The West Highland Way is the famous multi-day walk towards the Scottish Highlands, promising all the icons of Scotland: red deer, Loch Lomond, inviting pubs and moody rain. Peter and Nanette experienced it all on an 8-day self-guided tour with UTracks and wrote it up in an article, Mist and Midges on the West Highland Way, for the NZ Post. Continue reading for an excerpt.

 

“Get your clothes off and give them to me,” says the hotel hostess at reception. Not quite the welcome my wife Nanette and I expect after a long day hiking the West Highland Way, Scotland’s first official long distance footpath.

Opened in 1980, it leads from Glasgow’s northern suburbs for 158 kilometres through progressively higher hills, before finishing at Fort William at the foot of Ben Nevis, United Kingdom’s highest mountain.

 

The West Highland Way starts just 20 minutes by train from central Glasgow by an obelisk in the pedestrianised shopping street at Milngavie (which locals call "Mull-guy"), then enters a portal to a fenced path with panelled depictions of what walkers will see along the trail. We leave Glasgow’s peripheral suburbs on wide paths through woodland and beside streams and small lochs, well waymarked with signs bearing a stylised thistle."

 

 

 

>> All West Highland Way tours

>> All Scotland tours

 

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