‘Walking away from the world in Scotland’: an easier way to plan long Highlands hikes

The last time I went wild camping in Scotland the experience was so tame I haven’t lived it down a decade later. The wrong equipment, paired with a late frost, meant that I packed up at 3am and headed to a drive-through on the fringes of Glasgow to warm up, watching the sun rise over takeaway coffee rather than a secluded loch.

More Raynaud’s than Ray Mears, the experience may not have done much for my outdoor credentials, but it makes me the perfect guinea pig for CampWild’s Wild Trails. The initiative is from the wild camping platform CampWild; the idea is to give more people the confidence to enjoy off-grid adventuring in the UK and try self-guided, multi-day hikes.

Inspired by off-country trails in Canada and the US, the hikes are not waymarked but use trail corridors, highlighting zones within which to choose a route rather than pinpointing a precise path. The first hike is in Perthshire, at Invergeldie, outside Comrie. A 4,856-hectare (12,000-acre) former sporting estate bought in a natural capital acquisition by Oxygen Conservation last year, it’s now home to a mix of peatland restoration, tree-planting, hill farming and hydro-power, the latter managed by SSE Renewables.

Not entirely wild, then, but wild enough for the purpose at hand. There are three trails at Invergeldie: all two- or three-day routes designed to be do-able in a weekend or long weekend. The most accessible is the 12-mile (20km) Moors Trail which, being largely on old hunting and SSE tracks, is also suitable for adventure wheelchair users. The most challenging is the 21-mile (35km) Peaks Trail, a higher-level route almost completely off-track. Between the two is the Lochs Trail, a 12-mile part on- part off-track route that my friend Helen and I did a recce of before the trail launched last month.

All three trails start at Ben Chonzie car park, four miles north-west of Comrie. Hikers are provided with a customised route map (via the OS app), a trail guide listing wildlife highlights and suggested camping locations, and an “adventure pack” with kit list and code of conduct.

At the car park, Helen and I open the OS app and pick up the start of the Lochs Trail. A little hump-backed bridge takes us into Invergeldie Estate and towards Loch Lednock reservoir along a single-track road. In the afternoon sun, skylarks are trilling and as we pass Spout Rolla waterfall we’re overtaken by two backpack-free walkers – the last people we see for two days.

We know we won’t come across any other CampWild members (the trails are booked exclusively for 48 hours to manage numbers) but, as in most parts of Scotland, you can wild camp at Invergeldie if you’re visiting recreationally on foot. So we’re prepared to meet more experienced wild hikers. That we don’t may just be chance but it might also be the terrain: rugged Invergeldie suits CampWild’s away-from-it-all purposes but it doesn’t have the drama of Torridon, say, or the salt-washed grandeur of the Rough Bounds.

Given the freedom to roam in Scotland, some might question paying to connect with nature. CampWild co-founder Tom Backhouse says the research that goes into each trail, and the sharing of it, is where the value is. “The benefits you get from solitude in nature are profound but accessing it can be intimidating. If you’re very experienced you’d just crack on yourself. But only a fraction of the population feel confident doing that.”

As well as inspiring and supporting people to get outdoors, it’s also about education. “You can pretty much camp anywhere in Scotland but it doesn’t mean you should,” says Backhouse, pointing to the impact of litter and fires, and to inadvertent damage to local ecology. Instead, the CampWild model aims to maintain and create responsible access to these spaces.

Back on the trail, but now off-road, Helen and I stop to rest just beyond the loch’s dam. Looking back at the valley we’ve just climbed, it glows with green softness. Ahead it’s all bronze, bracken-covered hills.

Venturing deeper into the estate, we follow the line of the loch. Signs of the hydroelectricity infrastructure are visible in telegraph poles and pipelines but the ground is becoming wilder underfoot. Walking over tussocky heather and moss that looks like forests of tiny trees, we pass a stretch of peat laced with strands of grass as black as squid ink spaghetti. A cuckoo has been calling all afternoon but now oystercatchers have joined the aural landscape. A soft breeze tugs at our cheeks as we look up at a flypast of geese. Below us, small waves scour the edges of the loch.

Glad to join another single-lane track after the boggy peat, we continue to the end of the loch. The sky has clouded and our shoulders ache as we peel off our backpacks to fill water bottles from a stream. Three hours’ walk from the car park, with a soft rain starting, we’re glad to pinpoint one of the trail’s designated Wild Space camping spots via its What3Words locator. A grassy bullseye beside the ruins of some old stone shielings, we pitch our tent facing the loch, protected by an amphitheatre of hills. Firing up our camping stove we eat quickly. “I feel like we’ve walked away from the world,” says Helen.

That night, drifting off to sleep in the half-light, I wonder about the people who built the shielings, the shepherds and farmers who brought their animals here and the drovers who led cattle through these hills to markets in Crieff and beyond. Before the clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries, there were apparently 21 settlements in Glen Lednock, their inhabitants intimately familiar with this now-isolated terrain.

Waking to sunshine, we pick our way up the bilberry-smudged valley to a barely-there drovers’ track, following it up the slopes of Creag Uchdag to views of the loch. Today’s route along the opposite side of the loch feels much wilder and takes twice as long. As we walk we “ooh” at dazzling lichens and “ahh” at the shadows of clouds rippling across moorland. The more we adjust to the off-grid pace the more we see; a mountain hare here, a black pheasant there, a circling red kite. Golden eagles have also been seen in this area.

There are proposals for a windfarm on the opposite side of the loch but for now, though, the trail is ours and the birds to enjoy. We stumble on a fairytale dipping spot beside a small plantation of pine trees and plunge our hot feet gratefully into the icy water.

Not far from here is An Dun, the second camping space on the Lochs Trail. It’s a scenic spot, 20 minutes’ walk from the end of the trail, with a lochan cradled in the dip between two hills and rushes swaying gold in the evening light. Today, though, it’s also catching a shift in the wind and we struggle to put our tent up. Making use of the trail map, we detour to Lednock Wood, a camping space on the Moors Trail, instead.

This is where the value Tom spoke about comes in. Without CampWild’s information we would have spent much longer finding an alternative camping spot. We might even have (whisper it) packed up early and made for the fringes of Glasgow. Instead we spend our final evening eating spice-scented bowls of dal by a remote riverside, serenaded by willow warblers and the soul-soothing clatter of water tumbling over pebbles.

CampWild’s Wild Trails opened to members on 1 June, with membership costing £20 a year for a household (two adults and any number of children). Trail bookings cost £50 per membership holder with numbers limited to a maximum of four people