Low carbon TRAVELLING

Travelling by train from London to the Scottish Highlands is a long, slow, meander to the mountainous fresh and wild. Leaving Euston on a Thursday evening, I ate a late dinner of neeps and tatties washed down with a beer in the train’s dining carriage, and then had a decent night’s sleep as the train trundled up through the north of England and across the border.

The next morning, I tucked into a simple breakfast of Scottish Porridge and tea at 8am, before getting off the train just before 9am at Corrour, an isolated station a few stops short of Fort William in the western Scottish Highlands. From the station, it was a 10-minute walk along a track to Loch Ossian, a small, off-grid youth hostel among a small clump of birch and rowan trees at the edge of the narrow 3-mile (5- km) long Loch Ossian, surrounded by boggy moorland and sparsely covered mountains. There was nothing else in sight: no pylons, no street lights, no roads. air of this remote area of wilderness, and swam in the loch. That evening, I ate a hearty stew in the small station restaurant at Corrour, then walked back to the hostel

It was a 10-minute walk along a track to Loch Ossian, a small off-grid youth hostel

After jettisoning my sleeping bag and spare clothes in one of the hostel dorms, I spent the day walking on Rannoch Moor, catching sight of several ptarmigan on the low ground and dozens of deer upwind. I climbed a Munro, sucked in the clean to see the moon lighting up the loch. It’s remarkable – and immensely satisfying – that just 24 hours earlier I had been in London, and reached this special place not via a nose-to-tail, long-distance motorway journey, but by train – all the way.