Walking with Plato by Gary Hayden Read Free Book Online

Rannoch Moor, and now caters for fisherman, hikers, climbers, and skiers.
    Those with sufficient funds can retire to one of the hotel’s bedrooms, after closing time, and can look out of their picture windows upon the mountains, the moors, the wind, the rain, and the deer. But Wendy and I, being without sufficient funds, had to retire to our backpacker tent and keep more intimate company with the mountains, the moors, the wind, the rain, and the midges.

    Midges are mosquito-like biting insects that infest large parts of the Highlands and Western Scotland during the summer months. They’re so tiny that they’re barely visible to the human eye, but there are lots of them. A square metre of ground can hold half a million . So it’s little consolation to know that only the females bite.
    Each summer, midges ruin countless picnics, walks, and camping trips. They make thousands of visitors vow never to set foot in the Scottish countryside again, and are estimated to cost the tourist industry £300 million a year.
    Despite taking every precaution to prevent midges from entering our inner tent in the night, Wendy and I woke up the next morning covered in itchy lumps. Then, when we ventured outside, we were descended upon by hordes of the little bastards.
    One midge bite is no big deal. It feels like a tiny, hot pinprick. But a full-scale attack, consisting of perhaps a dozen hot pinpricks per second, drives you to distraction. So we dived back into the tent and covered every square inch of skin with long-trousers, long-sleeved shirts, gloves, and mesh hoods. Only then could we take down our camp, ready to set off on the day’s hike: nineteen miles from the King’s House Hotel to Tyndrum , including a lengthy stretch across Rannoch Moor.

    Rannoch Moor is a vast wilderness of peat bogs, streams, lochs, and lochans, a fifty-square-mile elevated plateau encircled by mountains.
    In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped , the narrator, David Balfour, says of Rannoch Moor, ‘A wearier-looking desert never man saw’. But he was fleeing for his life and dangerously ill at the time. So doubtlessly that coloured his perceptions.
    My experience of it was very different. I found it to be a wild and lovely place. Something about it – something to do with its vastness and openness, and its harsh, untamed beauty – seemed to set my soul free.
    Generally, in my everyday life, my thoughts writhe and churn inside my head like the proverbial can of worms. But there, on the moor, they seemed to find release. I felt smaller than I usually do, and less important than I usually do, and it was a good feeling.

    I recalled that I had felt the same way twenty years previously while walking in the Lake District. I was in my early thirties at the time, and undergoing a crisis of faith.
    I had grown up believing that there is a God and a Devil, that Christians go to Heaven while everyone else goes to Hell, that the Bible is right about everything , and that one day – probably very soon – Jesus will come again.
    Needless to say, I had the occasional pang of doubt about all of this. But up until my late twenties I managed to keep on believing nonetheless. However, as my twenties gave way to my thirties, I found that my doubts had become too big to brush under the carpet any more. I had to face them.
    If I could resolve my doubts – and I sincerely hoped that I could – then I could carry on believing. But otherwise . . .
    So it was that I found myself, for the first time, questioning the beliefs that had guided every aspect of my life up until then. It was an intensely stressful and confusing time. I was tied up in so many intellectual and emotional knots that I scarcely knew what – or even how – to think. I felt so burdened and distressed that I wondered if I could ever be happy again.
    But, in the middle of it all, I took a fortnight’s camping holiday, alone, in the Lake District.
    Each day, I would walk through the countryside