Day 305: Duror to Ballachulish

I normally research cross-country routes, but today I’m a slave to the machine, blindly following a path my OS app has chosen.

A well-maintained cycle path winds through the woodland into the Highland Titles Nature Reserve. The lochans are beautiful in the early morning sun, surrounded by bird hides, bee hives, and signs proclaiming a hedgehog hospital and a wildcat rehabilitation centre, hidden and fenced behind the trees. The place is deserted.

Highland Titles sells souvenir plots of land and titles — “Become Laird, Lord or Lady of the Glen” — to punters. Offshore companies and a lack of transparency mean no one knows how much they put back into conservation. I’d rather donate money to more transparent wildlife charities. Google and form your own views. Given the owner’s penchant for litigation, I’ll keep mine to myself.

After briefly returning to the A828, a commercial forest road runs up Glen Duror, the trees dully obscuring any view. The thought of spending five months hiking in the woods on the Appalachian Trail, one of America’s Triple Crown long-distance trails, does not appeal. Unfortunately, it features in my 100 Hikes of a Lifetime. My dream is to thru-hike the Continental Divide Trail instead, the hardest and most remote of the three, running over 3,000 miles from Mexico to Canada across the Rocky Mountains. It may be beyond me at my age, not least due to the highly remote risk of being attacked by a grizzly bear when hiking alone, especially as bears and I appear to be drawn to each other as established on our family Canada trip in 2023.

The trees part at a bend, revealing my route. There’s a forestry track in the distance. How to reach it?

A trail branches off the road. Unfortunately, the OS app soon tells me to leave the path, so I’ve no choice but to follow the contour across the hillside.

I need to turn down the hill to find the river crossing, plunging into the forest, breaking the first rule of any horror movie, for those who have watched The Ritual. Fortunately, a rough trail descends through the trees, literally.

This is more like an obstacle course.

What happened to the bridge?

Time for stone hopping.

Expertly done, feet dry, I’m back on a forest road skirting the Munros, Sgorr Dhearg and Sgorr Dhonuill to my left

A fingerpost for Ballachulish points into the forest, a welcome opportunity to leave the road.

After a short distance, the trees part and the scenery changes dramatically.

I didn’t expect this after the forest roads. The sun streams across the open hillside, the Pap of Glencoe now visible in the distance.

The final descent into Ballachulish is lovely.

There’s time for coffee and cake before the bus back to Oban. That’s half the gap between Oban and Glen Coe completed, with the other half for tomorrow. It was fun to have the uncertainty over what lay ahead. I’ll do it more often when I’ve plenty of time to deal with unexpected challenges.

Date of walk: Tuesday 22 April 2025.

Walk distance: 11 miles.

Total distance: 5,013 miles.