I’ll admit it: going wild camping in January in Scotland does sound rather like the sort of trip that only wannabe Bear Grylls types would attempt. It conjures visions of a blizzard-stricken landscape besmirched by a lonely tent, inside which wretched campers practise Captain Oates impersonations and josh about cutting off toes with a blunt penknife.
However, it can be much more enjoyable than this as my friend, Carl, and I found as we lay snugly in our tents beside picturesque Whiteadder reservoir in East Lothian’s Lammermuir Hills. We’ve gone wild camping nearly every January for the last decade and the weather is often pretty wild (a -13ºC night on a heath in Suffolk will live long in the memory), so we were pleased to find a sheltered spot just as the last light was fading. Pleasantly tired after an afternoon’s tramping over moorland, we were lulled to sleep by the wind whistling over our protective little spinney and the honk of greylag geese flapping across the water. It was an experience we enjoyed alone. Edinburgh is less than 25 miles off but the only people we saw were a couple of farmhands on quad bikes.
We were taking on the little-known Herring Road, a 28-mile footpath that has existed since the 17th century. Each winter, when food inland was scarce, locals would carry salted herrings from Dunbar harbour across the hills to the village of Lauder. We had given ourselves a day and a half to do it, after an early ride train from London. There’s no accommodation along the way so wild camping – which is legal in Scotland, with a few caveats – is the only feasible method of doing it.
We’d been tempted to take a taxi the four miles from the coast to the hamlet of Halls, where the tarmac stops, but opted in the end for the full Herring Road experience. We were glad we did because, as we climbed slowly through pastureland, we were treated to expansive views of the conical volcanic plug of North Berwick Law, its seabound twin Bass Rock, and across the Firth of Forth to the Isle of May.
No one would claim that the Lammermuir Hills are Scotland at its most spectacular, and anyone who dislikes wind turbines would see their blood pressure shoot up here. However, the area is sparsely populated, all but roadless, and has a satisfyingly away-from-it-all feel. We spotted deer, red and black grouse and, on two occasions, mountain hares, their coats almost completely white in readiness for the snow. And although here and there we saw the v-shaped gouges made long ago by pack horses, the waymarked path was sufficiently vague in places for us to stray off it a couple of times by mistake.
One of the mantras of wild camping is “pitch late, leave early”. However, with the sun setting around 4pm, it meant that by 5pm we had already popped our tents up and were gazing up at Cassiopeia and Ursa Major while a good, thick soup bubbled on the stove. The forecast was for a low of 2C – chilly enough, but warmer than Scotland’s loftier regions that night and our sleeping bags were reassuringly stout.
The next day we spent in solitude, even when our path piggybacked the normally popular Southern Upland Way. We enjoyed the views until, buffeted by a gale, we took refuge in one of the huge cairns on Twin Law. Here we found an anonymous donor had left an emergency pack – fizzy drink, chocolate and, naturally, a bottle of whisky – but were glad we had no need to dip into it.
By evening, we had become so used to the wilderness that when we finally got to Lauder, the village looked like a sprawling metropolis. We camped on the fringes of a nearby wood and ambled in. The next morning we would take the bus from here to Edinburgh but, tonight, we treated ourselves to dinner and a pint at the Black Bull. The village was clearly prospering: herring, we noted, was not on the menu.
• Train tickets were provided by East Coast (London to Edinburgh single from £24); and ScotRail (Edinburgh to Dunbar single from £7.80). Bus from Lauder to Edinburgh £6.50 single
