Day 14 - Srathchailleach bothy - Cape Wrath (11Km, 200m ascent)
Day 15 - Cape Wrath - Strahchailleach bothy
Day 16 - Strahchailleach bothy - Kinlochbervie
Christmas Day dawned much as Christmas Eve. Cold, bright, with a heavy frost on the ground. At least that meant one thing - the deep bogs for which this stretch is infamous were frozen solid. We still had to tread carefully and could have done with crampons, but I’ll take frozen heather over bogs any day.
As a result we made pretty quick progress and were soon at the relatively new boundary fence that delineates the Cape Wrath range. As it was Christmas Day we passed through with no problems, the only interruption being me managing to rip a good sized hole in the seat of my trousers on the barbed wire fence!
The day to the Cape doesn’t really offer too many navigational challenges other than the rough going, so we revelled in the bleakness of the landscape and the sensation of being utterly alone. This is wild, desolate country of the finest order and something we both loved.
Eventually we reached the 4x4 track that leads up and round the final hill to find that too was frozen solid. We inched forward along the sides, skating along the ice in places and trying not to break our necks so close to the final prize. One of the final teases of the Cape Wrath Trail is that although the lighthouse is visible from Sandwood Bay, you don’t then see it again until you’re almost upon it.
So it was with a mixture of relief, happiness and excitement that I finally turned the bend in the track that let me glimpse the lighthouse just a couple of kilometres away. As we approached we could hear dogs barking. In Kinlochbervie, the locals had told us about a cafe at the Cape which we had assumed was a joke at the expense of visitors. But after we had done the obligatory picture stop and decided to head back to find a nicer camp site, we encountered a lone man and a pack of springer spaniels.
This was a slightly surreal sight at such a remote point, but it turned out he did indeed run a cafe at the lighthouse. He was waiting for his wife who had been cut off by the ice we had encountered on the track (we didn’t know it at the time but this was a story that subsequently made the national papers - complete with a cameo from ourselves as intrepid walkers).
Feeling slightly ill at ease with company, we said farewell and headed back to a spot a few miles back that had looked perfect for camping. And so it was, we pitched the Akto’s in the weak winter sunshine and sat brewing tea and contemplating what we had just achieved. The Cape itself had been the ultimate goal, but it had been all about what we were now doing - sitting, nestled in one of the country’s most far off wildernesses watching the sun dip into the North Atlantic, stretching far off towards Iceland.
And so, our journey was almost complete. We’d made the Cape, but being winter, we had no option other than to re-trace our steps via Strathchailleach to Kinlochbervie. With the conditions underfoot this was far from straightforward and at Sandwood we even resorted to lashing old rope to our boots to try and get some more purchase on the ice. It was therefore with considerable relief that we returned to the road at Blairmore and plodded slowly back to Kinlochbervie.
The next day, almost defying belief, the postbus arrived out of the frigid dark to pick us up and wound its way precariously to Lairg. Here the conditions were even colder and we endured an agonisingly cold half hour wait for the train to Inverness where we spent a snowy afternoon browsing the shops before boarding the sleeper south.
