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Through the trees I have emerged on to open hillside. The heather is a dour brown, the green (that IS there within it) muted by the high cloud cover.
Four hours ago the disc of the midsummer sun rose clear over the fields as I stepped out my back door. That was a hundred and forty miles to the north, now it blinks only occasionally as I climb the Foxhunters Path.
This is a good path - easy to follow, sound underfoot. Pausing I see increasingly vast areas and realise that I have left Glen Feshie too soon.
My planned day was to bag the Munro Mullach Clach a Bhlair using an estate track almost to its top. Instead my errant feet are now climbing Carn Ban Mor. I say 'bag', but in truth I'm no Munro Bagger. The physical and mental challenge of that is beyond my abilities, but any day out on the hills is a delight. Indeed any day outside is a delight.
Wreaths of grey cloud are pouring over the crest above me as I begin to approach the top. The forecast assures me they wont last and whilst they are frequent they aren't constant.
It's a steady climb and I'm surprised how quickly I'm going, how fit I feel. Perhaps that crest is a false summit and beyond another 1000 feet to climb, but my map suggests not.
I didn't expect this. I've prepared my route enough to be sensible, but not too much as to blunt the experience. A great openness greets me, a swathe of space.
The wind shelter cairn atop Carn Ban Mor is beside me now. It's a worthy structure, but up here it seems dinky. There is no wind; stillness.
The top of Sgor Gaoith is an obvious feature and I face towards it. The accumulated knowledge of countless walkers before me is a pathway to its top. Away lies Braeriach which from here seems forbidding and distant.
Before Sgor Gaoith's summit is reached I have stopped. I wander from the path to the edge of a great corrie where below me Loch Eanaich is shimmering in the light that is winning through.
I am entranced: the water is like renewed life within the chasm of human frailty. The wellspring of birth deep inside the negation of death. A child to be born soon after its grandparents passing. I stand still and alone, confronted by mortality.
There is a breeze on the top of Sgor Gaoith, and so there should be. The breath of the mountains is pouring onto me, I don't linger but return to my first viewpoint for a ham piece and a can of Vimto.
Time is my amenable companion at this point in summer and returning to Carn Ban Mor I realise I have enough of it to take in Mullach Clach a Bhlair.
Am Moine Mhor - The Great Moss - a green flat plateau. Not featureless, but no doubt very difficult to navigate in poor visibility. My mind is being lulled - for this could be the Flow Country of home and as such the open carachter is familiar. However I'm presently 2,500 feet higher, a fact proclaimed to me by a protective ptarmigan herding her chicks away as I approach.
There can't surely be within these islands many other areas of peatland bog at this altitude. I'm not sure what the tundra of the Arctic Circle is like, but I'm beginning to feel a sense of it - perhaps.
At this point the path is perhaps less of a scar on a wild landscape than a scribble on the painting of such a scene.
Cotton grass dips and dances on a breeze that must be there yet I can't feel. Exposed peat has become a cracked pavement.
The dry call of a dunlin rises from the peat hags. Pausing, I wait. Eventually the male shows himself resplendent in summer plumage before scurrying away.
I have just easily forded the Caochan Dubh. There is a richer green here by this vein of life.
Mullach Clach a Bhlair cannot be described as a dramatic mountain. Yet, approaching it I can see it's of its place.
I have now picked up what seems to be a bulldozed track and from it I detour a little to find an underwhelming cairn on an underwhelming summit and an overwhelming sense of space.
It is as if we've climbed up to the ancient past. The space is the great distance of time from now back to the origin of these granite heights. I'm grounded at 3,000 feet.
Sprawled out I take my lunch beneath an increasingly blue sky.
You've caught me up above Coire Garbhlach whose slopes of scree seem kinetic. I fear that you might feel like our world is suddenly collapsing beneath us, but this place has taught us the patience of times slow passage. We're better prepared by that.
Temptation takes me up the path to Meall nan Sleac where a summit cairn marks the top.
Now I'm back on the bulldozed track and descending quite quickly towards Glen Feshie and at this lower altitude there are foxglove by the side.
Glen Feshie is a well of heat and I wander through pine, by river and ford a stream or two easily in this dry weather.
I have left the high plateau behind to the mournful piping of the Golden Plover. Eventually they too must leave it vowing their return.
