Strathfarrar Four
After a bout of illness, David Lintern returns to the hills with an idyllic backpacking trip around the remote Strathfarrar Munros – but with a new perspective on what true ‘open access’ means
TUCKED AWAY to the west of Inverness are a series of parallel glens that will be well known to some readers, less so to others. Mullardoch and Affric are the most famous, their long lochs separated by miles of suspended wild space, summits strung out along days’ worth of skyline ridge walking, none of it hugely technical, pretty much all of it the embodiment of that slightly old-fashioned phrase, ‘the freedom of the hills’. Airy ridges you can really stride out on, lots of room to breathe – the good stuff.
I’ve visited both in the past (and written about them in these pages), but not so the glen immediately to the north. Strathfarrar and its four Munros remained out of reach. I kept reading about access restrictions. Different rules depending on the time of year, and a limit on the number of vehicles allowed in the glen. In the winter, it seemed you had to be a member of Mountaineering Scotland to get in at all. I’m sure I was overcomplicating things, but it sounded like a faff.
And, to be honest, it rankled a little. By all accounts, Scotland has some of the best access legislation in the world. The owners of Strathfarrar, Glenavon and Braulen estates (and their agents, Bidwells) weren’t playing fair. Last year, things became less free, with no vehicle access in the winter allowed at all and walkers restricted to just the Munros themselves. In context, access rights in Scotland do seem to be under threat, post-pandemic, with lots of questionable signage, blocked rights of way and cuts to local government path and access work. Access in Scotland is rightly celebrated, but it’s not a given.
ON TWO WHEELS
Still, all my wailing and gnashing of teeth isn’t going to get my Munros done. My list is slowly shrinking, and this represented one of the remaining, more obvious groups still to explore. A week of high pressure over Scandinavia and the consequent clear, dry spell in the Highlands coincided with a few days off for me and a friend. Rather than bother with permits and rules, we shoehorned our bikes into the back of Mick’s car and set off for Inchmore, where the public road ends and the private one begins.
The sun split the sky as we floated down the first mile of empty tarmac, birch woodland on our right, the river Farrar on our left. A brief mechanical problem interrupted the early reverie, but otherwise it was bucolic. The road rose and fell, meandering alongside the river glinting diamonds in sunlight. Further in, old-growth pine lined the water’s edge, whilst new growth draped the hillsides above. It was
