Midsummer at the Crask, the long hard desert wilderness, wildlife great and small, and the emergence into the northern flatlands

It has been a long hard five days, from Invershin to Halkirk, punctuated by stunning moments and beautiful encounters. The end is almost in sight. 

I left Invershin on the longest day of the year, into driving winds. The forecast said 41mph. I'm sure it was more. I had had breakfast with an Alaskan cyclist named Sage, who wears a rainbow net skirt over her lycra, as a sort of alternative hi-vis. I wondered how she might get to Ullapool as the wind was coming from the west, and her skirt may have flown her to Norway. I passed the Falls of Shin, where salmon jump up the waterfall on their way back to their spawning grounds from unimaginably long journeys through the Atlantic. None were jumping, but they may have been shy of the coach load of American tourists who then got to the tiny coffee stall first. I moved on to Lairg, stopping in the last shop for five days. The wind was sweeping across Loch Shin, giving the impression and sound of a choppy sea. Then it's a long road north, on the single track A-road, 13 miles to the Crask Inn. The views were long and clear, with the opening out of the vast moor, and the distant Munros to the west, and the strange shaped northern Munros dotting the horizon, and the great Ben Klibreck, dark and looming, dominating the near view. And the whole of it lit wildly, every colour bright as can be, even the predominant brown. The wind got stronger and stronger, throwing me about, and I got slower and slower, losing it about a mile from the Crask as my legs hurt and my lighter wasn't working. I threw down the rucksack to look inside it, and two separate cars stopped to ask if I was alright. I reassured them. A cyclist passed me and stopped. He was waiting for his friend, also from Australia, both cycling Lands End to John O'Groats. It turns out his friend had done the same, losing it and throwing down his bike, to look for his hip flask. I rounded the bend of the shoulder of the hill, and there below was one of my favourite views - the Crask Inn, nestled by the river, a few trees shielding it from the constant wind, and the sign that always creaks. This is possibly the most remote inn in the UK, and the only building in Crask, aside from a cottage that used to be the bunkhouse. The two cyclists caught up and we all blew through the door together, and were immediately welcomed, warmed, and offered a drink. The Crask Inn has always been there probably since God was a boy, as a shelter to travellers, passers by, some staying, some passing through, all battered at least a little by the weather. I turned up there last year, coming from the east, the Sunday after Easter, when snow was forecast and it had taken forever to get across the last three miles of bog in the freezing rain. I asked to camp in the garden but then decided to stay inside - the only guest in this remote place, the snowy night falling quickly. We ate together, and drank whisky as the wind howled outside, with the fire lit, and Brandy the dog on my lap. It had then just been gifted to the Scottish Episcopal Church by the previous owners, Mike and Kai, who now live in what was the bunkhouse and still have their sheep. Douglas, who had agreed to run it, was in the process of repainting and repairing. But it was never closed. Evening Prayer is said in the dining room most evenings, and guests are invited to a common table for dinner, and it remains, as it always has, an inn in the remote wilds, welcoming whoever walks through the door, like an old friend. This time I really was camping outside as it was midsummer, and the inn was full. Putting up the tent in high winds after a pint was hard work. Brandy was bobbing about, and the fire was lit. Douglas invited me to join them for dinner, and remembered I was vegetarian. So 11 men and me gathered round the table, End to End cyclists, and a group of four friends from Gloucestershire staying for two days, and Douglas said the Selkirk grace and I helped him serve and clear up as he was on his own that night running everything. I wonder if the church, in taking on the inn, is learning how to do real hospitality as it has always been done. And Douglas is the perfect host. He knows how to be normal with everyone and nothing phases him, even unannounced people turning up off the bog out of the snow. The men round the table were kind and chivalrous, and apparently I was the first person this year passing through the Crask walking End to end. Talk was of weather and routes and the sun was still piercing bright at 9pm. The wind had turned bitingly cold and later, after all the cyclists had gone to bed, I leaned against the bar with two ladies from Inverness, long time university friends, out beginning their Munro bagging career without children and husbands - just their dogs. I asked Douglas which local single malt was good for midsummer and he suggested the Glenrothes, which was kind of local. It was nearly midnight before we all turned in and as I stood outside my tent the northern sky was still light, and three stags had come off the moor to the trees at the edge of the garden. I went to bed with my hat on, thankful. 

The morning sky was darker than the night just past, and I was among the last to leave. Most of the cyclists were aiming for John O'Groats that day, and I had hours and hours of daylight to walk the planned 17 miles into the wilderness. I had had dreams about having to abandon the walk at the Crask as my family was moving house, and I wept and wept. It was only a dream though, but as Douglas and I chatted and I admitted it was hard to leave, he said 'Be brave'. I think I just needed someone to say that, and it has been a tiny mantra the past few days. So I headed east, out under the dark sky, in the slightly lighter wind, across the moor under the southern shoulder of Ben Klibreck. The Crask got smaller and smaller behind and as I rounded the shoulder and up to the bealach a shower of rain blew through. I sheltered in the corner of two tall rocks looking out at the sudden deep valley below, the steep rocky sides cupping the windblown Loch a Bealaich, leading out to the long Loch Choire and the lower country beyond. I braced myself and headed downwards, now on track, to the first loch, trying to stay upright as the surface of the water was being whipped up into a spray, and shafts of bright sunlight were breaking through the grey, making the green greener and the wind eye-watering. I rounded the south shore of Loch Choire, sheltering in the little rattling bothy with a roof weighed down by large rocks on wire. The bothy visitors log was sparsely written in - a very different place to the Lairig Ghru - but a previous visitor was Andy Robinson, author of the Cicerone End to End guide which I half used last time and which was helpful this time. I now have proof that at least two of these writers really do do their research in person. 

The track took me through the buildings of the Loch Choire Lodge, all of them, big and small, made of corrugated iron and painted a lurid and unnatural green colour, with no sign of anyone about. Past a little herd of deer I headed further east, wind behind me, along the long wide stony track for mile upon mile, cold, watching the landscape change shape into undulating moor, forestry, dotted with lochs and hills that rise occasionally looking high, even though they are not, but only appear to be. A post van appeared, surprising me, a small Jack Russell on the passenger seat. He didn't come back past until nearly an hour later. That's a very long round trip for one house, and he still had miles to go back to the road. I was making for a sheepfold by Loch Alltan Fheàrna, where I camped last year. I found it, and pitched my tent behind it, sheltered from the wind. The stream by it was low this time, and a herd of about twenty deer with fawns came down to it later in the evening, calling their strange throaty calls back up to those still on the hillside. The now distant high mountains were intermittently clear, bathed and then blinded with sun between the clouds. The voice of a snipe wobbled ghostly around the tent in the brief darkness and the morning light, and the wind died down with some drizzle, leaving midges enough for face itch while packing up. 

The skies were now getting bigger and bigger, and leaving my sheepfold it was all grey swirls and huge misty lines, below the higher lighter grey. Still cool, I wore a fleece and a hat for most of the day. This first cross country part joins the tarmac road beyond Loch Badanloch, although this was mostly empty. Big well fed curlews and chattering oyster catchers darted about and once again I was dive bombed by panicking plover. The road follows the River Helmsdale in part to the tiny village of Kinbrace, and over the water two large birds of prey loped ahead, brown with long wings. One had caught something in its claws. I want to believe they were eagles, as they do live around there. They were the wrong shape, size and behaviour for buzzards. They could have been harriers. Where's a twitcher when you need one? 

I rested in the shelter on the Kinbrace station platform as it's the only place to sit down.  There was no chance of one of the two trains a day passing. Only one person was visible in the village - a man in overalls fiddling around with lorry engines in the garage over the road. The long single track road is a timber extraction route, and when the great timber lorries come you move right off the road. I headed north up this long road, to the next tiny station hamlet of Forsinard, a request stop on the train route. There was a definite front right above me - to my left high white cloud and patches of blue, and to my right very dark clouds making the low ridge almost black. Again the land changes, difficult to describe - lonely and largely unpeopled, north and remote, huge, but alive if you look closely and attend to it, with so many birds, and the weather and the constant changing of colour. And dotted with remote farms and houses often miles off the road up a long track. 

At Forsinard I stopped at the Station Cottage tea room, run by a terse Yorkshire woman, who had to open and turn the lights on in the converted shed for me. It was 2 in the afternoon on a Saturday and I must have been her first customer. She brought me a very small but nice scone and a pot of tea, but she kindly let me charge my phone. Her husband was out weedkilling in the wind. Next door the station building has been converted into the RSPB visitor centre for the Forsinard Flows Nature Reserve. I went inside and talked birds of prey with the lovely young woman on an internship from Edinburgh. She then fired questions at me about my walk, commenting that I was travelling light. Thank you sister! So many people have been in awe of how apparently big my rucksack is. Although, to be fair, it has reduced a lot since the Pennine Way. She wished me well as I headed up the road again another three miles to Forsinain, finding a little relatively flat spot to camp by the river, out of sight of the road. It turned out that I had pitched in tick central. All sizes of them made their best attempts to get into the tent. And they are impossible to kill. You can pick them up with a tissue and squeeze and squeeze and they will still swagger out like a heavily armoured body builder. I think (or at least I hope) I came out of that tick free. The river level was low and it was hard to collect any water without sediment in it. The chlorine tablets are now very useful. 

The morning dawned surprisingly bright and clear, and the tent warmed up fast. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. I packed up the tent fairly quickly to get away from the ticks. And entered the second cross country section, east again, on wide sandy track into the Flows. This is miles and miles of open brown moorland, all part of the RSPB 'Forest to Bog Project' - another re-wilding, turning the landscape back from vast swathes of forestry to original open moor. Now the strange shaped peaks really are on the distant horizon beyond miles of brown. And it was dry -really dry. Bird life had reduced to the occasional skylark, and there was a distant herd of deer, and all the streams were just cracked waterless crevasses or algae ridden pools. We complain about the weather a lot, but they really haven't had enough rain up here. With the unrelenting sun, the going was hard, with nowhere to shelter. It was a strange temperature though. I walked in my fleece all morning, partly because of the breeze, partly the sun, and mostly because of the horseflies. After ten miles I reached Altnabreac station, the 8th least used station in Britain. It was here I got off the train last April, walking three days to the Crask before the snow, so I knew there was a shelter. It was still there, so I sat in the wooden hut out of the sun, wondering how to get water. There are a few houses dotted about here on the remote track, where electricity doesn't reach, but, like before, no sign of anyone. I left the station before the one train of the day came through. It's a request stop and if the driver sees you they'll stop the train. I didn't want to be responsible for that. So I plodded on, and into unfamiliar territory for the first time in a week, zoning out, my head full of nothing. There was more, if sparse, forestry left this side, although the tracks are still so wide the trees provide no shade. I came to Loch Caise and took the decision to fill up my water bottle. You should really only take water from running streams, but there weren't any. I used two purification tablets and hoped for the best. A large brown owlish bird rose out of the trees ahead of me. I decided to head for the bridge over the wide river that leads into Loch Mòre, for somewhere to pitch the tent. When I arrived the river was nearly empty and the ground was silt and algae. I rounded the corner to the loch and literally gasped. In front of me was a huge blue loch with long white beaches all around, almost Hebridean. It was surrounded by vast low grassland with more odd shaped hills on the distant south horizon. Loch Mòre cottage over the water looked idyllic, and way across the moor to the south were the remains of a chapel and the long-named farm of Aschoriclate. A couple were on the beach with their dogs and I said hello as  they were the first people I had seen all day. I found a good spot just up from the sand and pitched the tent, not quite believing just how stunning it all was. The couple left and I had the whole place to myself. I needed shelter so I dozed inside the warm tent in as few clothes as possible. I filled up my bottles with water from the loch which left a sandy sediment at the bottom. Chlorine tablets and boiling it too I hope took care of anything dodgy. I am alright still! Later on I sat on a rock in the strong breeze with the tiny bit of whisky I had left and wrote. And an osprey appeared, diving into the water and re-emerging with a fish. Then two more appeared and I watched them soar about, diving, rising again, weaving in and out of one another. There were deer prints in the sand, itself marked with patches of ancient dried peat. And the nearly full moon rose over the loch while the sun was still high. It suddenly turned very cold though, and I retreated to my sleeping bag, amazed and grateful. 

This morning I woke looking up at a large tick, looking down at me from the ceiling of the fly sheet. It was midgy outside so I packed up straight away and decamped to the beach, making coffee, watching another osprey fishing. It was again an almost cloudless morning. I took my time, waiting for the boiled water to cool to decant. And then I rejoined the track, out of the wilderness onto a long tarmac road to Halkirk. I passed a tiny cemetery, with graves weathered so much it was hard to make out any lettering. Of the readable ones were farmers of Strathmore and Aschoriclate. At the tiny village of Westerdale a battered old 4x4 pulled up beside me, window wound down, and a man with a Cornish accent asked me, 'Are you going all the way?'. I said I was, and he congratulated me. I told him I was heading for Dunnet Head, and he said, 'Arrr - Lizard to Dunnet. The real one. Well done. Gotta go - late for the doctors'. And off he sped. 

The landscape turned into agricultural flatlands interspersed with areas of tussocky bog grass, white fluffed cotton grass, heather, buttercups and cow parsley, as well as near and distant windfarms. Large pebble-dash bungalows were dotted here and there surrounded by spacious plots of land - there's a lot of space. The road rose gently and almost unnoticeably to a crossroads from which I could see in the far misty distance the distinctive shape of Orkney, with the straight cliff on the left and the Old Man of Hoy. It was too far to make out the sea in between. Towards Halkirk a sign by a farm said 'Freshly picked strawberries'. I knew I needed something and that was it. I bought a small punnet and continued walking along the road, eating them. They were very sweet and good. And now I am in the village of Halkirk, the 'first planned village in Scotland' as it says on the sign. I don't think it means that all the rest were unplanned and just happened. But it's not a new place by any means. Here the accents are lilting - echoes of a far north almost Nordic sound. I booked a B&B (the B&B) a few days ago, and it is lovely and very good value. Never has a shower felt so good, and she even let me use the washing machine so everything is completely clean. 

It is 17 miles to Dunnet Head. So this time tomorrow, all being well, I will have officially finished. I am then walking to John O'Groats the day after to actually finish in the far corner, but I could get a bus there if I wanted as I only committed to Dunnet Head (I won't really get a bus). JOG also has a better pub. 

For now, sleep, without ticks for company.