Whenever one of my close friends calls me up and says ‘I just had the idea of walking…’, I shout ‘Yes, I’m in’ before I even know where we’re going. I walked parts of the West Highland Way with her, started the John Muir Way and already posted about our time on the Thomas Muir Way. I just love walking, ever since she asked me to come long for the first time.
One thing you need to know though, is that she’s an experienced hillwalker and I’m not. In fact, the West Highland Way was the only reason I bought walking shoes for myself and – I admit it – I thought more about what looks cute than what I would actually need. I did luckily end up with a decent pair of shoes and a sudden thirst to walk absolutely everywhere. This time, the area of the day was the Campsie Fells.
I had heard of them but didn’t even know where they where, but, alas, my friend had all the info we needed. We set off on our little adventure and everything seemed to be going fine. No rain, parking lot not busy – perfect. Unfortunately, we hadn’t factored in all the rain from the days before or the piss-poor phone connections (what do you mean, printed maps?). Happily strolling along the hills and following the path, we made our way to the first peak, just about avoiding swampy, muddy stretches along the way. Next peak? No problem, and so we went on, just following the path – until it was gone. Protecting ourselves from the first of a few rain showers, we managed to lose the path that was ‘supposed to take a soft left turn and lead us back to the car park somewhere’. Well, then…
As what we thought was a path just turned out to be even muddier and swampier than anything before we decided to cut straight across the hills in the rough direction of the car. Trying (and often failing) to jump across small streams that made their way downhill and turned the countryside into a huge swamp monster, we got wet feet within minutes – even wet legs. It was up-a-hill-down-a-hill, trying to avoid fences we couldn’t get across and praying for the weather to not change. As I scared two pheasant that were mere feet away from me, I also started praying that I would survive the day without my own inexperience leading to my disappearance.
We eventually made it back – hooray. The best part of the day? Probably the fact that we all agreed that we didn’t want to experience anything like that again and then had a big laugh about it. We’re still joking about our 5 hour adventure in the ‘wild’ and the next one will hopefully come soon.
Do you have any favourite hillwalks?
See you around,
Walking the Campsie Fells
The Campsies are located north of Glasgow, with the towns Milton of Campsie, Lennoxtown and Drumgoyne. We went by car and took the road past Campsie Golf Course into the hills from Lennoxtown (Crow Road) until we reached a small parking lot.
German in Scotland | Weekend Adventurer
