The West Highland Line

At platform 7 of Queen Street Station in Glasgow, I boarded the train to Oban. It's about 3 and a half hours long, and from Oban it gets a little tricky. In Oban, I'm meant to connect with a 4:00pm ferry to Craignure, then get to Tobermory, from where a ferry departs to Kilchoan at 6:00pm. I might never have figured all this out on my own, but Tim, an incredible guy who is going to host me for a few days while I plan, told me what I would need to do. So now, I'm sitting on the train as it winds through some of the prettiest country I've ever seen. Glens (valleys), lochs (lakes), bens (hills), and quaint, remote platforms have composed the shifting painting of my window. The train headed west before it separated from the Fort William line and headed south. My ultimate destination today is Kilchoan on the western coast of the country where Tim lives.

I don't have a way with words like many do, but this landscape warrants some effort towards description. Each loch seems to hold its own beauty, with the rivers feeding into them and the bens surrounding. It's wild almost, and outside the industrialized cities, of which there aren't actually that many, the homes fit into their context and form a very intimate and beautiful picture at every turn. It's no wonder that the directors if Harry Potter chose this line to film the train scenes in the movies, most memorably the Glenfinnan viaduct. Not being quite into the Norther Highlands yet, the hills are just that, hills, though no doubt some would fatigue any who set out to climb them. Some have deep cuts in them, down which waterfalls travel into the lochs. The train itself, and the iPad I'm writing this on, are the only things that keep me from slipping away into a much older and simpler time. The closer I get to the wild, and the closer I get to beginning the Cape Wrath Trail, the John Muir quote sinks in deeper and deeper.

"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity."

 

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