In Search Of Silence

T was a dour, grey day, and my legs burned as I trudged up the interminable footpath that runs from Achlean in Glen Feshie up to the sprawling plateau that's known as the Moine Mhor, or the Great Moss.

- Cameron McNeish

In his book, Highways And Byways In The Central Highlands, author Seton Gordon refers to this route as the Foxhunter's Path, but that name is rarely used nowadays. Signposts in Glen Feshie point the way of the path to Carn Ban Mor, a Munro until it was demoted sometime back in the 70s.

That didn't come as a surprise at the time. The summit's barely perceptible rise creates a mere bump in the realm of ice-polished granite lumps, glittering sheets of water, twinkling burns, moss-grown boulders, screes and swards of grass that form the extensive Am Moine Mhor.

The actual rump of the Moine Mhor is a couple of kilometres south of Carn Ban Mor, a place that offers a lonely solitude, green rather than grey, tending to the gentler end of harsh, a soft pearl in a crown of hard diamonds. Its billowing acres flow south from the Sgurans and the head of Loch Einich and over Mullach Clach a' Bhlair to upper Glen Feshie.

Bounded on the east by the huge swells of Monadh Mor and Cnapan Mor, its peat-hag-ridden heartland is gnawed deep by the River Eidart, a tumultuous watercourse fed by some of the highest streams in the country.

As I approached the cairn on Carn Ban Mor, I considered continuing north to the Munro of Sgor Gaoith, whose summit sits on the very edge of steep rocky slopes that fall away into the cliff-girt trench that holds Loch Einich, but I resisted the temptation. I hadn't been on the high hills for a few months and “hill fitness” was something that I had well and truly lost, but despite my heavy breathing and tight calf muscles, I bubbled with an exhilaration I had almost forgotten. Munro-bagging wasn’t the name of the hill-game today - I was in search of something else.