Cape Wrath Trail, eleven days, and everything that got wet

Eleven days is too fast. I did it anyway and I am not going to pretend that was clever.

Third time on this route, first time with a schedule. The Cape Wrath Trail is not really a trail. Nothing is waymarked, nothing is signposted, there is no official line at all: it is a set of linked ways of getting from Fort William to the lighthouse at Cape Wrath, and depending on which variants you take it comes out somewhere between roughly 320 and 380 km. The Cicerone guide (Iain Harper, fourth edition, ISBN 9781786311344) calls it 370 km in fourteen stages and suggests sixteen to twenty two days. My watch said 387. Watches overread on ground where you take four small steps to cross two metres of peat hag, so call it 370 and stop arguing with the satellites.

The plan was eleven days because I wanted to know if I could. Yes, and the price was two days I would like to give back.

The log

Ascent is what the watch claimed, which is generous. Weather gets one line because that is all it deserves. Dan writes these for websites when they fall over (@grep/postmortem-forty-three-minutes-of-502s). This is one for a pair of feet.

Day	Route	km	Ascent (m)	Slept	Weather
1	Fort William to Corryhully	38	700	Corryhully bothy	dry to Glenfinnan, then rain, then more rain
2	Corryhully to Sourlies, over the Mam na Cloich Airde	33	1300	Sourlies bothy, on the floor, nine of us	cloud on the deck, wet from the knee down all day
3	Sourlies to Barrisdale	24	1250	tent at Barrisdale	two hours of sun which I did not use to dry anything
4	Barrisdale, Kinloch Hourn, Shiel Bridge, Morvich	32	1200	campsite at Morvich	dry, cold, north easterly
5	Morvich, Falls of Glomach, Glen Elchaig, Iron Lodge, Maol Bhuidhe	28	1250	Maol Bhuidhe bothy	showers, then hail above the falls
6	Maol Bhuidhe to Coulin, via Strathcarron and Coulags	37	1200	tent at Coulin	rain from 06:40 to 21:00 with no gaps
7	Coulin, Kinlochewe, Shenavall	36	1350	Shenavall bothy	clear morning, filthy afternoon
8	Shenavall, Inverlael, on up the track	39	1150	tent, in a bog, on purpose	drizzle that was mostly cloud sitting on me
9	Oykel Bridge to Inchnadamph	41	900	tent at Inchnadamph	dry, no wind at all, and therefore midges
10	Inchnadamph, Glendhu, north	48	1100	tent, 2 km short of Rhiconich	dry until four, then hail, rainbow, hail
11	Rhiconich, Sandwood Bay, Cape Wrath	31	650	Durness	wind, sun, wind

That is 387 km and 12,050 m of up, a few hundred metres shy of the totals the guides quote, because I took the Glen Elchaig line and skipped a climb I have done twice already.

Everything that got wet, in order

The order is the interesting part. Nobody drowns on this route. You just lose function, one item at a time, until the ordinary jobs of an evening become impossible.

1. Both feet, day one, hour two, in a burn below Glenfinnan I could have stepped over in April. Fine. Feet are supposed to be wet.
2. Socks and gaiters, same hour. Also fine.
3. Trousers to the hip, day two, Glen Dessarry. The bog through there does not have a surface. It has an opinion.
4. Gloves, day two afternoon, and this is where it stops being fine. Wet gloves in wind at 700 m is how you lose the ability to work a zip.
5. The paper map, day two, because it was in a mesh side pocket like an idiot. Third time on this route and I still did that.
6. Tent inner, day three, packed wet in wind because there was no version of that morning where it went in dry. A dry Alpkit Soloist is 1200 g. Mine read 1710 g on the luggage scale at Kinlochewe. I carried that extra 510 g for six days and it never once dried out properly.
7. Sleeping bag footbox, night five at Maol Bhuidhe. Not rain. Condensation off a stone wall and my own breath, which is worse because you cannot blame anyone.
8. Phone, day six, twenty minutes of hail while I stood there navigating off the screen. It lived. Do not copy me.
9. The spare base layer, day eight, because the thing I called a dry bag was a stuff sack, and a stuff sack is a bag that is not dry.
10. Morale, day ten, at about kilometre 39.

The one thing that stayed dry

Two pairs of socks and a hat, in a 1.5 litre freezer bag with the air squeezed out and the top rolled three times. Cost nothing. Weighed 4 g. Worked better than anything I have ever paid money for. I got into that bag at the end of day six and it is the single reason I did not quit at Coulin.

The two days

Day six was 37 km and 1200 m in rain from 06:40 to 21:00 with no gaps. Not heavy rain. Rain like a tap left half on, in a wind that made the hood useless, for fourteen and a half hours. I reached Coulin at nine and could not get the tent up in one go, because my hands had stopped taking instructions and the pegs kept doing that thing where they are suddenly the wrong shape. Twenty minutes for a job that takes four. That is the real failure mode out here. Not drama. Just a slow loss of the ability to do fiddly things, which arrives long before you feel cold enough to be worried.

Day ten was worse and it was entirely self inflicted. Forty eight kilometres from Inchnadamph, past Glendhu, north through the Reay country to within sight of Loch Inchard. I decided at kilometre twenty to push all the way so the last day would be short, and I spent the final twelve kilometres doing arithmetic about how much light was left instead of looking up. Sutherland was doing something extraordinary with the low sun on wet gneiss and I watched my feet. That is a shite way to spend an evening.

The range

Cape Wrath sits inside a live firing range. Cape Wrath Training Centre runs it from Faraid Head at Durness, ordnance goes at Garvie Island a few kilometres east of the cape, and the RAF drops live bombs there. Firing times get published monthly on GOV.UK, and Range Control answers the phone on 01971 511242 between eight and five.

I rang from Kinlochbervie on the evening of day ten and got a person who told me plainly that nothing was scheduled for the next morning. Walked in from Rhiconich over Sandwood, reached the lighthouse at about eleven, and then walked back out to Blairmore, because the ferry across the Kyle of Durness runs roughly May to September and only when the weather and the tide allow, and that morning the wind said no. Twenty two extra kilometres to finish a trail I had already finished. It is the only part of the whole thing that felt like admin.

Sandwood Bay belongs to the John Muir Trust. Two miles of sand, a sea stack off the south end, no road within four miles of it. I sat down for eleven minutes and did not take a photograph, and that is all you are getting.

What I would change

Four things, and none of them are gear I need to buy.

• The map goes in a proper roll top dry bag, not a mesh pocket. This is the third year I have written that sentence down.
• Two pairs of gloves is one pair short when it rains for six days. Three pairs is 144 g. Losing the use of your hands at eight in the evening costs more than 144 g.
• Budget for the wet tent. Half a kilo of water lives in that fabric from day three onwards and there is nothing you can do about it except know it and stop being surprised.
• Do not build a schedule that needs every day to work. Eleven days had no slack in it, so days six and ten had to absorb the weather instead of the plan absorbing it.

I am going back for a fourth. Fourteen days, and I intend to spend the extra three sitting in bothy doorways watching it rain sideways, which it turns out is the part I actually came for.