Inverie is tiny, a shambolic mix of old timers in knackered, occasionally unlicensed vehicles and newcomers in obscenely expensive hardwood yachts, plus a few dreadlocked inbetweeners and hill walking holidaymakers. The pub and the café both shut midweek, and sometimes when the wind drops, there’s a feeling of entropy. A pirate flag hangs flaccid across a child’s trampoline, faded Jacobite posters adorn the back wall of the post office. These are clues left with a nod and a wink, it’s also a community that doesn’t care what I think, and neither should they: here is an alliance of the wiry…

Scotland’s rugged west coast is, I would suggest, uniformly magnificent. And yet, as you travel through this amazing place there are some locations that rise above even that lofty baseline. Some are famous, most are not. And in the case of the nots, they’re often the kinds of places you unwittingly stumble upon while on your way to see something else. As a case in point, earlier this year I paid my first ever visit to the Isle of Mull. I’d heard plenty in advance about its history, its hills and its geology, so I already had a list of…

AN American backpacker, Dr Robert Wehrman, has written a definite biography of Colin Fletcher, a Welsh/American whose works have inspired legions of backpackers across the globe, including Chris Townsend and myself. Indeed Chris and I have probably spent hours hiking and discussing what we know about Fletcher, or more pertinently, what we don’t know about Fletcher, for he was an extremely private person and it would seem there is plenty we don’t know. But what we don’t know, Bob Wehrman does. Wehrman has been looking for some financial help in publishing the biography and initially set up a Kickstarter fund,…

Bogs are hard to love. Indeed, if you hear the word ‘bog’ then what might spring to mind, other than the lavatory, is something that grips your boot and refuses to let it go as you step away. Or perhaps you instantly picture a place that is difficult to navigate through on a compass bearing because you can rarely walk in a straight line. Or perhaps, if you’ve ever been unlucky enough to actually fall into a bog, you imagine something that is very smelly indeed. Faced with such bad press it’s not surprising that bogs can be viewed rather…

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…

SEVERAL nights ago when the temperature dropped to unusually low levels even for this poor summer I put some logs on the wood burning stove, poured myself a large dram and settled down to read. But it wasn’t a book I was reading – it was the brand new Harveys map of Assynt. This new 1:40,000 scale map had dropped through my letterbox a few days earlier and it covers what many would regard as one of the finest areas of wild land in Scotland. The poet Norman MacCaig was passionate in his love for this area – he claimed…