A couple of weeks ago I found myself sat in the Lochmaddy Hotel on North Uist, rain streaming down the windows, killing time before catching the ferry back to Skye. It was the final day of a four week jaunt around Scotland and, as inevitably happens when a journey comes to an end, I found myself reflecting on the highlights of the previous 28 days. I’d seen so much. Too much to recall in just one sitting but some notable experiences nonetheless stood out: exploring the cavernous space of Smoo Cave; standing below some of the tallest trees in the…

Camp food is one of the best parts of the outdoor day. David Lintern is thinking about his stomach (again). Backpacking and camping season is almost upon us, so I thought it was time to talk about something that’s high on my list of priorities when outside – food! When you’ve been carting a heavy bag across the hills all day, the rewards of a good meal are obvious. But it’s easy to over complicate this. There are millions of words devoted to calorie count vs weight, and a lot of it is there just to sell more prepackaged, pricey,…

SEVERAL folk have asked me recently if I’ve given up the hills for cycling? I’ve certainly been enjoying my bike a lot more in the past five years than in the previous fifty and it’s true to say that for me bikepacking has certainly taken over from backpacking. Over the past few years I’ve cycled Land’s End to John O’Groats; toured through France from the Channel to the Med and cycled Ireland end to end. Last autumn I spent a couple of weeks cycling in the Picos de Europa of north Spain, an area that had some of the longest…

Colour can be in short supply during the average Scottish winter. Whether it’s due to low cloud, mist or rain, or invariably all three at the same time, we spend much of the winter under a blanket of grey that drains anything bright and sharp from the landscape. Ours is a muted world made of different hues of grey, brown and green. This inevitably means that when something colourful does finally come along it stands out with all the subtlety of a nuclear explosion. Waking up after weeks of dreichness to find a sparkling blue sky in the morning is…