20220415 Hermit bagging

Location: Lochaber, Scotland

Distance: 35.0km

Route:

[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=1GnbRikde8Ore8bQN-di7FJ4VszRTiCE&ehbc=2E312F&w=640&h=480]

For a period of time toward the end of 2021 I could not stop talking about The Hermit Of Treig, a documentary exploring the fascinating life of Highlands recluse, Ken Smith. Photographer, diarist, woodsman, loner - whatever identity the world has tried to assign him, Ken Smith resists. Assisted by the generous filmmaking of Lizzie Mackenzie, Smith tells the story of his early years growing up in northern England, the violent upheaval that set him to travelling the Canadian backcountry in the 1970s, and his eventual return and subsequent journey north to build a new life in the Highlands. Mackenzie, who had never made a documentary feature prior to this, befriended him while working nearby - relatively speaking - in the Lochaber region of Scotland that Smith has made his home for the past 40 years. The film showcases everything that is good about Ken's simple, secluded way of life, showing its beauty without glossing over the hard reality of a life outside society.

As far as I know the film is no longer available to stream anywhere, which is a shame. The period around which I first saw it was a fantastic time to be alive by all accounts. Spiritually speaking we were on the upswing: covid was in retreat, pubs were open, and things were returning to normal. It was all very far from the weirdness of Christmas 2020, from which my only memory is of a slow, sad rendition of Despacito played outside a deserted west London shopping centre on an accordion. The reasons for my being so affected by the story of a septuagenarian turning his back on society are still a mystery to me. Why, after 18 months of on-and-off lockdown, was the idea of leaving everything behind so alluring? I had to learn more, from the man himself. So as soon as the days grew long enough I hatched a plan to set out and find him.

It turns out this was not straightforward. Treig, the shores on which Smith resides, is a loch to the north and east of Fort William. There are no roads to Treig, and the closest rail connection is the lonely Corrour Station, which you will immediately recognise as that godforsaken platform in Danny Boyle's Trainspotting. Ben Nevis and the Grey Corries loom over it to the west, and Ben Alder to the east. Outside high summer the days are brief, and night comes abruptly. It is not without reason that Treig has often been translated from the Gaelic to mean the 'lonely' or 'abandoned' loch.

Not wanting to be discourage, and having recruited someone else to help, I set off one dark morning north on the M6 from Lancashire to find my friend Jack. By 9am I'd found him at Glasgow Airport and by noon we stood squinting in the Fort William sunlight, in search of a late breakfast and an early lunch (two pints of Bellhaven in The Crofter, and several more for the road in the Sawyer bladder). We grabbed our last minute provisions and drove up Glen Nevis to the trailhead at Steall Waterfall Car Park. With our boots laced and great nets of excess gear strapped to the outside of our packs (necessary to make space for the provisions), we set off east in the direction of the Meanach bothy.

Though Meanach is just seven miles from the car park, we had not made life easy for ourselves. While we had a loose agenda to stay at the bothy that night, beyond this our plans were less certain. In an ideal world we would stumble upon Ken somewhere along the trail early the next day. At this point, Plan A would be to engage him in some earth shattering conversation, before being invited back to the cabin to share his log fire and some birch sap hooch. Being optimists, we had packed a shelter for this eventuality, which would allow us to camp out under the stars beside his waterside dwelling once we had outstayed our welcome; we would sleep happy in the knowledge that we had succeeded in our mission, wise beyond our years from having conversed with The Hermit. Realistically we understood how unlikely this was, and had therefore also planned for a re-route north from the southern shore of the loch up to the Lairig Leacach bothy. On Easter Sunday, wherever we found ourselves, the objective would be to reach a walkers' hostel in Roy Bridge, about ten miles further to the north, and from there we would hitch a ride back to Fort William. The ambiguity was deliberate, but did mean that a certain amount of obsolete weight was priced-in from the start, including a bombproof 2kg backpacking tent and some Easter gifts to curry favour with Ken (a bottle of scotch and Cadbury's mini eggs). The going, especially that first day, was dogged and slow.

Trudging up the trail we passed crowds of people heading back to their cars but no one else in front or behind us going east, and once we had passed the great Steall falls we saw no one again at all that afternoon. The further we walked the thinner and wetter the trail grew, until eventually it fizzled out entirely and we were left slogging through bog and sedge and ankle-deep sphagnum. To make matters worse, Jack immediately discovered several large holes in his boots, and something strange happened to my eye which meant that I couldn't see further than 20 or 30 metres ahead of me for about an hour. Enthusiastic to the end, we kept on up the ascent toward a bend in the Abhainn Rath tumbling south down off the hills, which I forded, boots tied around my neck, while Jack walked further up in search of a narrow enough point to hop across.

When we finally clapped eyes on the bothy we whooped and slapped each other damply on the backs and picked up the pace. The drizzle had turned to rain, and the small hut was a welcome sight. The building is a two-roomed structure with a small window and hearth in each. The grander of the two rooms, which also has a skylight, was already occupied by a father and son from Kent. We made ourselves at home in the other room and set about getting dry and fed. It was too damp for a fire, but we did find some tealights which Jack optimistically placed in his boots in an attempt to dry them.

With Jacks boot humming cheerfully in the gloom and the alcohol burner flickering we began eating and drinking as much as we could, thinking as much about lightening our future selves' burden as we were about filling our bellies. It quickly became apparent we had only bought one spoon, and a civilised agreement was soon made over its shared use. Sat in the dusk, content in our jackets as the night grew dark and the wind howled in the chimney, all our jokes about whether Ken would in any way be pleased to know that a couple of strangers were heading to find him took on a new poignancy. Why were we out here in the middle of nowhere? Did we really expect that our attempts to meet this old man, who had made a deliberate and unambiguous decision to leave society, to be well received? Worse yet, what if we were just the most recent in a long line of pests who had been swarming him since the film? Bothersome paparazzo, like midges - but bigger and smellier.

The next day we woke to find a chunk of our provisions gone and the neighbours next door already departed. We hadn't been robbed, but it was probably good that we weren't due to operate any heavy machinery. We took it slow, taking turns with the spoon again, this time to eat porridge, before dragging on our frozen walking clothes for the onward slog. The river was much wider here, and the ground less boggy so long as we followed its meandering bank. Blue sky peered down at us through the cloud.

Over the river from the Meanach bothy we could now see the ruins of the Luibelt Lodge by a stand of trees, an anomaly in this spare, moorland estate. This had been our first sighting of what might be a shelter for the night the evening before, and we had actually wondered if that was the bothy, until the Meanach had come into view soon after. It was just as well we hadn't, as it is an unpleasant place. Haunted by some accounts, even most level-headed walkers seem to agree that it is not worth getting your socks wet crossing the river to reach it. Originally a deerstalking lodge, the derelict building has been out of use for more than half a century and has long since been scavenged for firewood.

You certainly wouldn't want to fall in now - riffles here and there reveal a quickening of the flow and thigh-deep pools look more than capable of whisking someone or their pack off a downriver. The path grows steeper, the river narrowing and deepening in its channel as it gushes over great natural weirs, and eventually tumbling down a series of steep falls over enormous boulders meters across.

The path continued like this much of the morning and as we neared the loch it broke off into a firm, dry trail that skirted grassy meadows, patches of woodland, rising high and falling again. We chatted to another walker, coming from the nearby Staoineag bothy and ate M&Ms and peanuts and sat on warm rocks in the sun. The first sign that we were getting close were the railway tracks, which we could see sidling around the far shore. "That's where we'll find him," I was sure of it. At the end of the path we met a grand old house on a small hill overlooking the lonely loch. The house had seen better days - the windows and doors were all boarded and signs everywhere warned people from getting too close. It served nicely as a windbreak as we surveyed the body of water. Since 1912 the loch has been tapped for hydropower, with the northern shores dammed where the River Treig flows out of the hills toward the Spean. Once upon a time there were settlements to the south, Kinlochleven and Creaguaineach, landmarks along the old drovers' roads connecting Lochaber and the Inner Hebrides with markets in Perthshire. Places like this would be where the tired workers and their livestock could rest in a rare unexposed patch on the long, wet and rocky road. Those settlements are now gone, flooded to create the massive hydraulic gradient that keeps the turbines spinning, and presumably powers the fridges and microwaves in the valleys below. The native ancient woodlands that covered much of the region are long-felled to make way for mismanaged non-native plantations; Sitka spruce, too diseased to last, and lodgepole pines that were never fit for timber in the first place.

We weighed our options. It was probably a couple of hours to get to the far side, as we'd need to double back and then scrabble alongside the railway from the look of it. The train tracks gave a helpful bearing but there was no path we could see. Looking back I might say there was something about the clouds over the lonely loch, the dark water and the dark woods - but perhaps we had run out of steam for the finding Ken. It certainly didn't look like the woods held any cheerful glowing hermit huts. I felt a pang of sympathy for the drovers on the road to market hundreds of years before us, before the invention of Gore Tex™ and mini eggs.

So, on the verge of success we left things as they were. Instead we climbed north on a thankless path to the next bothy, stopping only once for water and then once more on finding a fishing rod complete with carry case and accessories. Clearly it had fallen from someone's pack and, having not seen anyone pass us on their way down, we carried it with us hoping to catch them up whoever they were. It was only later that night that we got to worrying about the possibility that it was that rare old mountain goat Ken's and that we had just deprived him of a crucial source of sustenance. It was a colder night, at a far higher altitude, and we were grateful. Grateful of the spoon we had to share, and of the roof over our heads. We toasted Ken with the whisky we'd bought for him, and slept like stones knowing that the journey had been its own reward.

+++

The next couple of days were eventful. We did eventually make it off the mountain, passing the Wee Minister and wading across the Spean in the process. When we reached the bunkhouse, still damp, it transpired that I had mistakenly booked it for the night before. We took a taxi into Fort William for a meal while the specifics of it were ironed out and ended up being carried away in the afterglow of a Old Firm semi-final in the Scottish Cup. It was nearly 12 hours later that we finally stumbled into a cab back to the bunkhouse, assured as we were by an earlier voicemail telling us that there was a room for us after all. We sat in the canteen in a 4am daze and drank everyone else's beers from the communal fridge, laughing at a strange evening of karaoke, bar brawls and slacklining.

While not the most popular guests to check out the following morning, word had fortunately not yet had time to spread, and we hitched a ride almost immediately with a freckly man-child driving a Porsche Cayenne. He seemed pleased to see us and it could have been a perfect getaway had I not given myself terrible ligament damage trying to impress some teenage skaters in the carpark on our way back to the wagon. Jack was unsympathetic, though he was no better in his own attempt at an ollie. And bless him he did drive us back to Glasgow.

Thinking back, while it's a huge regret that we didn't meet Ken, it's something which I'll happily live with. It is pleasure enough to just spend some days in the hills thinking only of where one footstep follows the last. Gambolling down the mountain on Easter Sunday, vigorously extolling the virtues of a weekend walking in the clouds, a memory stands out to me: we were captivated by a bubbling stream tumbling down into a dark cauldron of rock, and were amazed at the simple pleasure of observing the swirling water.

"That's always happening, 24 hours a day - even when we're not thinking about it."

So it is that I still think of Ken from time to time, especially when I say to others in the south west of England, where I now live, that I have unfinished business back in the north, as I sometimes do. But only in the sense of those rivers and streams that are active, out of sight. The hermit is safe from my interrogation - it's enough for me to just know that he's there.