It started with a warning: “Weaklings and novices must expect to perish.” Guidebook writer Alfred Wainwright didn’t mince his words when describing the glacially scoured tract of land known as Fisherfield in Scotland’s far north-west Highlands, between the tiny townships of Kinlochewe to the south and Dundonnell to the north.
It has earned the reputation of Scotland’s “great wilderness” and offers a cluster of vertiginous mountains, veined with a multitude of rivers; it is also home to a population of deer that easily outnumbers people.
And according to Ordnance Survey, it’s home to the furthest point from a road on mainland Britain, on the mountain of Ruadh Stac Mor. It’s the “middle of nowhere”! While some might see all this, and Wainwright’s words, as a reason to stay away, I saw it as the laying down of a rather tantalising gauntlet. That’s why, after a serious dump of snow up in Wester Ross, I was on the sleeper train with my friend and…
— to www.theguardian.com
