Highland Insider

I spent Friday night at Callart View Bed & Breakfast in Glencoe village, and had possibly the most magnificent breakfast of my life. I was ready to be impressed, having already sampled the ‘Bed’ part of the deal: a comfortable warm double with a rich patchwork quilt and spare pillows laid on, in one of the three cosy rooms of this 1920s gardener’s cottage.

My breakfast table was by the window looking out onto Loch Leven with the mountains of Lochaber beyond. The food was going to have to be good to capture my attention with such a panorama in front of me. It was. I noticed none of the other guests in the dining room went for either of the porridge options, and they missed such a treat. They were all from various parts of mainland Europe, where porridge doesn’t seem to be recognised for the superfood it is; I remember a party of German walkers in a youth hostel once being horrified that we were going to eat oats. ‘It’s for horses!’ they insisted.

I chose the creamy porridge with almonds and sultanas, laced with a nip of whisky and it was comforting, invigorating and totally delicious. Lynn Allman, porridge chef and owner of Callart View with her husband Geoff, is from York, which just shows you don’t have to be Scottish to be handy with a spurtle. I feel a return trip to Glencoe won’t be long in coming.

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My walking boots are in the kitchen, hosed down and stuffed full of newspaper. Above them the old wooden pulley is festooned with hats, gloves, fleece, trousers, woolly socks, rucksack … in fact just about every item of walking gear I own, apart from my waterproof trousers which had a lovely dry weekend in the wardrobe. The rest of us spent Friday climbing Sgorr Dhonuill, by Ballachulish, with a couple of friends, Ann and Joan, who drove up from south of the border on Thursday.

We spent the entire day in thick cloud, imagining what a fantastic route this must be if only we could see it. It starts in a Forestry Commission carpark in Glen Achulais and winds along great paths up through the conifer plantations and out onto open hillside, following and crossing a steep burn which was spectacularly in spate. Then it’s back into woodland, with a narrow track up through native broadleafs as well as pines this time, with lush bracken, ferns and foxgloves to wade through. With the fine spray from the waterfalls mingling with the misty cloud, there was an almost tropical, rainforest atmosphere. We took a couple of wrong turns when we mistook the track for another burn and went looking for something that didn’t have water gushing down it. On the return leg we’d got wise to that and just splashed our way straight back down, stopping to wring out our socks back at the forestry track.

In between was a boggy ascent to the bealach between Sgorr Dhonuill and Sgorr Dhearg. We had intended to pop up to both peaks that make up Beinn a’ Bheithir but the conditions were so poor we chose one, nipped up to its rocky summit and got back down as fast as we could. Apart from a bashful young roe deer on the edge of the woods, we only met one other soul on the hill all day, a friendly Irish chap who was walking at about twice the speed we were and managed to do both summits in less time than we took to do one.

So, I’ve been to the top of Donald’s Rocky Peak, but, as always when the cloud is down, I don’t feel I’ve really got to know the hill. Bad weather forces an intimate knowledge of the ground under your boots, and, as a by-product, a better knowledge of you own resources, physical, mental and spiritual; but without the view of and from the mountain, you lose the perspective of the height and scale of the mass you’re climbing. That’s why I’ll be back to Glen Achulais some time, on a dry clear day, to get to know the horseshoe ridge of Beinn a’ Bheithir a bit better. Mind you, as the name translates as ‘Hill of the Thunderbolt’, I might have to wait a while.

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Outside my bedroom window is a little mud nest stuffed full of baby swallows. It’s tucked under the corrugated roof that forms a covered walkway between the cottage and the outbuildings, and it’s just low enough to be able to see five fluffy punk heads poking out of the rim. The white lipstick markings round their gaping mouths show up easily against the dark background of the nest when they’re awake and looking for a snack.

They seem to associate any nearby movement with the parents returning with food, as whenever we go out of the front door they start up a noise like a chorus of squeaky toys, loud enough to wake the dead. Well, at least loud enough to wake the sleeping; I’m now roused around four o’clock every morning when their breakfast arrives. It’s such an endearing racket though, I just smile and go back to sleep. I’ll probably miss it when they fledge.

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