far fewer visitors that the neighbouring Cairngorms. As a result, it offers a much greater sense of wilderness, remoteness, solitude. A tent pitched in the Monadhliath is unlikely to attract company and the experience is all the richer because of that (unless you’re then on a certain week in May, of course, when one or two folk might pop over to share a hip flask - yours! – in which case it’s a rich experience of a different nature).
Burn hopping in the Monadhliath
For years I’ve promised myself a solo trip there during which I’ll walk only a few hundred yards each day, just following one of those lazy burns that slice tunnels through the peat, camping by still, dark pools and watching the wildlife go by.
Looks like it’s going to have to be this summer.
The Scottish government/parliament/parish council – call it whatever you deem appropriate – has seen fit to allow a (okay, another) large chunk of this beautiful landscape to be turned into a power station.
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