cameras and recording equipment. He offered me a pole, but I
declined. It was a beautiful day in June, and the countryside was
blindingly green. This is one of the most popular day hikes in
Glasgow, and I figured the trail would be dry and solid. I’m used to
real mountains, after all.
That was my first surprise about rambling in Scotland: there
aren’t really trails. It’s so damp and green that the grass grows faster
than human feet can stamp it out. One walks on tufts and clumps of
sedges, moss, rock and clover. Straight up, and then straight down.
“This will get your heart rate up,” he said. It did, for about an
hour. The landscape was ridiculously, lavishly beautiful. We vaulted
ancient stone fences lined with blossoming pink foxgloves. Sheep
grazed in the fields and a kestrel circled overhead. At the top, we
came upon a small group of Boy Scouts. Behind them stretched a 360-
degree view of the soft green carpet of Scotland, piling up toward the
nearby West Highlands. The color suffused through the land, erasing
the roads and houses.
We ate some sammies and took pictures. Before we’d gone very
far on the way down, I banana-slipped, scraping my hands but saving
the notebook. Mitchell wordlessly offered a pole again, and this time
I accepted. I asked him why rambling, as they call it, is so crazy
popular in Scotland. (“Hiking,” a term reserved for overnight
backpacking, is considered a bit of a hippie thing.) Mitchell shrugged
and said it’s probably because of the country’s friendly and ancient
right-to-roam laws, which are more lenient than elsewhere in the U.K.
and allow you to tromp anywhere across private land, provided you
don’t steal the sheep, dig up the gardenias, or hunt the landlord’s
stags. Walking is the most popular sport in Scotland, with Scots
taking 2.2 million short walks and 1.8 million long walks per year. I
didn’t see figures for attendant tick bites, but Mitchell says he digs
two or three ticks out of his skin every year.
But it wasn’t until we ran into a couple eagerly descending on