Nature boy

A quick stopover in Dunbar with an old family friend Su, reminds me of my expedition to Yosemite last year. Dunbar is where the founder of Yosemite National Park, John Muir, was born. That was in 1838, when Dunbar was a bustling fishing port, though his father had moved the family there for a job in forces recruitment.

Dunbar's old harbour

Sign of a fishing community

John Muir was worked hard as a boy, and whipped hard, too, because that’s the way they got the three Rs into them in those days. Nor was there much respite when he got home. His father was devoutly religious and a severe disciplinarian. But rather than be cowed, John and his brother used to escape, to footer about in the fields and potter among the rock pools, and to the cliffs, ‘to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins of the old Dunbar Castle, when the sea and the sky, the waves and the cloud, were mingled together as one.’

The ruins of Dunbar Castle

First stop today as we leave Su’s flat in a handsome Edwardian building close to the seafront, is a sculpture of Muir by Valentin Znoba, showing him in full St Francis of Assisi mode. I’ve been looking at Su’s ceramics in her cellar workshop and her work seems far more in tune with nature and the environment to me.

Znoba's statue of John Muir

Su on the high street

The Muirs’ old house has been converted into a museum, which is where I lose myself for the next hour. I learned the story of America’s John Muir when I went to a one-man play in the Yosemite Valley last year. But this filled in the gaps and gave a sense of what had shaped this extraordinary man, one of the world's first ‘eco-warriors’.

Papa Muir and the family left Dunbar for a farm in Wisconsin when John was 11, ostensibly in pursuit of the religious freedom that America offered. There was backbreaking farm work in store for the young lad, but at least he was close to nature. Later, he was to travel the world in search of new wildernesses – he even once revisited Dunbar – but it was in the Sierra Nevada that he found his paradise on earth, Yosemite, which is why he fought so hard to protect it, so that it could be shared by all. ‘Climb the mountains and get their good tidings,’ he said. ‘Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.’

Muir was way ahead of Darwin in believing everything in nature is linked, though his theories had a firm Christian basis. ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.’ Unlike Darwin, Muir believed it was God’s Universe. A lovely line, mind.
Later, I head out to the craggy headlands to the north of town. There are no awful storms today so the craggy headlands have a warm rosy glow.

The red cliffs of Dunbar

Looking north

This part of the coastline is where the John Muir Way begins and this April, to mark 100 years since his death, it is being revamped and extended to become the new John Muir Link will be opened - by Alex Salmond no less. It’s a 134-mile walk from Dunbar to Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland (not far from where the Muirs set sail for America). As I turn inland, the rising moon over a serene sea gives me an idea for another walk…

Moonrise over Dunbar

Babes in the hoods

When I was growing up in Aviemore, the snowsports focus was very much on Cairngorm. Even after we moved to Edinburgh, our parents rented a farmhouse in the Spey Valley, Croftcarnoch, so that we'd have a base for holidays and skiing weekends. Then, later, when my Aunt Marjorie was one of Aviemore's GPs, her rambling house adjacent to the surgery became our second home, her garage crammed with our family's skis, sticks and boots.

Cairngorm is a big mountain in terms of Scottish skiing and on a good day it stirs my soul like nowhere in the Alps or Rockies could ever do. But here I am, up from London for a winter mini-break, and it's been more or less shut for the past four days.

I've done a walk or two with my brother Sean, hiked up part of the Speyside Way with Lara, my sister-in-law, and soaked my cares away in the hot tub on their deck overlooking the river Nethy. But it's winter, and I fancy a ski.

So today I set off with Lara and a truckload of 11-year-olds, including my nephew Calum, for a qualifying round of the Scottish Schools Championships, being held at The Lecht.

Team Abernethy Primary

The Lecht is a ski hill made up of a handful of runs on either side of one of the UK's highest roads, the A939 between Tomintoul and Cockbridge in the eastern Cairngorms.

Up until 1977, keen skiers used a tractor tow and there was only room for a few cars in the lay-by next to the cattle grid. These days the place can accommodate more than 10,000 skiers per hour. What's more, it's often open when Cairngorm is shut, and it's less than an hour away.

Today's weather isn't promising, overcast with gusting winds and only a couple of pomas running. My sister Moira arrives with her primary school posse (including my niece Sula) from Banchory, over the other side of the Cairngorms.

Team Banchory's star racer Sula with coach, Mum

Everyone is buffed up, and by that I mean wearing full face protection in the shape of stretchy tubes pulled right up over the face and nose. Surely it's Scottish skiers alone who keep this industry alive.

But by the time the race starts, with tots as young as six and seven snowploughing their way down the course (there is a novice team category), the cloud has lifted and the sun is shining brightly. Next thing you know I'm squinting into the glare and wondering if I've put sun block on.

When the clouds lifted...

Skiing in Scotland. Yes, really!

The race gets underway, but there's a lot of hanging around. Calum and his pals put a chairlift that isn't running to good use. The organisers seem to have chosen a wind tunnel to locate the start-gate and kids are star-jumping and windmilling their arms to keep warm.

Waiting their turn

The race start

Calum pushes off

All our kids make it down safely and after a quick lunch – outdoors no less – it's back up to the start for the second run.

The wind has really picked up and as it whips over the brow of the mountain it picks up surface snow crystals and blasts our faces. The kids enjoy the spooky effect of the windswept snow.

Play time

Calum steps out

Calum and Angus buff up

With the race over, there's some free skiing time and we head over to the sunny side of the road and, guided by a local, find some fabulous fresh powder beyond the furthest lift.

Skiing eastwards

Finally there's the prize giving, something I haven't experienced since racing as a teenager. And nothing has changed. I have medals galore in my loft and I was one of the least promising racers. Calum comes away with the best medal haul, as it turns out he has beaten everyone in the race, including all the secondary school kids. Both his and Sula's school are through to the finals, so it's a great result all round.

Team Abernethy on top form

The moon rises as we leave

The reindeer man

Utsi’s hut is hidden away in the Glenmore forest and in all the years I’ve lived up here and been coming here on holiday, I had never seen it until Christmas Day, when it was the destination of our morning walk. 

Mikel Utsi was a Norwegian Sami deer herder who moved to Scotland in the 1950s. He successfully introduced reindeer to Glenmore, where he had settled, and when he had imported his third consignment of the beasts, in 1956, he built the hut using wood from the crates used to transport the deer. It took a while to reach the reindeer enclosure so Utsi needed a place to stay. Inside was a small bed and a table and stools handcrafted by Utsi himself.

Arriving in the clearing

The hut on Christmas Day

Me and Calum at the Utsi hut Christmas picnic

Mr Utsi has come a long way. Just before Christmas, alerted by my cousin Liz, we found his herd, descendents of the original reindeer, had made it onto the front page of the New York Times.

Cairngorm reindeer in the New York Times

I remember Mr Utsi. He lived with his wife in a rather unprepossessing bungalow in Glenmore. His house was at the start of the road leading up to Glenmore Lodge, where we lived. To a shy girl like me he seemed mysterious and a little intimidating. He didn’t talk much, nor did we really have much to do with him (possibly because he was off in his hut for much of the time). But once a year at Halloween, we had to brace ourselves and ring his doorbell. We’d be invited into the living room to recite our ditties. Mr and Mrs Utsi would sit with their arms folded, listening, before fetching us the oddest assortment of ‘goodies’. It was not the highlight of our guising trail.

Now I realise he was probably as warm and hospitable as any of our neighbours – just Scandinavian.

I was so taken with the trail to the hut on Christmas Day that I returned a week later with my cousin Christopher Langmuir and his family, all over from Seville, Spain. To our tuna mayo sandwiches they brought homemade tortilla. The weather was a little calmer than on Christmas Day so we began and ended the walk on the shores of Loch Morlich. I think they enjoyed it. At any rate, despite soggy footwear the kids joined in a lively snowball fight and we brought them home for warming soup. I'm just delighted to have discovered another hidden gem.

Loch Morlich

Gathered Langmuirs

Our Spanish branch's tortilla feast

Rory and Sula look out from Utsi's hut

Sunset over Loch Morlich

Estate of mind

All across the Highlands you’ll come across country estates with, typically, a big stately home, a steading (old stable block), scattered cottages and grounds that can stretch for miles – somewhere to pursue all that hunting, shooting and fishing with which the Anglo-Scots landed gentry maintained their standing in days gone by. Some families have sold up, no longer able to make the rambling acres pay. Some have persevered, with a finger in every available pie in an effort to preserve the estate for future generations. My old school, for example, is now a popular restaurant with an adjacent shop selling produce from the Rothiemurchus estate (in the room where I once sat in primary one with our teacher Miss MacPherson) .

There are estates that have become destinations in their own right. Just outside Grantown-on-Spey is the Revack estate, where trails wind around a small hill with views across to the Cairngorm mountains. After a walk you can warm up with homemade soup in the cafe and shop for pricey Highland goods in the shop.

Revack trail

Walking on Revack Estate

A particular favourite of mine is Logie Steading, on the Findhorn river about 20 miles north of Grantown and a great place to meet Elgin cousins, or a stop-off en route to the Moray coast. The estate comprises a house and grounds – including a walled vegetable garden – and dates back to the 18th century, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that a new generation of the family took over and began to rationalise and modernise.

For the tourist, there are scenic walks along the steep gorges of the river to a historic beauty spot, Randolph’s Leap, and the Steading itself, a conversion that houses a heritage centre and cafe, various shops and one of the best secondhand booksellers this side of Edinburgh. The area is well-served for distilleries, too, so it’s a useful spot to walk, or shop, off a whisky tasting…

The Logie laird’s house

A Logie Redwood

Money plants in the walled garden

Northern light

Christmas and Hogmanay in the Spey Valley usually involves a cocktail of family and friends shaken up with an ever-changing mix of snow, rain and gale-force winds. This year has been no different and our traditional Christmas day walk was taken through driving rain with a rather exposed picnic of smoked salmon and oatcakes washed down with bubbly chilled naturally in the breeze.

When the rain begins to get us down there is the option of heading up to the Moray Coast, where the sun always seems to shine. And one of the most fabulous places to stroll is the beach at Lossiemouth, the ‘jewel of the Moray Firth’. Once a bustling fishing port, Lossie’s West beach is about four miles long, backed by sand dunes that were originally created by using old railway carriages to protect the town from heavy seas. I have an uncle in nearby Elgin and a clutch of cousins living round about. So it was with Uncle Robin and cousins Susan and Penny – with kids Lara and Louie and their Scotty dog – that I took in the Lossie sands last Sunday, and the light fantastic…

Setting out from Lossiemouth

Sunshine on our shoulders

Showing my uncle a selfie

Cousins and dog

The lighting Gods at work

The big breakfast

With the Coast to Coast behind us, we promised ourselves a full English on the morning of departure. It's been almost three weeks of muesli and fresh fruit first thing. As we're not walking we can indulge, though with these two pesky early risers, I don't get a lie in. I'll have to wait until I get home for that little beauty.
I pitch up to breakfast sporting the t-shirt we all wore at Uncle Mick's 70th birthday party. He's completely taken aback and chuffed to bits.

After our slap-up feast it's time to say goodbye. Uncles Paddy and Mick are returning to London via their cousin Molly in Manchester and I'll mooch around Whitby for a while before heading home. So there they go, the Bog Cotton Boys, off on another safari.

It feels a bit like waving off my two new Dads. We've been thrown together so intimately these past few weeks. I feel so glad that I had the time to spare, not to mention the good sense to say 'yes' to the adventure. 
Of course, none of it would have happened without Mick's singular approach to organisation, booking hostels before Paddy and I had given the itinerary so much as a cursory glance. Mick's an asset in any hostel, too, hale and hearty at all times, even 6am.
Paddy's pronouncements on 'that bloody Wainwright' have kept us laughing – not to mention the pantomime that ensues when he grapples with his gear – but all he needs to help him forget the pain is a meaty conversation about abbeys. Fortunately the Coast to Coast turned out to be peppered with monastic gems.
And like the good younger brothers they are, they proved to be terribly tolerant of me, whether I was being a bossy boots or a crack-of-dawn curmudgeon. 
Dear Uncles, I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

The end is nigh

So here we are on the final day of our Coast to Coast walking adventure. Two uncles, one niece and a 192-mile challenge we have trekked over, driven back and forth along and negotiated every curve ball it has thrown at us. There's a giddy atmosphere in the car this morning and the uncles are singing and laughing their way through Jimmy Durante musical comedy routines from their childhood.  I love it.

Of course the last few days would not have been the same without the company of our German-Irish new best friend, Hauke, and we all feel it would be fitting to start and finish this last day together. Hauke tells us about the chatty little nine-year-old boy in his B&B and how his parents don't want him to go to Ireland and kiss the Blarney Stone in case it makes him even more chatty.  Pad says, 'And when did you kiss the Blarney Stone, Hauke?'

The day begins in Littlebeck Woods. They're like a stage set for A Midsummer Night's Dream with dappled sunlight filtering through the trees, waterfalls and this hollowed out rock called The Hermitage. We all sit inside and sing Swing Low Sweet Chariot. 

We bring forward our elevenses to 10.30am as we arrive at the most scenic little cafe, Midge Hall, set by a waterfall, Falling Foss. The owners rescued the place a few years ago and it's now a must-do on the trail (though several Coast to Coasters have already passed by and not stopped in – how could they?).



The path opens out onto our last stretch of moorland and we're pinned to it by the fierce sun. It's a huge relief when a cloud passes over and we can whip off our hats to cool down. The promised bog is as dry as a bone.
There's the sea and Whitby Abbey in the distance (somewhere near Pad and Mick's fingers).

We're quite weary now and it's strange to think that tomorrow we won't be walking. We're all clearly thinking differently about the experience, however.

Hauke says, 'I don't want it to end.' 

Paddy says, 'I just want it to end.'

We stop for lunch in the Hare & Hounds in Hawsker, the final village before the clifftop walk round to Robin Hood's Bay. Paddy's toenails have been bugging him so he borrows Hauke's pocket knife and clips them.

I do my classic leg reviver.

We walk on through a holiday trailer park that would normally look like a prison camp but in the bright sunshine looks colourful and fun.

It's a three-mile stretch along the cliff...

...but it feels like an age before Robin Hood's Bay finally reveals itself. Here's the Robin Hood's Bay boys.

We walk down the steep road to the shore. 'I'm glad I cut my toenails,' says Pad.
There's a throng of day trippers in flip-flops and the odd tired and emotional type in walking boots around the sea front. We throw off our boots, dig out our pebbles from the Irish Sea and cast them into the North Sea.

Then someone gets the beers in at the Wainwright Bar of the Bay Hotel and we pose under The End plaque.

Once we've showered we drive back for a last supper with Hauke at the Bay Hotel. He's heard there's a folk club on tonight and has brought his tin whistle. We go along after dinner but after our 12-mile day in the hot sun I think we're just too exhausted to enter into the spirit. Plus there's one last hill to climb – up the steep road to the car park.