For over four years in the early 1990s, when I lived near Stirling and travelled to work by train, I walked a short distance through the convulsions of Edinburgh’s Old Town from Waverley Station to a small close off the Canongate. I don’t need to labour the magic of Edinburgh as a city to explore on foot, including as it does a volcano to climb, wheeling gulls and views to the Forth, and a National library housing eight acres of books in storeys climbing between two streets stacked one above the other. In some cities ‘enchantment engineers’ design temporary illusions…

I was in my sleeping bag by 6:50 PM on the night of the Spring equinox and still able to write by natural light. I looked east, watching through the tent flap as the light died over Meall nan Tarmachan, Ben Vorlich, Stuc a Chroin. I couldn’t see the sunset directly, having pitched my tent at about 750 m on the south-eastern crags of Meall Ghaordaidh to shelter from increasing night winds. However, a sharply demarcated block of shade had risen up the hills, contrasting with a diminishing russet glow on the tops as blue-grey clouds draped over them, the…

Snow was tickling the inland hills when I arrived at the ruined chapel at Kilmarie on the Craignish peninsula. It was early December and melancholy-grey; the sea and sky stilled after a weekend of violent storms. All was now holding its breath before a proper fall of snow. Overhead the sound of crows’ wing-beats and a curlew’s whoop seemed amplified. Despite planes going over, the fishing boats out again after the storm, a radio playing on a nearby building site, there was a sense of ancientness here amidst the glister of wet rock and mottled gravestones, their ownership gradually being…

I chose the autumn equinox when everything is held in balance; when light and dark are of equal length. I thought of this walk as a deep breath before the winter: a good time to look back, then accept the receding light and look forward without foreboding. Walking the track upstream along the Almond from Newton Bridge, I was at first between some of my familiar, round Perthshire hills, climbing gradually west towards Loch Tay. But then at the head of the valley I planned to leave familiar territory and turn south over the westerly flanks of Ben Chonzie to…

Linda Cracknell is an-award winning Highlands-based writer known for her creative approach to exploring wild places and man’s interaction with them. Her Walkhighlands’ essays cover the cultural aspects of the Scottish landscape on a quarterly basis. In May this year I climbed Quinag for the first time. I had saved its magnificence for such a day; recently raucous south-westerlies had stilled and cloud flurried high above the summits. Threading through its towers and buttresses, gaping clefts and chutes of long, vertical scree, I felt I was touring the walls of an ancient castle. Its giant proportions invited a very different…

Linda Cracknell is an-award winning Highlands-based writer known for her creative approach to exploring wild places and man’s interaction with them. Her Walkhighlands’ essays cover the cultural aspects of the Scottish landscape on a quarterly basis. Always keen to make my travel interesting, I arrived as guest reader on a travel writing course at Moniack Mhor having made a four-day journey on foot. I chose a route which began with an east-to-west crossing over the Corrieyairack Pass from Laggan to Fort Augustus through the Monadhliath mountains, and then walked north along the Great Glen Way. There’s something about Moniack Mhor.…

From Crieff To Aberfeldy on Wade’s Military Road Linda Cracknell is an-award winning Highlands-based writer known for her creative approach to exploring wild places and man’s interaction with them. Her Walkhighlands’ essays cover the cultural aspects of the Scottish landscape on a quarterly basis. ‘I’m just reading a book about that,’ the bus driver from Aberfeldy said, having learnt I was going to be walking a road made by General Wade. ‘It says he took all the credit, but his successors did most of it.’‘Major Caulfeild?’ I asked.‘That’s the one!’‘You’ve a braw day for a hike anyway,’ he said when…

Linda Cracknell is an-award winning writer based in the Scottish Highlands and known for her creative approach to exploring wild places and man’s interaction with them. Walkhighlands will be publishing a specially-commissioned piece emphasising the cultural aspects of the Scottish landscape on a quarterly basis. ‘I think I’ve fallen in love,’ Kate said, less than 24 hours into our enchantment. We were sitting on a small hill on the island’s south east corner, looking north towards the village, the ferry plying to and fro from Fionnphort, the abbey sunlit and watchful beyond. To the south-east the archipelago of islands and…