Over the stippled swell of the Firth of Clyde soars a gannet. A pair of long, black-tipped wings catches the late-August light as the bird tilts on the breeze. It’s on fish patrol – curving low then rising high, scanning the waves, only ever a heartbeat away from a missile-plunge for food but never catching the moment. Beyond, the island of Wee Cumbrae is humped and windswept in the distance.
I’m sat on a rock on a rough coastal track on the Isle of Bute. Looking seawards, I swig my water and stare over towards the folds of the mainland. It’s a chilly Wednesday morning and the green hills look deserted. The sky seems huge and vaulted. Somehow, this view is mine. A tiny brown frog moves through the scrub below me: hop, hop, stop, hop, hop, stop.
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Bute pulls off quite the trick. Just three hours ago I was stepping off the Caledonian Sleeper into a packed Glasgow Central Station, the concourse a hive of PA announcements and coffee queues. An hour-long rail journey along the River Clyde followed (highlight: a damp rainbow arcing over the Trossachs to the north), before a 35-minute ferry crossing from Wemyss Bay in a brisk wind.
And now? I’m half an hour into Bute’s West Island Way with hiking boots on my feet, cliffs at my back and nothing for company but a frog. The air is salty and the footpath is empty. This swift journey from inner city to secluded headland would be enough to leave me dizzy were it not for the fact the island exudes a kind of lush, grounding calm. Bute is 15 miles long, five miles wide and has a scattered population of fewer than 6,500 people. As far back as the mid-16th century, Bishop John Leslie described the place as “an elegant and trimme Ile… induet with great fertilie.” He wasn’t wrong.
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What is the West Island Way?
The West Island Way – not to be confused with the mainland’s far more popular West Highland Way, which it trades a pun on – was founded 25 years ago. It looks a little odd on the map, consisting of a loop at either end of the island and a connecting central section, but it was the first waymarked long-distance path on a Scottish island and gives walkers a grandstand overview of what makes Bute, well, such a beaut (that’s it – puns done).
The route is formally classified as one of Scotland’s Great Trails, covers 29.8 miles (48km) in total and can be done across two, three or four days.
The ‘Naples of the North’
I begin in Kilchattan Bay, a wide sweep full of twittering oystercatchers in the south of the island. The houses on the shorefront are big sandstone affairs with hydrangeas in the flowerbeds and porcelain dogs in the windows. Within a few minutes of walking south, however, there’s not a garden to be seen – just a rambling coastline of ferns and basalt outcrops. The weather is set fair, the day is quiet and the century-old Rubh’ an Eun lighthouse looms ahead on the foreshore. I’m smitten already.
Bute hasn’t always been so serene. From the 19th century onwards, thanks to its easily reachable location and Gulf Stream climate, the island attracted up to 10,000 summer visitors a day, drawn by the prospect of donkey rides, ice creams, long beaches and a tourist-friendly port town, namely Rothesay. Nicknames for the island once included the Madeira of Scotland, the Costa del Clyde and, improbably, the Naples of the North.
This visitor influx dwindled as the economic boom of the 1950s broadened the British public’s travelling horizons, but even today the island retains a sense of old-time grandeur, evident in everything from the steady elegance of Rothesay Bay to the ornate Victorian loos that greet passengers off the ferry.
All of which barely hints at Bute’s longer history. As a flattish, fertile, sheltered island at the mouth of the Clyde – making it the very definition of a tactical base – it was fought over for centuries by the Scots and the Norwegians and spent substantial periods under Viking control.
Going back a few more millennia, meanwhile, there’s also evidence of Neolithic settlers, in the shape of cairns and other prehistoric remains.
Such are the thoughts I’m mulling over as I walk slowly around the island’s southern headland. On the seaweed-strewn shingle beach of Glencallum Bay I pass seven horned sheep, who eye me nonchalantly, then shortly afterwards I linger above the greenish shimmer of a cove, waiting for otters that never appear. Before long the Isle of Arran looms into view, a wild mass of mountains across the water.
Only when I reach the 12th-century ruins of St Blane’s Chapel do I see other walkers, a couple from Edinburgh sitting in the graveyard and staring across tufty slopes towards Arran.
“It’s a peaceful place, isn’t it?” says one, in greeting. There are rooks roosting in nearby sycamores and the island we’re on feels adrift. “It’s beautiful,” I reply.
An hour or so later, following the track north again, I crest a hill to see waves rolling in and Bute laid out below me: a sun-struck world of crop fields, drystone dykes and distant pine groves. By the time I descend back to Kilchattan Bay, there are mallards in the shallows and V-shaped fleets of geese flying inland. The path leads me alongside a community orchard heavy with pale apples, then through stubbled wheatfields.
My bed for the night is within the solid whitewashed walls of the Kingarth Hotel. “It’s been a country inn since 1786,” landlady Maria Tettmar tells me that evening, pouring an Argyll-brewed ale. The bar is lively and the tables are filled with diners. “My husband and I came up here from Sussex and liked Bute so much we stayed.” I ask if the move was recent. “Not really,” she says, smiling. “1997.”
Three-day adventure
I’m tackling the West Island Way across three days, which means my breakfast-fuelled hike the next morning takes me first to the windswept loveliness of Stravannan Bay – the sand just soft and wet enough to take a print – then leads into the interior, past dune-roaming cows and hefty hay bales.
The trail heads along the raised spine of the island, displaying Bute in its late-summer finery. In the foreground are raggle-taggle hawthorn hedges, drowsy bees and the jewel-like glisten of ripe blackberries; in the distance are surf-flecked bays, tiny tractors and fast-moving clouds. The breeze on the higher sections feels fresh and life-giving.
I stop at the lofty trig point of Lord James’ Ride, reading that charabancs used to rattle along this same track with post-war sightseers. Today I see no-one until a 12-strong walking group passes the other way with cheery hellos (“hey, pal!”) and off-lead labradors.
On returning to sea level I reach the banks of glassy Loch Ascog, where an oak trunk provides the perfect seatback for a sandwich stop. Nearby, the larger Loch Fad is where the Highland Boundary Fault runs right across the island. To the south of the loch are fertile volcanic soils, while to the north are more rugged landscapes, formed of the metamorphic schists that shape much of the Highlands.
It’s to the north that I’m heading for the final leg of the hike, though not before an overnight stop at Rothesay’s Victorian-era Glenburn Hotel. A total of 107 steps lead from street level to the hotel veranda – a punishment after a day on the trail – although the view from the top, of Rothesay Bay and the muscular Cowal Peninsula beyond, is superb.
Ending on a high
The last part of the West Island Way leads me first to Ettrick Bay on Bute’s west coast, where 4,000 spectators reportedly used to come for horse-racing on the sands. This morning it’s empty save for puffer-jacketed dog walkers and a few ringed plovers scuttling through the tide. It’s mighty easy to get used to, the sense of having an island almost to yourself.
This happy isolation is only exacerbated by the miles that follow: I cross fields of squelchy earth, pass farmyards of questionable fragrance and trek through forests of towering pines, all the while heading north. At Rhubodach, a tiny harbour almost on Bute’s uppermost tip, I watch a ferry plying the 400m journey across the Kyles of Bute to and from the Cowal Peninsula. Here, the towering slopes of the mainland feel so close you could almost reach out and touch them.
The final stage of the way heads across high and often boggy moorland. The long grass is scattered with purple devil’s-bit scabious and the views, even under leaden clouds, stretch triumphantly in all directions. Arran reappears, glowering to the west. As I straggle elatedly towards route’s end at the village of Port Bannatyne, two herons flap slowly above the harbour.
I’m dog-tired when I finish (the pint I’m served at the community-owned Anchor Tavern is, somewhat ironically, named ‘Easy Trail’) but buzzing with an intense natural high. And I’m left to ponder something that even now seems impossible. How can an island hiking route so dramatic and all-enfolding – and above all, so quiet – be barely 90 minutes by public transport from Scotland’s largest city?
