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. 

Just Esk and we'll follow

All three of us are venturing out again on the Coast to Coast meets Walking with Uncles odyssey and it's the penultimate day of our 17. As we pass the Church of the English Martyrs, Paddy remarks, 'I'm now beginning to regard myself as one of them.' Of course, he's not, he's doing really well, particularly with the muesli and fresh fruit regime I've got him on every morning. Just look at the muscles coming on in those legs.

Our route today follows the Esk and it's a lush and leafy contrast to the moorland of the past few days. We follow a centuries-old 'paved pannier' trail, created specifically for packhorses and their muleteers. The stones are worn down with hundreds of years of tramping.

It brings us out at Egton Bridge, the village the Reformation missed, and the birthplace of the Blessed Nicholas Postgate. He was a 17th century Catholic priest who carried on Masses and religious rites in secret, on the moors, and who was eventually betrayed and executed, aged 82. There are relics in the church here and this wonderful window, too.

The route takes in lots of points of social and historical interest, from an old Toll House by the Esk, to this donkey sanctuary with a donation box on the gate. 'If my friend Hilary were here she'd put a fiver in that box,' I say.

In Grosmont we find steam trains, a toytown-style station and trainspotters galore. We have a momentary lapse in the world of simple sedentary pleasures at the Old School cafe – lemon drizzle cake, lattes and views of the North York Moors Railway's steam trains chugging by.

It's just as well, for the next leg is the Coast to Coast's 'ultimate' hill (yesterday we had its penultimate), and it's a tough trek up an endless 33 degree tarmac road. I pass the time by checking emails on my phone.

Then it's over the final moor for me and the Bog Cotton Boys, along a busy road with views of Whitby Abbey (just above the car in the picture below) and we arrive in Littlebeck, typical of the villages in the valleys here. 

But no pub, sadly, so we say cheerio to Hauke and head back to Whitby. I think it'll be an Italian tonight. We need plenty of ballast for the final day.  

Stoned with Betty and Ralph

Uncles and niece all together again today – Mick having rested his wounded limbs – and here we are leaving our hostel (no, really).

We start off at the Lion Inn this morning and we're back to our gang of four, as Hauke appears out of the pub enthusing over the fabulous food he'd eaten there the night before and the 15th century bedrooms. We're feeling none too chipper after our evening of sloppy hostel cooking and a night of seven-in-a-room sleeping. 

This route is waymarked by stone crosses that may date back as far as the 11th century when Christianity first became widespread. They all have names. This one's called Fat Betty and you're supposed to leave a sweet, and take one. Nothing on offer looks particularly appetising and all I have is a Malteser, but I leave it anyway.

This is one of the rare ones that still has a cross on top. It's called Ralph.

We arrive at an isolated hut, Trough House it's called on the map, with a stone bench on one side and guess what time it is… 11am. So coffee and biscuits are taken to the sound of hammering inside. Closer investigation reveals a couple zhushing up the interior with ceiling drapes, so that the Scarborough landowner's grouse shooting guests don't have to look at anything so uncouth as a bare barn roof. We should have known from the preponderance of grouse butts. 'Could be worse places to be,' says the man on the job. 'Looking out on t'moor on a sunny day.'

It's six miles to the end of this section along the old Whitby Road that runs along the top of the Rigg (ridge) above Glaisdale and Fryup valleys (yes, I kid you not, though the name probably has more to do with friars than a full English).
'You know, if you'd said a few weeks ago that I had to walk another six miles, it would have seemed impossible,' declares Paddy. 'Now I think, is that all?'
As Mick and I are succumbing to aches and pains (my bunions are giving my gyp and I can't walk without a pad, or a knee bandage) Paddy is getting stronger and fitter. We've told him that when he gets home he has a window of opportunity to continue the good work – 'more of a yawning abyss,' he said the other day, but now it actually looks achievable. On the bright side for me, my farmer's tan is coming along nicely.

Back in Whitby we descend from the Abbey's lofty heights to the town centre and manage to find refuge from the teeming masses in a brilliant little Costa Rican restaurant. After a quick glance over the wall at floodlit Whitby Abbey on the way back...
...we're all tucked up by 9.30pm, as per usual. Don't know how I'm going to cope with re-entry.