In angels' footsteps

Others were about in the car park tucked among trees where the Mhic Nobuil burn rushes down to the loch, a group of four and a single walker, bare-headed with cropped ginger hair.

I made a bad decision: to follow the beaten track some distance to a bridge where the river, now in spate, could be safely crossed. One bridge was fine, two would have been dandy. I had another rushing stream to cross; after a long detour, I found a likely place, and then it was not easy. Apart from the business of getting across the water, the far bank rose abruptly, and its mixture of sopping vegetation, muddy soil and greasy rock presented difficulties. I hoisted myself to the top by dint of careful placing of the feet and a grab or two at clumps of rank heather, and set off cross-country towards Coire nan Laogh, the horseshoe corrie giving access to Tom na Gruagaich.

This mile or so of wet moorland looked innocuous enough on the map but its true nature was to be cussed. Not least of the problems were the several burns which bisected the sodden ground. I followed one up and down, past many twists and bends, before I found a crossing point.

So I was leg-weary by the time I reached the waterfalls that issue from the corrie. I surveyed the options: a scramble up the buttress on my right, or a straightforward ascent by the steep track that twisted up into the corrie. Since the weather was closing in fast I chose the latter. I felt tired. Maybe seven days of hard walking were beginning to tell.

Mist gathered and sleet spat in my face. Near the top (how much further?) it turned to snow and out of the flurry, descending smartly, appeared a figure I recognised. It was the ginger-haired walker from the car park, who must have scampered over the full round of Alligin in something like three hours while I'd been floundering over bog and mire. This was bitter in the mouth. We exchanged a friendly word and I plodded on. Came rain, hail and snow and a gusting wind and in the teeth of it I reached the summit where I circled the cairn, cast a glance into the void and beat a retreat.

Homeward, I followed a route I should have taken at the start; a rough track that dropped straight to the car park, avoiding the Mhic Nobuil stream, the track, bridge, moorland and all. It was steep and often running with water but it would have saved a weary mile or two. The last indignity was to lose my car key. After a panicky search I found it in the litter bin, wrapped in sandwich papers I'd just thrown away.

The hostel at Ardgartan is a de luxe little place with views over Loch Duich to the Kintail mountains. I shared a room with Tony, a wiry, grizzled cyclist from Skipton whose Yorkshire accent was so strong I felt in need of subtitles until my ear attuned. We had a pint together at the pub; he said he'd been a window cleaner till he found he could make a living from his hobby, photography. Each year he cycled north to catch the autumn tints (a couple of weeks later I met him again in Glen Affric, snapping away at birch and pine around the lochs).

He reminisced about his trips in times gone by; at Torridon, for example, when the old hostel's water supply was an outside tap by a tree.

Next morning, there was an early bustle in the kitchen as a group prepared to set off for the South Shiel ridge, a long traverse which includes seven Munros.

The loch was rain-spattered and the hills lost in mist, but the Five Sisters were there somewhere, veiled, and I had a date with one of them. I drove into Glen Shiel.

I must have been daydreaming as I cleared a plantation of trees, for I strayed from the track - not that it mattered, for it was a straight climb on to the misty ridge. A stag standing proudly on the horizon marked the spot.

Once on the ridge I surmounted several rock-strewn peaklets and then faced an abrupt rise into nothingness at Coirean nan Spainteach, the first summit of the chain though not one of the famous five. The distance still to go included a section described (ominously, I thought) as ''a short rock pitch''. This proved to be a sheer drop over a knob of broken bedrock that called for deft use of hands and feet.

Having mastered it, I was studying the map when a disembodied voice cried ''Hi!'' and I looked up to see a figure scrambling down to join me.

She was a dark-haired young woman called Ruth, dressed in matching designer ensemble of red jacket, trousers and cap. From then on we walked together, or if not quite together, with her in the lead me behind; she slim and fit and swift on the ascent and I following. We took the narrow ridge in good style and climbed over rock heaps leading to the summit of Sgurr na Ciste Dubh, a dim hulk in the gloom, where I found her sitting in the lee of the cairn. Two well-camouflaged ptarmigan were picking about.

Sgurr na Ciste Dubh is old Munro; the adjoining rocky spikelet of Sgurr na Carnach is the new. Here was raised a philosophical question neither of us could answer. Can you count a new Munro as bagged if you've walked over it in the past, before it was designated, or are you honour bound to climb it again, in the full knowledge of its status? In other words, can you claim a Munro retrospectively?

More practically, there was the question of where to go now. For Ruth there was no choice. She'd parked at Shiel Bridge and taken a bus to her starting point (the same as mine) and so was walking towards her car. My car was behind me; I'd reached my objective and every step onwards

took me further from it. What to do? I'd intended to turn back but the thought of retracing my steps, with no view, didn't have much appeal.

Ruth cut the knot by proposing we continue together and she'd drive me to my car, so we set off along another ridge and over another hill (Sgur Fhurain, third Munro of the day) and down by a sharp-edged spur that carried as far down to the bottom of the glen, a jarring descent, with the small waters of Loch Shiel and the greater spread of Loch Duich always in view before us. We saw deer slots printed in the peaty ground and many droppings, and once a herd crossed below us, a stag with his harem behind him.

Two bridges over the Shiel river were marked on my map but only one on Ruth's and we trusted hers as the more up to date, a wise decision because one of my bridges seems to be a phantom. The one and only veritable bridge was a spindly hump-backed affair suspended by wires, whose deck planks (one or two of them broken) bounced gently under our feet.

We tugged off wet boots and jackets and drove back up the glen and the parting of the ways -- for Ruth, to Ratagan hostel, for me a long drive to Strathspey. En route I stopped at the store in Drumnadrochit for a whisky miniature, a celebration dram for the morrow's Munro, last of the eight, to be drunk on the summit.

Loch Morlich hostel was strangely dark when I drove up. The rain didn't help. The car park was empty and no light shone. Closed, it said on the door.

Back into the car, back six miles down the ski road to Aviemore where I had chips with everything and a pint at the Winking Owl, a pub well known to skiers, walkers and climbers; then on to the comfort of Aviemore hostel, a place geared to the passing tourist trade (not my style, being a purist) but relatively quiet at this time of year, snug, and best of all, open.

Last day. Extensive hill fog forecast. What's new?

I discussed routes with one of the wardens, surnamed Grant. I wished to climb Sgor an Lochain Uaine, otherwise the Angel's Peak, my last of the last Munros. The Munro book recommends an approach from the eastern side of the Cairngorms, but a tight schedule hadn't allowed me time for the long cross-

country sweep into Deeside. The shortest way to the Angel's Peak from Aviemore is over Braeriach (a mighty hill, third highest in Scotland) and back again, but warden Grant rather pooh-poohed this and suggested a tempting variation.

I could walk up Glen Einich, climb on to the plateau from the head of the glen and make directly for the Angel's Peak, from where I could return by Braeriach and the mouth of the Lairig Ghru pass. That way I needn't retrace my steps at all.

He looked at me quizzically. ''It's a long way,'' he said. ''How fit are you?''

I was eight days' walking fit, fit enough. ''That's the route you'll take?'' I nodded. ''So we'll know. Tell us when you get back.'' (A gesture to mountain safety).

The walk began with a wander among tall pine trees in the ancient forest of Rothiemurchus. Signs on a couple of gates warned that shooting was in progress - a sure-fire irritant to those of us who consider that the land is ours (wild land, that is) and open to all. But the laird of Rothiemurchus (a Grant, of course) is a friend not foe, and leaflets in a box on the gate showed that walkers were welcome on the hills even at the height of the shooting season. The way was clear.

The trees became sparser until none were left in a landscape of bare, rounded hills darkened with old heather. A Landrover came round a bend, bumping over pot-holes, and as I stood aside to let it pass I saw a dead stag slung in the trailer.

A fresh breeze blew. Far ahead, banks of mist swirled in the high corrie under Braeriach, snow-streaked already, and at the head of the glen cloud capped the cliffs rising sheer above the still invisible Loch Einich.

A quaking bridge with a strand of wire as a handrail took me over the river; so far so good, but there was no bridge at the next burn to cross and I thought I'd have to wade. Reluctant to do so I reconnoitered upstream, tramping a good half mile through tall heather till I could safely ford, from boulder to boulder.

It's more than two hours' brisk walk on a rising track before you first see the loch, a sliver of silver-grey under cliffs cowled by mist. But the ribbon of path steeply angled up the side of the hill above it, rising towards the plateau, is clearly visible, a tantalising feature from afar. Where it branches from the main track a few stones have been raised in a rough wall, a welcome shelter in this windswept desolation where I paused for a few mouthfuls of hot soup and to reflect on what lay ahead.

From above, the loch showed its gentler face, an iridescence of blues and greens, pale shallows and inkier depths. But a sullen presence ruled in the higher regions. Webs of mist partially obscured the amphitheatre into which I climbed. A many-layered stream spouted over faceted rock that gleamed black as washed coal, and over this I clambered by way of a crevice in the cliff side.

Now I stood on the rim of the great Cairngorm plateau, a high terrain of stone and thin vegetation that undulates over many square miles, rent here and there by awesome cliffs. There was soft, wet snow underfoot and a chill wind blowing.

Little could be seen in the greyness, so I took a bearing towards a rounded summit some three-quarters of a mile away, not named on the map but the next best thing to a distinguishable feature. Once I got there my plan was to find the cliff edge over the Lairig Ghru and follow it round to the Angel's Peak.

I worked slowly from one faint landmark to another (no more than an outcropping rock or just a wind-blown clump of vegetation sticking out of the snow), constantly checking the compass, until I reached the unnamed hilltop. At 1265 metres it was higher than the peak I was aiming for - in fact higher than any Munro apart from the big four. I saw the vague outline of snow cornice and broken rock that marked the edge of the cliff and started to follow it warily. Sometimes I slipped in the soft snow and once again regretted my preference for light boots.

I was not happy. I could see little. The Angel's Peak lay a mile and a half away by a route that curved round sheer crags - an easy stroll in fair weather but problematic in this mess of fog and snow. There were pellets of snow in the wind and I feared a whiteout, in which case precision of navigation would be required and I doubted my competence. I felt a sickness in the pit of my stomach: incipient panic, the lone walker's snake in the grass.

So I stopped, considered the options, studied the map. Doubts came crowding and I obeyed my gut instinct. I turned back and felt an instant relief; I retraced my steps to the unnamed point and set my course for a descent. Though it seemed like a betrayal at the time, I felt then, and I do now, that it was the correct decision. I was on the last lap with no great distance to go, no great height to climb and no physical barrier to surmount; a walk, no more than that. But I believe I had reasonable excuse to shirk it. Did it matter that the whole enterprise, the nine days' wonder, the eight last Munros in a row, had foundered? I looked into my soul and found there a resounding ''no''.

Braeriach, a giant, still lay in my way, beyond the one distinct marker in these parts, the infant Dee which rises from the Pools of Dee nearby and spills over the cliff into the Lairig Ghru - a small black burn running between icy banks that cracked under my step.

Two pairs of bootprints were visible round the summit of Braeriach and I guessed they belonged to walkers who'd come up from the Sugar Bowl car park on the ski road and returned the same way. It was so; I discovered later that the taciturn father and son from Staffordshire who shared a room with me at the hostel had been this way, so we'd been the only three on the mountain top that day. Their round trip had been considerably shorter than mine, and less rewarding, I think. Every so often I'd find their bootprints as I made my way downwards, a vicarious companionship, but as the track wasn't visible and I followed a strict reading of the compass our steps parted and converged at greater or shorter intervals.

Braeriach is a bouldery mountain and the way off it takes a twist at the narrowest point so I didn't progress very fast until at last I got below the mist and could see my way. At that point, feeling curiously wedged in between swirling top-cloud and solid ground, I could see banks of fog welling up from the glens and dissipating in the upper air.

The worst was over, but there was still a longish walk ahead of me. Everything seemed to conspire against me - I suppose I was merely tired. A field of huge rounded boulders blocked the descent to the site of the former Sinclair Hut (now removed) and I sat disconsolately on one of them munching a last sandwich.

From then on the route led along a familiar rugged track that exits from the Lairig Ghru and enters the Rothiemurchus forest from the east. Conscious that the light was fading and anxious to be out of the forest by the time night fell, I kept up a good pace. In some parts branches brushed my face and the web of tree roots criss-crossing the track was a nuisance, and once I tripped and fell flat, pack and all. I didn't feel a thing.

It was dusk when I reached the Cairngorm Club footbridge, dark when I got back to the car, and I had to stow my gear by the light of a head torch. It was after seven o'clock; I'd left the car at 8.45 in the morning so I'd been well over 10 hours on the march and I'd tramped about 17 miles. I reflected that if I'd struggled on to the Angel's Peak as planned I'd have been forced to make my way through the forest maze in pitch darkness.

All day I'd been alone. The only people I'd seen were the two in the Land-Rover cab in Glen Einich, long hours before, and I'd spoken to no-one. A couple in a cab and a line of footprints in the snow had been my only links with humanity. Arriving at the hostel was like the traveller's return from a far country.

Later I made some rough calculations. I'd reached the summits of seven of the eight new Munros (including four I'd climbed previously in pre-Munro days). In the nine-day outing I'd climbed a total of 13 Munros, eight of them new to me.

Adding all the ascents together, from base to mountain top and any extra tops, humps and bumps on the way, I'd climbed a sum total of 9500 metres, or roughly 31,000ft. The distance walked over the ground added up to something over 70 miles. On the way, I'd driven 627 miles door to door.

I pushed aside the maps, compass and pocket calculator on the table and then, later than I'd hoped and not where I'd planned it, solemnly and a little wistfully drained the whisky.

n John Fowler's book Have You Seen the Glories?, describing his experiences walking in Scotland and abroad, will be published by Jock's Hill Press later this year.