On this great walk, my accommodation follows me along

On a path beside Scotland’s Caledonian Canal, I’ve just been overtaken by my accommodation. I’m hiking north from Fort William along the course of the Great Glen Way as the Fingal of Caledonia – a century-old converted coal barge – cruises slowly past. Aboard is my bed, most of my luggage and a chef preparing the night’s dinner of pan-roasted duck breast. Together, we advance through the Great Glen, on foot and afloat.

The 125-kilometre Great Glen Way (GGW) is Scotland’s version of a coast-to-coast walk, following a string of lochs and the 19th century canal built to connect them. One of Scotland’s 29 official Great Trails, it’s a lowland route through the Highlands, and one on which hikers routinely cover a footsore 20 to 30 kilometres a day along its lochside trails and canal towpaths. But not us.

Barges and cruise boats on the Caledonian Canal.

On this boots and barge trip, we’ll hike the GGWs best sections, coupled with a selection of side trails to waterfalls, woodlands and onto Scottish estates. We’ll walk beside Loch Ness and across the toes of craggy Ben Nevis, the UK’s highest mountain, but this is a trip that’s as much a river cruise as a hike.

It begins at the head of Neptune’s Staircase, the longest staircase lock on a British canal, where the 39-metre-long Fingal of Caledonia is moored in wait. Fort William sprawls just behind us and a canal towpath points north, creating the GGW’s flattest and gentlest section. With our bags and much of our life for the next week ensconced in the six small cabins that line the barge, we set out walking through midsummer rain.

“We’ve already had summer this year in the Highlands,” jokes guide Chris. “It was April 27.”

Set deep into the mountains, the Great Glen was just another loch-dotted valley until the early 19th century when the Caledonian Canal was dug to connect its three lochs – Loch Ness, Loch Oich and the lyrically named Loch Lochy – to the North and Irish seas.

It was designed as a safe shortcut for shipping, doing away with the need to sail around Scotland’s treacherous north-west coast, but by the time the canal was completed in 1822, after almost 20 years of construction, it was virtually redundant. Sailing ships had been usurped by steam ships too large to use the canal. Today, the canal is used only by pleasure craft and fishing boats.

At Laggan Locks, at the head of Loch Lochy, the Caledonian Canal performs its greatest trick.

As we hike along the towpath, the canal flows beneath our feet and Ben Nevis rises above our heads. For the next week, this 100-kilometre waterway will be a story told on foot. An engineering marvel of its time, it was pieced together with 28 locks that were the largest in the world until the construction of the Panama Canal a century later.

At Gairlochy, the first lock north of Neptune’s Staircase, we rendezvous with the barge after two hours of walking. With the locks along the canal closing each evening, halting all boat traffic, we moor below the gates in motionless wait for morning. The shores of Loch Lochy are just beyond, and the only sounds to reach us are from within – the movement of our six passengers and three crew, and the welcome clatter of Mike, the Fingal’s chef, at work in the open galley.

A pattern soon settles over the days, with walks each morning and afternoon, returning to the Fingal for lunches of soup and barge-baked bread and baguettes. As the barge squeezes into Gairlochy’s locks after breakfast the next morning, its 180 tonnes rising on an elevator of water, we continue hiking along the GGW. Along the southern shores of Loch Lochy, the Way is at its most beautiful, framed by mountains and winding through forest so green even the light seems tinged with colour. It was on these shores that Allied troops trained for the D-Day landings in 1945, and here that Achnacarry, the ancestral estate of the Clan Cameron chiefs, sprawls across an isthmus between Loch Lochy and Loch Arkaig.

The GGW marches blindly past Achnacarry, but we turn up a hidden path beside a village church to enter the estate. Looking over green fields and sheep to its Scottish Baronial castle, it’s like we’ve stepped into every British period drama ever filmed.

Sunrise over Achnacarry and Loch Lochy near Fort William.Credit: iStock

Alongside the castle there’s a clan museum, but we’re bound for the Dark Mile at the estate’s far end. Though it sounds like something from a Stephen King novel, the Dark Mile looks more like something from a fairy tale – a mile-long country lane where the drystone walls and the roadside trees and earth are inches thick in moss. Through this cushioned landscape we return to the loch, where the barge’s tender awaits us, one of our longest walking days done after just 11 kilometres.

The presence of the barge allows us this kind of ease that’s uncommon on long-distance trails. Along the canal, we simply step off the barge directly onto the paths. On the lochs, the tender ferries us to and from the shores.

Walking along the foot of Ben Nevis, Britain’s highest peak.Credit: iStock

Once aboard, one half of the barge is a communal space of couches, an honesty bar of local whiskies and craft beers, an extensive library and a large dining table for meals – from ox-cheek broth to Balmoral chicken stuffed with haggis – that we share with the crew.

At Laggan Locks, at the head of Loch Lochy, the Caledonian Canal performs its greatest trick. So much of the canal was built beside rivers, but here it needed to cross a low hill that rose as a watershed within the Great Glen. It was the final section of the canal to be constructed – a two-kilometre-long hurdle – but it took 500 workers seven years to complete.

Known today as Laggan Avenue, it’s a section that’s wasted on walkers, with the canal obscured by trees, so we remain aboard as the Fingal motors on from the locks. For half an hour, it feels more like an Amazon cruise than a Scottish walking trip, with a jungle-like strip of forest reaching down to and over the canal.

“This is totally different to any canal I’ve ever been on,” says skipper Adam Evans. “It’s my favourite part of the canal.”

Soon, the canal widens again into Loch Oich and finally Loch Ness, Scotland’s most famous body of water. Its dimensions are as monstrous as its myths – containing more water than all the lakes and rivers in England and Wales combined, it’s up to 300 metres deep, giving it a sense of mystery that fuelled the legend of Nessie.

Canal and boat lift connecting Loch Ness at Fort Augustus.Credit: iStock

We continue to use the water as a diving board into a host of trails – walks to waterfalls, over low hills, through blueberry-carpeted forests and eventually to the Caledonian Canal’s end at the Moray Firth.

In Loch Ness, we moor by a pier in Foyers, on the loch’s quieter and wilder eastern side, where we’ve watched goats grazing at the water’s edge and been circled by a sea eagle – the largest bird in the UK. But the best comes in the calm of dawn as I take my coffee up onto the deck of the barge.

Less than 100 metres ahead of us, a stream pours into the loch through a green glow of forest. As I watch, two deer step out of the trees and into Loch Ness. As they dip their heads to drink, not a single other thing around the loch seems to move.

Far across the water, on the path proper for the GGW, there will be hikers now stirring, packing up tents or already on the move. But here, I’m in no hurry. We will soon sail towards Inverness and the trip’s end but, for the moment, I have the most beautiful and natural of company.

THE DETAILS

WALK
UTracks’ seven-day Scotland Coast to Coast Rambler Walk and Barge trip begins in Fort William and finishes in Inverness, and includes all meals and accommodation on the Fingal of Caledonia. Prices start from $3690 per person. See utracks.com

RIDE
The Great Glen Way is a walking track that can also be sped up into a cycling trip. Cyclists largely follow the same path as hikers, riding flat and fast along the towpaths and then inching along single track and fire roads higher up slopes above the lochs.
The trail requires a mountain bike and can be comfortably cycled in three days, as per the itinerary on UTrack’s self-guided Great Glen Cycleway trip, where nights are spent in Invergarry (42 kilometres from Fort William) and beside Loch Ness in Drumnadrochit (48 kilometres from Invergarry).

FLY
Qantas flies daily to Glasgow (through a codeshare with Emirates) from Sydney and Melbourne, transiting in Dubai. From Glasgow, ScotRail trains run direct to Fort William. See qantas.com.

MORE
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The writer travelled courtesy of UTracks.