I’d booked sleeping berths to Fort William, onward tickets for the scenic passenger line to Mallaig, and a double bed in a country-house hotel. But at the last moment she said she couldn’t come. So on my birthday I woke from a drugged sleep in an upper bunk on the Caledonian sleeper and there was one less person in my romantic Scottish Highlands sleeper-compartment fantasy than planned.
I climbed down the ladder, released the window shutter and looked out. We were travelling slowly across a frozen bog. In the far distance, mountains; their snowy peaks glowing orange in the weak early-morning sunlight. Between the strand of barbed wire demarcating railway property and these far-off peaks, not a single sign of human endeavour could be seen. I might have been looking out on the end of the Ice Age. A pair of red stags, looking anxiously at the train over their shoulders, cantered away. A red stag is a fine sight at the best of times. Two spotted from a train at sunrise on my birthday raised my spirits for the rest of the day.
Just over an hour later, after more bog and snowy mountain, we passed at a walking pace beside a new Morrison’s supermarket and lurched to a stop. Fort William. It was the end of the line for many, but not for me. I slid my suitcase into a left-luggage locker, scoffed a full Scottish in the station buffet, then boarded the last train (of two) bound for the fishing and ferry port of Mallaig. The scenery on offer through the windows of the impudent little two-carriage train, that plies back and forth between Fort William and Mallaig at the end of the West Highland line, was, if anything, even more spectacular.
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