Armed with what is becoming our traditional lunch (minus the cider) we set off to walk the 16 miles (26km) from Tain to Evanton today. No, there is no reason to have ever heard of Evanton. 

In this part of the world, most villages have fewer than 700 people so a single SPAR shop is all there is. If you get ~ 1,000 inhabitants, that seems to be when co-op and SPAR go hand in hand. We’ve seen one Tesco’s out of town near Wick and nearly went giddy with excitement when Tain had one in town last night. That’s probably thanks to the wealth that an entire distillery brings to the town. So lunch is typically a pastry of some description, a yoghurt based something and a couple of bits of fruit. The cider in this photo was courtesy of the fact that not every place we stop at has somewhere to eat out, and with a captive audience of a few hundred mad walkers each year, eating out is actually as expensive as Bath here. So fish-and-chips-and-cider is becoming our go to dinner. Thankfully burning 3,000 calories a day means that the range of food available to us in this part of Scotland is less cardiac emergency inducing than it would otherwise be. You wouldn’t believe how bad it gets when you add in the typical breakfast……

OK so now you know. And yes, this is a very worrying looking sausage. Mark ordered this breakfast with a poached egg rather than a fried one and the waiter looked like we’d asked him to tightrope walk across Loch Ness. I did dare Mark to re-order the breakfast without an egg and then add an additional portion of “poached egg on toast” without the toast, but we didn’t want to see a grown man cry. Fried it is then.

Fried almost everything to be honest, is pretty much the rule here, although we are still lacking a deep fried Mars bar experience. Deep fried pizza and deep fried pineapple have both been on menus we’ve seen, but the Mars bar remains elusive. Steak is fried, not grilled, I can’t think of one meal we’ve had yet that hasn’t had something fried in it.

So fuelled by fried food, we set off for today’s excitement. Unfortunately, the route was not exactly wild. For about 8 miles it looked like this:

Then for ~7 miles it looked like this:

Before we had some real drama…..

That’s the drama over. Back to being excited by seeing a pavement as we came into Evanton.

So, what do we actually do/talk about all day when the view gives us nearly nothing I hear you ask? (I have actually been asked this, I’m not making it up.)

Well when we stopped to eat the Chelsea bun, Mark told me about the Chelsea buns he used to have at school, which were proper home made, huge ones, oozing lard and sugar and contributing heavily to the modern obesity statistics no doubt. This is not the only gem from Mark’s childhood food repertoire, it’s a miracle he made it to adulthood just on his diet alone.

When we’ve waved and said good afternoon super cheerily to pairs of cyclists who we think may be making the same journey as us in reverse, the conversation is simple: a realisation that both pairs of people think the other pair are idiots. Why on earth would you want to cycle the length of the UK? My opinion – too much uphill to make that fun on a bike; Mark’s opinion – too much saddle to make that fun uphill or downhill; joint opinion – not enough challenge doing the whole length of the UK in around two weeks. The cyclists are probably 5 miles down the road already.

I’ve wondered if the foxgloves by the side of the road will grow at home if I take some of the seed pods back with me. Mark’s chatted up a random goat, so I’ve obviously checked that he still thinks goats are pure evil as they have horizontal slits for pupils. 

Apparently they still are.

We’ve discussed the proportion of male versus female UK prime ministers since we were old enough to know who this was (too many versus not enough); the number we can remember anything about (2) and the lamentable selection of UK and US leaders through Covid. That ended the political broadcast.

We wondered whether growing up in a remote part of Scotland with parents who hold very strong views, either against or for acceptable social norms, results in children with the same views, or whether access to the internet has levelled this out? What is the balance of nurture versus nature when nurture may be a polarised view of the world through social media rather than a physical social network?

This led us to the often visited topic of conversation on the value of a secondary school education in the UK. Mark has been an amazing secondary school teacher for 10 years and with seven university degrees between the two of us, we have certainly benefitted from the UK’s educational system. However, both of us are less sure that the national curriculum forced onto your average 14 year old pupil, combined with a compulsory breadth of subjects is setting them up for a lifetime of curiosity and fulfillment. We discussed how AI now can probably lead children through a subject, retaining their wonder and curiosity and build their learning confidently. At the same time it can probably do this using an interface tailored to the individual child’s preferences and particular needs. AI without much modification from an existing online chat facility is likely better than many newly trained teachers. Given the wide access that most of the world has to AI (bearing in mind that many countries without even a viable road or transport network rely heavily on mobile telecommunications instead to get anything done) the barriers to teaching children are not because children can’t get to school buildings any more. However, being in a school building does give you a physical social network.

So maybe the weirdest thing about being in this remote part of Scotland is not seeing more than one family walking along the streets, not seeing kids playing outside houses or in the farms in these photos. Most villages along this coast relied heavily on herring fishing until automation and the few remaining smart herring swimming off elsewhere, meant a whole industry collapsed. Population halved in most villages and by the looks of the building names, the bank, the post office the pharmacy and the schools went too, leaving no reason or training for young adults growing up in the area to stay. The median age in these villages is now 51 compared to 37 in places like Glasgow. It’s a sobering thought that although it looks like herring spawning grounds are returning to northern Scotland, people are not.

However Evanton has bucked this trend, with a growing younger population engaging with opportunities to work on sustainable energy nearby and/or commute to Inverness. So maybe Evanton one day will be renowned as the town that proved the value of a growing, physical social network.

Our immediate plan tonight though was to drink the extra can of cider we have both been carrying all day. Our backpacks are far too heavy and we’re looking forward to getting to Inverness tomorrow and posting some things back home.

Cheers

Distance – 26km