A Loch, a Moor and a River in the Clouds – Through-Hike John Muir Way, Scotland I.
May 30, 2025
Once from coast to coast through Scotland. But hey – not by rental car, but on foot. We are hiking the John Muir Way from the Scotland’s west coast to John Muir’s birthplace on the east coast. 134 miles and 15 days—every day in...um…“Scottish wind and weather”...? No! 15 days of sunshine and biting wind. Scotland is broken. Or maybe our climate is.
We are standing at the starting point in Helensburgh, a small village on the west coast of Scotland. The John Muir Way is much less well known here than the great West Highland Way, so the starting sign is also relatively puny: a plaque on the wall of a small building that has all the charm of a public toilet. Never mind, we take a photo anyway.
“Los we go!” I whisper quietly with my confused German-English brain. Then we walk out of town like Scottish ambassadors in the 16th century. Heavily laden, with a mission, not knowing if we will ever reach the other end. Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. Nevertheless, there is inherent magic in every long-distance hike. It seems to start the moment you decide to deliberatly walk an absurd distance on foot in a highly technological age. The moment you realize that you will carry everything you need for weeks on your back. The moment you let go of everything just to find out what you can achieve, knowing that you will never be the same person at the end of the journey as you were when you set out.
Loch Lomond and the deforested Moor
“Do you know the song about Loch Lomond?” my husband asks as we walk through the first small hills, and past bright yellow, gorse-covered heathlands. The higher we climb, the better the view of the blue Loch Lomond and its islets in the valley below.
“Are you going to sing now?” I ask anxiously. He looks at me a bit disgruntled. A moment of silence ensues.
“I won't,” he says, feigning offense as he stomps off. My husband sings about as well as I solve quadratic equations. Not at all.
On the second day, we take on our longest section of the John Muir Way. We have booked guesthouses in advance for each night in usually reasonable distances from each other, but there is nothing except moorland for 14 miles as it is a Nature Preserve through the Kilpatrick Hills. Well, we'll just have to walk through it. We leave Loch Lomond behind us as we set off early in the morning. We don't like to rush. If possible, we try to walk between six and eleven miles each day. That's enough for us.
Some long-distance hikers, like the through hikers on the great American trails such as the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail, cover over 20 miles a day, including trails over mountain passes. We don't feel like doing that. Together we are 113 years old, and I have no longer have an urgent need to prove anything to anyone. Especially not to myself. This shit is supposed to be fun, and I would like to have enough time to enjoy nature as well as the hike.
When we break for lunch in the moor, I find a super-soft patch of moss I can lie down on. With a
view of little cottongrass tufts. Strangely, the entire moor is full of felled tree stumps. Later, I find out that trees were planted here to be harvested regularly and the wood
sold. They then discovered that the trees were destroying the moor. Now the trees are being completely removed. Humans, sigh. I think that's a good thing, even if it currently looks like a
meteorite has decimated the area.
The absolutely marvellous Falkirk Wheel
Visitors from all over the world travel to the Falkirk Wheel just to see this canal lock for ships, according to the John Muir Way website. However, the website also mentioned strenuous, steep paths that turned out to be nothing more than small mounds of earth, so I am somewhat skeptical of the PR hype. A world-famous canal lock...where?
Before we get to The Wheel, we are less-than-fascinated by the flat path running beside the only moderately exciting Forth & Clyde Canal which runs on for what seems like an eternity. In general, the John Muir Way is flat, passes through many villages with infrastructure, and is therefore, in my opinion, a very cool introduction to multi-day, long-distance hiking for anyone who has never done it. To be honest, though, I miss the wilderness, the mountains, and the adventure a bit. But then again, I haven't been to the famous Falkirk Wheel yet!
Suddenly, a huge structure comes into view, consisting of steel columns and rings and looking like the time machine in the movie Contact. I would not be surprised if it starts humming and glowing red. The entire apparatus rotates like a circling loop balancing two huge containers of water as if they carried raw eggs. Inside the containers, or gondolas, are found full-sized canal ships—with people. Wow! I have to get closer!
And just like that, I'm one of the millions of visitors from all over the world who come to see the Falkirk Wheel.
And holy moly, is it cool! The Falkirk Wheel is the only rotating ship lift in the world. It connects the Forth & Clyde Canal with the Union Canal, which is 80 feet higher and hangs in the air above us like a surreal broken off water slide. Before The Wheel was built, it took eleven locks and a whole day for ships to be lifted or lowered between the canals—now it takes about ten minutes. 1,200 tons of steel and 15,000 bolts were used in its construction – each bolt tightened by hand. Each gondola holds over 130,000 gallons of water and is kept precisely balanced by Archimedes' principle of displacement. I'm racing ahead. I'm really not an engineering geek, but this is awesome!
At the end of the day, one of Rand’s shoes fall apart. Luckily, we have the all-purpose trail solution for everything at the ready: duct tape. I have stomach cramps from the spicy veggie wrap I had last night. We are both a little exhausted, but also exhilarated, as we crash into bed for the night.
Long-distance hiking: Where is the grass greener?
Canals are a recurring feature on the first third of the John Muir Way. However, I'm really getting tired of them. Today it's another five miles of canals. We cheat a little and look for a parallel path through a forest so that we don't have to walk for hours on the tarmac beside the water, again. That said, we've now seen probably the eighth really cute duck family with ducklings. Spring in Scotland means chicks, lambs, calves, and above all wildflowers everywhere—and no midges yet.
Long-distance hikes allow you to see what a country really looks like—away from the highlights and sights on Trip Advisor. When you're driving, you often thunder from one attraction to the next and think, “Wow, it's much nicer here than in my home country!” But you're just wearing your tourist glasses and picking out the raisins from the nut cake. But the nuts taste good, too. Just different. When you travel through a country on foot, you experience how long a canal is, see that not every city is pretty, understand that there are landfills and dilapidated power plants everywhere, discover where the social hotspots are, and find that people here lead normal lives, just like everywhere else in the world—and they don't just lie romantically in a Highland castle playing bagpipes all day.
One thing in particular strikes us: the John Muir Way runs through the middle of Edinburgh, and
the closer we get to the big city, the less often we are greeted with a passing “Hi,” the more people rush past us, and the more anonymous the contact becomes.
Before we enter Edinburgh, we pass the Avon Aqueduct. It's not simply a huge, old stone viaduct, because above it is... a canal. And no, this time I'm not annoyed by yet another canal, because this one is pretty cool and crazy up here, 85 feet above the ground, with ships actually gliding back and forth. Like a giant Lionel model railway.
This is also roughly the midpoint of the John Muir Way. We have walked 62 miles. The duct tape is still holding, the canals are over. We're now heading for the sea. I'm at the point where I'm ready to drop all the website information, concerns, predictions and PR promises: in the end, nothing is what we expect. It is sometimes better, sometimes worse—but always surprising. Just go and see for yourself.
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