Sleeper trains, silent nights and wee drams on a wild walk in Scotland

Look at a map of the British railway network. You will see for the most part it’s a tangle of mainlines and branchlines: a mesh stitched in a way to serve most corners of the island. Direct your gaze north, and you see the Scottish Highlands is an exception. It’s served by only a few lonely lines, trailing away from the rest of the network like loose threads from a ball of wool. Two of these threads — the West Highland Line and the Highland Main Line — wander in parallel north, come tantalisingly close to knotting together, then unspool in opposite directions. Between them is a blank expanse where no rails pass. A place where none of the cartographer’s ink was spent. 

I had long seen this part of the map — the space between the lines — and regarded it as something rather like a gulf to be bridged. But in the 22-mile divide between Corrour station on the West Highland Line and Dalwhinnie station on the Highland Main Line, there is no public transport, no public roads. Nor are there marked footpaths that fully connect the two stations. Rather there lies some of the roughest, most remote terrain in Western Europe, a crossing obstructed by hulking mountains and passes of famous treachery. To make the crossing between those lines entails a two- to three-day expedition through the wild heart of the Highlands. A journey that must partly be done on two rails, partly on two feet.

We were a team of two: myself and my friend Al. We first planned to make the crossing in early autumn — when leaves were reddening and stags rutting. Delays saw the trip pushed into November, when deer herds descended from the mountains, and the first frosts snuck into the glens. By the time our expedition set out, winter was making an unscheduled early arrival. Rime ice wreathed lineside fences. Heavy snowfall was timetabled to arrive soon after our northbound train. 

Northbound through the night

One spring night in 1873, the UK’s first sleeper service departed from London King’s Cross for Glasgow. A ‘sleeper’ train was an idea stolen from the United States — advertisements subsequently billed them as ‘The Most Interesting Route to Scotland’, offering a chance to ‘Travel in your Pyjamas’. The fortunes of sleepers waxed and waned over the following 150 years — victims of faster daytime trains and budget airlines, and easy prey to the politician’s axe. The modern Caledonian Sleeper departing from Platform One of London Euston station is a rare inheritor of this Victorian tradition. It takes much the same route as the 1873 sleeper, and retains some of its predecessor’s magic. 

In the dining car there is a foretaste of Scotland: haggis and Tunnock’s caramel logs on the menu, and seven single malt whiskies at the bar. There is a diverse cast of customers — oil traders bound for Aberdeen, hillwalkers off to Ben Nevis, and one man travelling alone with his ginger cat. 

The train heaves out of the concrete behemoth of Euston. Nightcaps are served beneath the Chilterns. Most customers are snoring by Crewe. Trackside goings-on subtly weave into passengers’ dreams: the bellow of a freight train at Penrith. The sudden stillness of a small-hours station in the Borders. Once I wake for a midnight wee, and see a full moon rising over obsidian Pennine hills. I think of WH Auden’s poem, Night Mail — both a description of a Scotland-bound night train and a meditation on the lines of communication that connect humanity: ‘This is the night mail crossing the Border, bringing the cheque and the postal order…’

In a few ways, travelling by sleeper stirs a childlike wonder. You climb into your bunk, trusting you will be ushered unconscious to your destination, like a baby dozing in a pushchair. You are rocked by the rhythmic lullaby of the rails. But the greatest wonder comes when you wake and part the cabin curtains, like opening wrapping paper on your birthday. The rush hour clamour of London has segued to silent wilderness. Lochs and lochans shimmer in the day’s first light. Munros glower down on the train, their lower slopes stiff with frozen heather, their upper slopes sugared with snow. The trudge of London commuters has turned to the strut of an Imperial stag. You have travelled from one of Europe’s most densely inhabited corners to one of its most sparsely inhabited nooks — merely by closing your eyes.

Our destination, Corrour station, materialises out of blanket bog soon after breakfast. Corrour sees about 12,000 passengers per year — which is roughly the same as Euston gets in a single peak-time hour. It’s also the highest station in the UK, and inaccessible by public roads. A station building houses a cafe serving those who come for the novelty factor but, as we draw in, we see a sign has been placed by the front door: ‘Closed for the Season’.

On a sleeper train you inhabit a pocket of comfort — a roving ambassador for civilised living — with hot showers, hot food, soft beds and attendants summoned at the press of a button. With a single step onto the platform at Corrour you begin to exile yourself from the trappings of modernity — entering a landscape where people are scarce, help can be distant, and sharp air is largely undisturbed by mobile reception. You enter a place beyond railway lines, telephone lines and electricity lines. The transition is abrupt. Suddenly you must stand on your own two feet.

As we get ready to disembark, Alec, one of the sleeper attendants, asks where we are heading. We explain we plan to walk to Dalwhinnie station, where we will catch a return sleeper to London in three days. In our rucksacks there’s food and shelter to sustain us; fastened to the straps are ice axes and crampons to traverse snowbound gradients. Minutes later we are on the platform, watching the train sweep into the distance, the rails ringing in its wake. In the silence that follows, Alec’s words echo in my head: “Rather you than me, lads.”

The ghosts of the Bealach Dubh

You may have seen Corrour station in the 1996 film Trainspotting, in the scene where Tommy takes the group to the Highlands. 

“Now what?” asks Sick Boy

“We go for a walk,” says Tommy.

“Are you serious?”

The group gets roughly 100m from the station before turning back for Edinburgh. 

Our first miles take us along a track by Loch Ossian, through shoreside forests of larch and Scots pine. The winter sun clears the hills, blessing bronze moorland with its golden rays. To our east, ranks of grey clouds assemble, heavy with snow yet to fall. For now, the weather is merciful. A lone buzzard watches us from a treetop. Around lunchtime we meet the only other walker on our trail: Jessie Guilliatt has been foraging in the forests, returning with a handful of hedgehog mushrooms. 

She is from the Mornington Peninsula in the Australian state of Victoria, and has come to Scotland after selling her farm. Seeing the Northern Lights dancing in the skies above Cape Wrath in the northwest was, she says, the closest she has come to sensing the divine. “You just get a feeling here,” she says of the Highlands. “The sense of space. The fact that you could never see it all, even in a lifetime.”

Beyond the eastern shores of the loch, the forests thin out. Past the lodge at Corrour, the track narrows to a vague trail and begins its ascent to a desolate pass: the Bealach Dubh (black pass). Here, our route shadows quickening streams. We cross them, balancing ourselves on stepping stones lacquered with ice. Midway, Jessie peels off to cook up her mushrooms with coriander and noodles.

Many Highland passes have their ghosts. Bealach Dubh has more than most. In December 1942, a Wellington bomber was on a training mission from RAF Lossiemouth when it went off course, crashing into a mountainside during a blizzard. From the crew of six there was a lone survivor — air gunner Sergeant Philip Underwood, himself seriously injured. After checking for signs of life in his comrades, he set out on our path — albeit in the opposite direction, out of the pass. For a few lonely miles, the snow raged around him, his injuries doubtless smarting with every step. By a miracle, he found help at the hunting lodge at Corrour, and later recovered. So remote is the crash site, the wreckage of the Wellington has never been fully cleared. Bits of the engine can be seen rusting in the hills.

Nine years later, another disaster took place. Five members of a local mountaineering club were caught in a storm just before New Years’ Eve 1951. One hundred mph winds thundered through the night and, one by one, four young men succumbed to exposure. Again there was a lone survivor — the wife of one of the men, who traced the lonely miles to Corrour Lodge. 

The intended destination of the club members that New Year had been Ben Alder Cottage, a bothy by the shores of Loch Ericht. On a more peaceful winter day, it is ours, too. Scotland is full of bothies — shelters often repurposed from derelict crofter’s cottages. They are without electricity, bedding and flushing toilets and are all unstaffed — unless you count the resident mice. They offer little more than a roof over your head — and sometimes even this leaks — and yet after long hours tramping through the Highland wilderness, their appearance can be a profound blessing.

In the pantheon of Highland bothies, Ben Alder Cottage ranks high, partly on account of its remoteness, but also because it’s said to be its most haunted. Nine hours’ march from Corrour we fling our packs on its stone floor, and hunt out firewood for the hearth. Soon the only sound is the toothless whistle of the wind in the chimney and the crackle of pine cones in the fireplace. When we switch off our head torches we are part of a scene unchanged for centuries: wayfarers huddled by a fire, the flicker and shadow duelling against the walls. 

There are many stories of hauntings at Ben Alder Cottage. One ghost is a woman who sought refuge here with her child in a storm, and — when driven mad by hunger — ate her offspring. Another is a resident gamekeeper who hanged himself in this lonely hut. Both are historically dubious, yet the bothy guestbook is full of reports of unexplained footsteps and sudden chills. It’s a place to seek the ghosts of the past in more benign ways, too. One recent entry is from a visitor who had been here on their birthday, to this Highland sanctuary where their parents had met 50 years previously and bonded over a bottle of brandy. The two were married three weeks after. “[Dad] is no longer with us, and so we came here to raise a glass of brandy,” goes the entry, “... and to sing.”

The snows of Ben Alder

We rise before dawn to push to the summit of Ben Alder. With every metre gained the temperature drops; clouds of vapour plume skywards with every spent breath. And then I hear a ringing sound — like the tinkling of distant bells — and think it’s a warning. The ringing grows louder. Resting on a granite outcrop, I realise what it is: the water bottle in my backpack clinking with freshly formed ice.

Ben Alder is the 1,148m mountain that stands sentry over the gap between the railway lines. The Bealach Dubh had been a place people escaped from; yet Ben Alder’s remoteness had cast it as a place to escape to — somewhere you might become anonymous. Bonnie Prince Charlie, the leader of the Jacobite Rising fighting to claim the throne for his exiled father, is said to have hidden here in the wake of his defeat at the 1746 Battle of Culloden. He was joined by fugitive clan leader Cluny Macpherson, who somehow survived for nine years in the Highlands, undetected by the authorities.

In 1996, Ben Alder hit national news after the discovery of a body near the summit. The so-called ‘Man with No Name’ had shed all forms of identification, cut labels from his clothing and climbed Ben Alder to kill himself with an antique-style revolver. His final view had been from a rocky outcrop, overlooking a little loch. His corpse had lain undiscovered in the snow for months; another year of press intrigue passed before he was identified as a French water board worker.

In truth, Ben Alder is less a conventional peak, more a plateau: an upland kingdom where winter’s reign is uncontested through much of the year. Crossing it, we encounter many species of snow. First: flurries of feather-soft snow that dust our backpacks and dew our paper maps. On the summit: vengeful snow that spits in our eyes as the windchill hits -10 C. For a few frightening hours, a whiteout sees snow and cloud coalesce into a single state of blankness. 

By evening, we make our exit — tracing moonlit paths of lilac snow off the plateau, pitching camp by a pine forest and pushing accumulating drifts off our tent roof. Across Britain, holidaymakers craving a fix of winter snowfall are fleeing to Scandinavia or the Alps; meanwhile, up on the roof of the country, we are ensconced in this pocket Arctic, where the only footsteps are our own — though these too are soon erased by fresh flurries.

Fire from snow

Hidden in the foothills north east of Ben Alder is a little body of water: Lochan na Doire-uaine. From the loch, a watercourse chunters for some miles eastward through the hills, supplying water for the Dalwhinnie whisky distillery. On our final day, we walk in parallel to its course, pacing a forester’s track by Loch Ericht. Eventually the chimneys of the distillery appear on the horizon. We arrive exhausted and exalted at our finishing line. 

“Dalwhinnie in Gaelic means ‘the meeting place’,’’ says distillery guide Peter Wemyss, as he leads us through warehouses full of stacked casks. “It was where old drovers gathered with their cattle before heading south. This has always been a place where people gather.”

Dalwhinnie is also where our path meets the railway line — Peter explains casks were once exported by rail from the station next door. We seek temporary sanctuary in the distillery, amidst hot copper stills that thaw our extremities, tasting single malts that warm our bellies. Feeling the slow fire of whisky in our throats, it’s curious to think this liquid began as snows that fell on the foothills of Ben Alder, many winters ago.

 It’s after dark when the southbound Caledonian Sleeper hauls into Dalwhinnie. As we speed south, I lie in my bunk thinking of Bruce Chatwin’s classic book The Songlines. In it the legendary travel writer outlines his theory that man, in his true state, is a nomadic creature, destined and designed to walk the Earth on foot. But most intriguing is Chatwin’s evidence for our innate nomadism: that children still have to be rocked to sleep, and to soothe their young, parents recreate the motion of ancient ancestors who carried their offspring while walking to new pastures. Being on the move meant all was well. 

Soon I enter a deep sleep in my bunk, the carriage rocking beneath my mattress, the train moving through the tangle of railway lines that bind this country. But I am still dreaming of the mountains and passes that lie in between.