Loch Eriboll’s charms have not always been immediately apparent to visitors. Servicemen stationed here during the Second World War observed the fierce desolation, its propensity for gusting winds and venomous rain, and renamed it “Loch ’Orrible”. 

Tonight it’s certainly living up to that moniker. A vicious southwesterly is rattling the scree on the bald slopes above. The rain is a few degrees off horizontal. And down by the wave-buffeted shore of Britain’s deepest sea loch I’m wriggling inside my hammock tent like an antelope slowly expiring inside an African rock python. My phone is dead. I couldn’t tell you for certain what day it is. I’m alone, isolated – and quite astonishingly content.

Luxury, like beauty, is subjective. For some it’s Dior and deep-tissue massages; others, turning left and tasting menus. What I craved with an urgency that surprised my phlegmatic, middle-aged self were the luxuries of time and space. When a restructure at work saw my deadline-regimented, increasingly desk-based role as travel editor of The Times and Sunday Times dissolved (“in travel journalism, you keep your bag packed,” as the old gag goes), I suddenly had a generous tranche of the former. As for the latter? I knew exactly where to find that.

As a (putative) travel professional, you’re regularly interrogated about your bucket list. Specifically, what tops it. Cue a look of practised solemnity, a touch of performative chin-stroking, then some pompous musing about the singularity of the light on the Antarctic peninsula. It’s what you imagine people want to hear. Yet, hand on heart, it’s always been somewhere far closer for me: Scotland – the camp-anywhere, spiritual home of escapism, encompassing some of the loftiest, remotest and most sparsely populated pockets of Europe.

The route I mapped out was of fag-packet simplicity and vaunting ambition. Glasgow to Dundee is 65 miles as the crow flies: I resolved to stretch it out into a 1,000-mile, broadly clockwise circumnavigation of the country by bike, kayak and on foot: first following the interlocking West Highland Way, Great Glen Way and North Coast 500, then striking out east from Inverness in a coastal loop around Aberdeenshire. On the map, the route resembled a giant ampersand. A more imaginative mate christened it the Proclaimers odyssey. “I would walk 500 miles – and I would bike/kayak 500 more…”. 

I packed little more than my hiking boots, tent and details of a couple of rental companies for a kayak (the Great Glen Way) and road bike (the NC500). And I stripped back the itinerary to a lone commitment: a train home four weeks hence. I’d spent years espousing the merits of slow travel. Now, I was finally having a stab.