Walking back to happiness

It doesn't get more isolated - or beautiful - than western Scotland's Knoydart peninsula, accessible only by boat or a 24km hike on rugged terrain. Euan Ferguson is exhausted but exhilarated on a walking holiday among its dramatic peaks

The term 'wilderness holiday' can cover a fat parcel of differences. It's all relative, isn't it?

For one of those keen-if-dubious older scouting types who likes to bake bread in rabbit-holes and clean their teeth with ash twigs, it would mean being left naked up a tree, forever, with endless bat guano sandwiches.

For the likes of, say, those men who make an inexplicable living writing about expensive watches, it would be having to slum it by plumping up your own pillow on the plane.

You take what you're used to and ratchet yourself into a world of significant enough difference to feel that you have, for a few days, led a different life.

For me, the perfect few days' difference came in Knoydart, the wild, sprawling, forgotten peninsula that forms the mainland gazed at by the Inner Hebrides off the north-west coast of Scotland, and a trip that left me frozen, soaked, exhausted and exhilarated.

It hit me, as it always does on the hills (yet I always forget, like childbirth), that it really is all about relativity.

The bed may not be the fanciest I've stayed in - a small bunk in a tiny wooden room. The sandwiches were, after 600m of climbing, crushed and soggy. The coffee, back in the bunkhouse, was instant. But, for those few days, because I had done the work, hauled up those sandwiches myself, earned the right to that sunset coffee, deservedly slid into a comfy single bed, I can safely say it was the best food, best coffee, best sleep I could remember.

That's what a wilderness holiday is. Plus you get to see a wilderness.

And what a one this is. The so-called 'rough bounds' of Knoydart, often described as Britain's last wilderness, can be accessed only by boat, or a very rough 24km trek from the east; there are no roads in through the hills.

It's a grand, high, wild, difficult place, with splendid but rarely taken walks in the interior and, as importantly, it is lean-across-and-touch close to the torn, crazed, lovely Inner Hebrides: Canna, Skye, Rum, Eigg and Muck.

So we come in by boat, having taken the train to Mallaig - one of those thrilling train journeys you forget can exist, the West Highland Line from Glasgow's Queen Street station.

Passengers begin to smile at each other as the grandiloquent scenery swells open on either side. The guard works out who the smokers are and tells us at which stops we'll get six minutes outside; all very human and forgotten 1950s Britain, and you also get to go over the Harry Potter viaduct at Glenfinnan. Then the little boat from Mallaig to Doune, a tiny not-even-hamlet, a couple of nicely done bunkhouses and a big kitchen, sitting inside an impossibly romantic inlet.

Doune is run by Wilderness Scotland, which specialises in this kind of trip. It lets you know what kind of walking you're going to get - this trip was termed 'moderate' - and gives you a dedicated guide for the week, in this case the splendid Lorraine, who, it turns out, has done every Munro. In a row. In one go, walking from one to the next, sleeping in the hills, friends leaving food at prearranged points. It took four months. Twenty-six hundred kilometres. The equivalent of climbing Everest 30 times. She has been in the papers and everything. I feel rather safe in her hands.

And, it's a good organisation, comfortable in its own skin, safe without being preachy; and the surroundings are satisfying, warm, everything we need, cosy rooms with their two towels, hot showers, fat sofas, kettles starting to whistle, as those in our eight-strong group begin to get to know each other.

And the food, in the evening, is good and plentiful. Very, very fresh. I compliment the tiny bustling chef on the crab, and she beams. 'I'm so glad.Caught it myself just this morning.' By lights out (because of the generator) at 11, we know each other pretty well. Splendid bunch. Some retired, some still busy, some who know these hills; we all vie in self-deprecating fashion to say who's going to be the slowest.

A sweet, sweet sleep by the sea, a good hot breakfast, and the walking begins.

Plans are fluid, depending on the weather on the hills and the state of the water, and on this first day we get to go, gloriously, to Eigg. A half-hour or so's boat ride and then we're there. It's hot.

I know this is Scotland, but it's hot. But there's a breeze, and I soon stop panting, or at least pant in a semblance of rhythm, and we find our walking legs, and move up towards the dark, looming, sheer, magnificently scary An Sgurr. It's only 393m high, good for our first day, but the fall, on those three sheer sides from the top, is pretty much every one of those 393.

And, do you know how it got there? Pay attention, because this is interesting. Quite a long, long time ago, children, after the lava-flow from the volcanoes of Rum had created Eigg, before the sea came in to separate the pair, a huge glacier cut through Eigg's lava residue, which was basalt. Way later, it melted.

Six or seven million years passed, then there were more explosions, and new, tougher, lava, mainly pitchstone, filled the water-bed. As the years - rather a lot of them - passed, the softer basalt eroded but the pitchstone stayed; hence this massive astonishing lump. It's a dried-up riverbed. Americans call that a monadnock, which I quite like.

See, it is interesting. I thought so, at least, wheezing my way up the sides.

Today, I am told, it is 58 million years old. Happy birthday, I mutter, feeling marginally older. I find it all even more interesting, terrifyingly so, an hour later, accidentally leading the pack, admiring the reassuringly hard-hewn old Ordnance Survey trig-point I've just passed, turning as I walk to bore someone behind me about how trigonometry works, you see it's clever but simple, by aiming theodolites at these points, which are of course at the very tops of the mountains, surveyors can...

Whoah! I sit down. Fast.

I have remembered what the top of this thing looked like, from below. I have just breezed past the trig-point. Which is, of course, at the very, very top.

I am, moronically, so pleased at getting up, and getting my second wind on the first day, that I have been two feet from walking over the edge. People laugh, in kindly fashion, and stop for lunch, but I have actually started shaking. A panic attack, and even if I am mainly panicking at my own stupidity, it doesn't make breathing any easier.

But the thing about being out here is that 90 minutes later, down on lowland and sitting by the ruins of a croft, sharing water-bottles, heart back to normal, gazing out at Muck, I feel magnificent.

Later, gazing back up at the prow of An Sgurr, I ask whether people often fall off it, in the gloating tones of someone who almost did but is now sitting safe and sun-blasted outside a splendid little tearoom by the harbour at Galmisdale.

Our boatman nods in the slow understated fashion. 'Old guy. Last year. Standing right on the edge. Heart attack.'

Well goodness, but just how unlucky a place can you pick to have a heart attack? Or lucky? What a way to... I muse, unsteadily, on death, and ways to go, and move swiftly to thinking instead on the walks ahead.

A short time later, too, too nastily soon, I found myself nearly welling up in self-anger at how unforgivably blase I'd been about it all. I missed the sunsets. I missed the cold, and the aching knees. I missed the panic attack, or at least the views it was obscuring. I missed the wilderness. I almost missed the midges. Almost. No point in going over the top.

Editor's note: Euan Ferguson travelled with Wilderness Scotland; (www.wildernessscotland.com), which runs wilderness walking and other adventure holidays across Scotland, with a wide range of trips to the Knoydart peninsula. A seven-night walking trip on Knoydart, using boats to access hiking routes, costs around BD436.