Hillwalking with a group of mates
We were staying at a bothy called Staoineag, a few miles from the Corrour halt on the West Highland Line (which you may have seen in Trainspotting, the deserted 'there's nothing here' railway station) ... We got the train up, then walked to the bothy with our gear and bedded in for a couple of days using Staoineag as a base, intending to walk the hills round that side of Ben Nevis (the Mamores for the Munro-baggers among you) ...
Sadly, overnight i came down with a bug and felt like utter crap next morning when everyone was getting ready for Binnein Beag, Binnein Mor, Sgurr Eilde Mor and a couple of others. I tried walking with the group, but after a while just gave up and went back to Staoineag to lie in my sleeping bag and feel sorry for myself.
There's nothing quite being ill in a tumbledown old cottage (the bothy) in a deserted Highland glen on a gloomy day in September to dampen your sunny outlook. After an hour or two reading a mountain guidebook, gazing at maps, making tea and feeling like shite, I was reduced to staring at the walls (it was too cold and windy outside to be sitting about in the open). A couple of times, I dozed off, then woke up feeling pretty rough and disoriented, until I remembered where I was.
The rest of them had been gone for hours by this point, but if the conditions were okay and they felt that they had the energy, they could keep ticking off tops all bloody day til it got dark.
The usual nonsense happened that unnerves you when alone - the door banging open with the wind; creaks and cracks from the bothy - but generally I was too absorbed in my health-misery and sheer bloody boredom to be scared. Generally.
By late afternoon, after I had been on my own for around six or seven hours, I was hoping the weather would turn really nasty - that would mean the guys would get back faster, but it just stayed cold, dry and windy. I nodded off again.
I can't have been asleep for long, but this time i woke up to a hissing noise. Not wind, nothing structural from the bothy, something more like static. I couldn't really tell where it was coming from and now I really did get scared. Bothies are not full of modern conveniences - this was basically just an old place where you stayed out of the rain, no electrics at all. I was saying to myself, "Hissing noises, sci-fi movies? Oh come on, bullshit. Don't be silly." But the tssssssss just kept going and going and going. Plainly I would have to sort this out myself, but I had no idea what to do, I was weak, shaken and confused. Then, despite me being alone in the bothy, someone spoke to me and my skin turned cold in an instant. 'When you were here before...' said the voice, then paused. 'I've never been here before,' I blurted out, feeling both like a complete twat for talking to a disembodied voice and the most terrified I'd ever been in my life... I think I actually spoke over his reply - you know those telephone conversations where you both speak at the same time, then you both pause? I waited and his next utterance came soon enough. 'You're just like angel,' at which point I got out of the sleeping bag and ran out of the bothy into the heather outside, terrified ... only noticing a few seconds later that that I was trailing an iPod from my trouser pocket and the voice was calling after me, 'I'm a creeeeeeeep, I'm a weirdo...'
That was the Creep-iest thing I've heard.
( writerblock ... embedding disabled by request on, Sat 9 Apr 2011, 1:31, Reply)