Day 3

The West Highland Way

Rowardennan – Inverarnen

14 ½ miles

By Emma Williams

I leave early, the book says you can’t get lost, just keep Loch Lomond on your left.

The water is perfect, no ripples, smooth almost solid.

But then the scrambling begins and soon I’m too hot, my expensive base layer overheating

my entire body.

Sweat drips down my back and small farts escape as I clamber over rocks.

This is not how I pictures myself walking the west highland way.

The path flattens out and I go through a wood, soft and luscious.

A waterfall, rhododendrons, bright pink against white water and brown ponds.

I eat cake

The book says the next bit is the hardest.

All roots and rocks.

Concentration, I work hard but its joyous. I remember me as a child, the adventurer.

Occasionally I glance at the moss or the root of a tree, soft and pink, it looks like the armpit

of a young man.

Sometimes there is a break, a breath, a flat field, a path through tall bracken, but soon its

back to work ,climbing puffing panting .

Finally at the end of the loch I look back ducks and ducklings bob in the sunshine. A speed

boat wizzes by, a load cheer, the ducks ride the waves.

A wedding, a birthday, a piss-up, I claim the applause as a celebration of me.

I leave one loch to find another through a field of yellow iris’s, past a bothy, small beaches

pebble and sand.

Then all change and its up up up .

Im no good at going up, huffing and puffing the cake sitting on the top of my hips squaring

my bottom up nicely.

I curse and sweat.

I come off the path and crawl down the grassy bank to the burn at the bottom. I rip off my

incredible overpriced walking gear and get out of my back pack my crappy old shorts and a

Tshirt. The breeze picks up and my skin thanks me.

Now I’m getting somewhere. I’m finding the edges of me, the frustrations, the joys, the

conversations and daydreams and I’m making my own decisions.

I climb back onto the path and looking up see them on the horizon.

magnificent and indifferent, the highlands.