Words by Rob Savin
She'd eaten well. A proper meal on a floating pub moored on the Caledonian Canal — she thinks it's called the Eagle Barge, somewhere between Loch Lochy and Loch Oich — and a glass of wine before walking back to her tent in the dark.
She unzipped the fly and was hit by a wall of sweet strawberry.
"I've never smelled that before in my life," she tells me. "I was like, something's off."
There were two eyes looking back at her from inside the tent.
She's laughing about it now — the kind of laugh that has had enough time to become a laugh. At the time, it had been pitch black, raining, and she was the sole occupant of a tent that had been infiltrated, mid-trip, by a mouse. "I had to coerce it out in the nicest way possible," she says. "I didn't want to scare it."
The following morning she sat in the rain with a sewing kit, patching the holes it had made in her bag and her waterproof coat. You cannot plan for that.
The Trail from the Map
Jennifer Stevens walks trails the way some people read books: carefully, with attention to things that get missed at pace. She has completed twelve national trails across the UK and films the whole thing for her YouTube channel, Tiny Pine Outdoors. The Great Glen Way she did solo, wild camping most nights, in late September 2023.
"It is a bit risky," she says of autumn hiking this far north. "You're risking a lot of rain and cold and wind." A pause. "While I did have some wind and rain, it wasn't anything mental."
She doesn't perform toughness. I notice that fairly quickly.
The trail runs 79 miles from Fort William to Inverness, following the Great Glen Fault — that diagonal fracture you can trace on any map of Scotland, the one that makes the country look like it's been split along a ruled line. From the satellite view, it barely looks natural. But it is. Loch Lochy, Loch Oich, Loch Ness, in sequence. The Great Glen Way follows it almost exactly.
She arrived on the Caledonian Sleeper, stepped off into Fort William at dawn, found the start point — "a big stone monolith plaque, like a recognised trail" — and then spent a good hour walking through suburban streets before anything remotely Highland began. That's not a complaint. That's just what it is.
"Once you're on the canal, it's a nice easy start," she says. "Very level. You can set your pace." She'd had a yellow weather warning on her phone all morning — moderate conditions, potential storm overnight. She did what seemed sensible: she read the information boards.
"I loved coming across them," she says. The geology, the wildlife, the history. There's a particular enthusiasm in the way she says geology. Not everyone says geology like that.
By the time the downpour arrived — proper horizontal Scottish rain — she was two miles into a three-mile detour towards Spean Bridge and a hotel. A car pulled up beside her. A smiling woman in her eighties asked if she'd like a lift. She'd just dropped off a ninety-year-old at the doctor's.
"Her grandkids give her grief for still doing all this," Jennifer says. "She just does a lot for her community."
Her name was Helen. She appeared at the right moment and didn't make a thing of it.
Jennifer stayed in the hotel that night. Wild camping started the following day.
· · ·
What the Locals Know
There is a pottery café somewhere in the hills on the approach to Drumnadrochit. Jennifer isn't entirely sure of the exact location. "There are signs," she says. "You can't miss it."
About an hour before she reached it, she passed three men on the trail — probably in their sixties, she thinks. A brief exchange: hello, lovely trail, isn't it, all the best. They went ahead. She stopped to take a photograph and sit on a bench.
When she walked into the café, the man behind the counter told her that one of the men outside had offered to pay for her coffee and cake.
"I was totally taken aback," she says. She tried to decline. He told her just to accept it.
"He likes to do this for younger people on the trail. He knows people can be strapped for cash and he doesn't want anyone to miss the experience."
His name was Keith. She recognised him from the trail an hour earlier. She thanked him. He didn't make much of it.
"I still think about it now," she says.
I find I think about it a little too, after she's described it.
· · ·
The Famous Loch
She'd never been to Loch Ness before. It matters, that detail — because seeing a famous place for the first time on foot, after several days of walking, is something different from arriving by car park.
She was staying in a hostel near the loch that night. She hadn't booked a private room; there just happened to be one. The window looked out directly onto the water. It was evening. The clouds were pink. The sky was lilac. The loch was framed by the foliage around the window frame.
"I thought, I can't believe I'm here. I've always wanted to come."
On another day — rain and sun alternating all morning, everything glistening — she came over a rise and Loch Ness was laid out in front of her with a full, perfect rainbow cast across it. She stopped walking.
What else would you do.
· · ·
The Last Full Day
The first serious climb of the entire route comes at the very end — a steep ascent through dense forest on the last full day of walking. The moss on the ground was so thick and green it was almost lurid, she says. Sunlight came through in long shafts. And then she broke out of the trees at the top and the whole length of the loch was below her, brilliant blue in the clear sky.
The rock up there surprised her. Almost arid, she says. Sandy. Strange, after so much green.
She'd been reading the information boards all week. Something clicked.
"The Caledonian Mountains are the oldest mountain ranges in the world," she says — pausing slightly, checking herself — "along with the Appalachians and the Atlas Mountains. They were all connected." She shakes her head, not quite believing she's standing in that thought. "You travel in time with it."
· · ·
The mouse had bitten through her waterproof. She'd sewn it back together with a travel kit in the morning rain. Keith had paid for her coffee and a slice of cake at a pottery café she'd have walked straight past. Helen — in her eighties, out in a storm, who drops strangers off at hotels without making a thing of it — had driven her the last mile.
None of it was on the itinerary. All of it is what she remembered.
