When I came back from Kintail, I emailed my editor suggesting we have lunch. I wanted to know what he thought about the book being about only the first section, hoping it might be viewed as more interesting than a traditional I-went-from-A-to-B-It-was-hard-but-I-overcame kind of thing. The history is certainly more fulsome and cohesive than what I’d managed to scrape together for many of the sections further north. But I got no reply, so I thought I’d write the book anyway, sending it off with only a few hours to spare for the September deadline not long after my return from Aviemore. And then I got on with other stuff.

On 8 December my editor emailed. I approached it cautiously – every writer craves the approval that is so spectacularly lacking when it’s just you and your laptop day in day out. It started out fine … ‘It reads well, although there are of course the usual things editors like to say about possible cuts and achieving, in places, a better balance between the walk and the history.’

Fair enough. I read on, a fierce heat taking hold. ‘But the main stumbling block is your unfortunate experience which caused you to finish prematurely. This is a problem from both an editorial and a sales/marketing point of view, I’m afraid to say. It is a big undertaking and would of course mean you’d need to rework the existing text too, but would you plan to complete the trail at some point next year? We don’t think the book is really viable without you covering the whole of the journey.’

I was shocked, but not entirely surprised. I emailed back. Yeah, of course I’ll do it.

I began my training again in a bleak January under skies dedicated to exploring every possible shade of grey. I couldn’t as yet face actually packing my bag so I opted for using flat weights. Being me, I went for 20 kg, on the basis that since it was going to hurt anyway, it might as well be a serious kickstart. I decided to walk round Loch Leven with its island castle that Mary, queen of Scots romantically escaped from. The grey is heavy, subduing colour and sound, but I make it round the 13 miles in a reasonable time feeling reasonably okay.

Five days later I went to bed with a pain in my right shoulder that crescendoed into something that demanded attention with agonising insistence. I stumbled into the spare bedroom, knowing I was unlikely to sleep, prodding pointlessly at my shoulder until I discovered a lump. No-one likes discovering lumps and the middle of the night only stimulates the imagination to ever gloomier thoughts.

Thankfully my friend Sheila, a practice nurse, was on-hand to dispense knowledge and reassurance. I was suffering from two separate afflications, a pain in my shoulder and a painless cyst, though the root cause – carrying a ridiculously heavy pack after a long hiatus – was probably the same. I wasn’t dying, then. But I realised it would be a while before I could put a pack back on.

Late winter and early spring continued cold and dispiritingly grey. It’s not as if there was even that much rain, but it felt as if there was. I aimed to go out once a week, but sometimes those weeks slipped by unwalked. Sometimes I felt strong. Mostly I felt I just wasn’t putting my back into it. But Nick and I sat down to coordinate our diaries, fixing on a start date of 14th April and a hiatus of a couple of days in Aberdeen to see Finn’s play before we would all, hoping against hope, head for the last two days before Cape Wrath.

I felt the months slip by with a growing sense of dread, the summer to be reached only through the black hole of April. It was partly the weather, which clung defiantly to winter churlishness. It was partly because, when Nick and I drove away from Kintail, I really had made my peace with the trail. And life was moving on, not least with the arrival of our grandson Arthur on 28 February 2026. This perfect scrap of humanity, still in a state of pure possibility, underlined the undeniable fact that my own past was now overwhelming greater than my future. I don’t believe for a single second that means I should give up on dreams and plans. But I don’t have time to waste. It’s good to persevere?, I tell myself sternly. To push aside excuses and just bloody do it.

And on the upside, too, as April arrives all too soon, our daughter Rose comes to stay all the way from New Zealand. So the plan is for the three of us to walk the first day together, though the weather continuing so damp, indeed snowy, we’ll avoid the path down the side of the Falls of Glomach. After a night camping, Nick and Rose will turn back and I’ll go on.

We drive to Shiel Bridge on Monday 13 April. My preparations have been painfully exact, as if I’d neither done this before nor believed them adequate. There had also been a bout of wall-to-wall socialising with friends eager to see Rose and to say goodbye that left both Nick and I exhausted, however pleasureable it had all been. I look at my bed, which I will not sleep in till it’s done, and promise myself a new tattoo if I slay the dragon.

There is sunshine on the drive up, which gives everything a cheerful look even if I’m not feeling it. I phone Finn as we cruise along Loch Laggan, putting off the moment when I end the call, letting him go, but it must be done. I switch off my phone. We start down the long, sweeping road through Glen Shiel, the tops of the mountains clear of cloud and full of snow. Weather fronts pass quickly by, menacing one minute, vibrant blue the next. Checking in at the campsite, we’re greeted by the same lady as last year. There’s obviously been a lot of rain.

Taking a walk to stretch our legs before dinner in the Shiel Bridge Hotel, Rose clutching her binoculars, we spot an osprey diving for fish, an otter slipping across the stoney foreshore, a golden eagle overhead. I joke that I should just leave my camera behind as clearly I’ve already exceeded my wildlife quota for the whole trip. We settle into our table. The bar is almost empty, a miserable contrast with the noisy camaraderie of Chrissie and I’s meal together.

I burst into tears (I’m beginning to think I only cry over Cape Wrath). ‘Do you think I can do it?’ I ask Nick and Rose, as if they know the answer. Rosie says she always cries when she goes out tramping in New Zealand by herself. She doesn’t know why. That does make me feel better. I wonder if it’s the disappointment of last year coming home to roost. I really don’t want to try again and then not be able to finish. But I’m also pretty sure that’s not the right attitude. You just need to go and see what happens without deadlines and expectations.

The truth is, I want to have done with it. But at least the waiting’s over.

Sleep does not come. I don’t really expect it to. I tell myself that kind of tiredness is not a problem when you’re outside. I tell myself that so I don’t wind myself up so tight I’m going to see in the dawn. I think I fall asleep around midnight, but Nick wakes up with a start. ‘I’m going to be so worried about you,’ he says. I suspect he’s not actually awake. But I am.

I toss and turn, wondering if I can somehow subliminally persuade him to ask me not to do it. I imagine having a semi-catastrophic accident between the tent and the toilet block. That kind of thinking usually happens several months before Departure Day. I don’t really understand why things are so different this year. Sure, I was nervous last time, but hugely excited too. If anything, I should be more sure of my capabilities now, not less.

I fall asleep as a few renegades of the dawn chorus embark on some warm-up exercises, waking up a few hours later with a hangover head. The rustling from the neighbouring sleeping bag suggests Nick’s awake too. I turn over and we snuggle together, almost nose-to-nose. I ask him if he thinks I should just call it a day before I’m even started. But he’s not daft. ‘Fi, it’s not for me to say whether you should do it or not. You know I’ll support you whatever you decide to do.’

Damn.

And finally, at 7.45 am on 14 April 2026, it dawns on me. I don’t have to do it.

I call out to Rosie in the next-door tent. ‘Can you come in here a minute.’ And I say it out loud. She hugs me. Nick grins from ear to ear. It’s over.

We have a perfectly lovely day walking up towards the Falls of Glomach in eye-splitting sunshine. I feel a bit wobbly, the tiredness making everything seem just a little bit surreal. But if I feel silly for having put everyone through this song and dance yet again, I have no doubts it’s the right decision. We have a picnic down by Loch Duich, watching golden eagles. I feel the simple pleasure of it, with nothing to worry about.

I phone Finn as we ease our way home. This time he’s just delighted. And when I tell my closest friends, they say they knew deep down it wasn’t right, that I hadn’t been quite myself for months. Given that I pride myself on a reasonable degree of self-awareness, I’m not a little embarrassed that I didn’t realise myself until it was down to the wire. I was doing it because I thought I had to, that it was my job to keep going and get the book finished. And the minute I thought that, I’d destroyed all the good reasons for getting back on the trail, everything that had sustained me over five years of planning and training and those precious four days from Fort William to Shiel Bridge.

And then we hear on the car radio that the body of a thirty-five year old man has been found somewhere up towards the Saddle bealach, the last bit I managed to do. He was an ultra-marathon champion trying to beat the record for completing the trail in the shortest time and raise money for Mountain Rescue. He was also hugely experienced, but that didn’t stop one newspaper from banging a familiar drum, warning tourists ‘over attempting to tackle Scottish Highlands’ “most dangerous” trail,’[1] as if every bus, car, train and campervan was disgorging wildly unprepared Cape Wrathers. That journalist obviously hasn’t read the guidebook, which makes the challenges – no waymarkers, days out of reach of civilisation, the propensity of rivers to rise quickly and dramatically, to name but a few – abundantly clear. In fact, very few people have died en route, though some have gone temporarily missing. But I’m hugely sorry for the death of this young man, so full of life. And yet I would not deny him the right to follow his dream.

I quickly email my editor to say I’m not doing it and he agrees that, if my heart isn’t in it, there’s no book as things stand. But that’s an awful lot of words going to waste on my laptop, so I decide to blog about it instead. While I’ve been writing it, Sarah has returned to Scotland (she only had time last year to get half-way), braving minus temperatures (in May!) and waterlogged ground to finish it. She confesses there were moments when she wanted to give up, but being Sarah she did not. And even if she had, she’d just have come back again until it was done. I’m overjoyed for her and pleased that I’m only a tiny bit jealous.

In the moments in Plockton immediately after I knew I couldn’t go on, it crossed my mind that the reasons why the Cape Wrath Trail had attracted me in the first place – thoughts about my age, ‘seize the day while you still can,’ about challenging myself as an antidote to my lovely, easy life – may not be the whole story. I wondered if there was something more deeply buried, more needy, more pathetically rooted in the feelings of inadequacy and helplessness of my childhood and adolescence might not be driving this passion for an end goal that would set me apart as one of a comparatively small band of heroic hikers.

I would not only have completed 230+ miles through epic wilderness, but I would have mostly done it alone. How amazing would it feel to look in the mirror, knowing I’d done that? How astonished and amazed would friends and acquaintances be when they heard. But if the only point is to get there, so as to be able to say I did, then my reasons speak of insecurity not strength, a pyrrhic victory given to me by others. And if that final moment at the Cape Wrath lighthouse is all that matters, can it ever be enough? Why should that moment be worth more than any other on the way?

For my 30th birthday, my brother gave me a card that I thought was both incredibly insightful (he’s my baby brother, so I had low expectations I’ve since entirely got rid of) and nothing whatsoever to do with me. It depicts a hiker, unshaven and wearing a t-shirt with a yin-yang symbol on it, reaching a narrow ledge. There he’s faced with his doppel-ganger, bespectacled, clean-shaven, suited and carrying a briefcase, umbrella and folded newspaper. The caption read: ‘Stanley was deeply disappointed when, high in the Tibetan mountains, he finally found his true self.’

I did imagine the Trail would weave something of a transformation over me, mould me finally into the real me. In my heart of hearts, I carry a fair amount of dissatisfaction with myself, that I’m not achieving enough, that I’m not doing enough, that life is slipping away. That may be an entirely normal reaction to reaching 60, I don’t know. It’s certainly incredibly self-centred.

And, to be fair, there’s much about this journey that speaks of failure and disappointment. Many of its historical protagonists tasted heavy defeat, one that dug deep into their lives and their way of life. The prince handled it very badly, becoming an alcoholic. I don’t know about Glenaladale, but he seems to have had a sensible head on his shoulders, so I’m optimistic. Archibald McDonell of Barrisdale did well in material terms, considering he nearly lost his head, though the description of him in later life suggests a man at odds with the world. But their journeys didn’t end at Culloden, any more than mine did at Kintail. To lapse into cliche for a moment, it’s not defeat that defines you, but what you do with it.

I know now that my friends really wouldn’t have thought any more of me if I’d got to the lighthouse at Cape Wrath, just as they didn’t think any less of me for not. If anything, they thought more of me for finally realising I no longer wanted to do it and letting go. When I came home, I felt so tightly held in the love of my friends and family I doubt I’d have felt much better if I’d made it all the way. So perhaps, in letting go of the trail, I am also letting go of any need to be something other than what I am.

But now, over a year later, as I’m about to bid farewell to all things Cape Wrath, how do I feel? I would confess I write this feeling a little at sea, anxious even. And I realise that planning to do the trail, training for it and finally stepping foot on it had given me purpose over these last six years, kept me more fit than otherwise, and stopped me thinking about what I was going to do next. It was, I suspect, an attempt to keep mortality at bay. But it won’t do.

In Knoydart, I found my rhythm, began to enjoy feeling strong, sent the negative voices packing, for the time being at least. And that, when I caught my first glimpse of Barrisdale and Loch Hourn from high up on the bealach, was what I meant by having done it.

And there’s nothing stopping me feeling like that again.

And finally, I just wanted to thank you for coming on this journey with me.

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[1] https://www.dailymail.com/travel/article-15738481/Tourists-warned-Scottish-Highlands-dangerous-trail.html

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