A SCOTTISH mum has told how she discovered a 2500-year-old island in the Highlands while exploring almost 300 lochs across the country.
Claire Young, 54, was “absolutely heartbroken” when she had to stop bagging Munros four-and-a-half years ago after suffering with persistent vertigo.
But the mum-of-two did not let go of her passion for adventure and instead set out to paddle 282 of the biggest freshwater lochs – a pursuit she likes to call “loch-bagging”.
“I thought if I can’t climb them [Munros] I’m going to paddle the lochs and look at them,” Young, who lives in Haddington in East Lothian, told The National.
“I’m a person that needs new things and exploring, so I looked for a list like the Munro list and thought maybe I could just paddle lots of different lochs and that would be a great way of seeing Scotland, but there wasn’t a list.
“I then found a site which could tell me the different surface areas of lochs and I made up my own list which took quite a bit of work.
“I put them all in a spreadsheet and thought ‘well, this could go on forever’. So, then I thought why don’t you just stop at 282 because it can reflect the Munro list, just as Munros are reflected in the lochs. I thought it was quite poetic.”
Young believes she is the first person to paddle so many lochs, with only oceanographer Sir John Murray documented to have travelled to any number close more than 100 years ago.
While paddling in Loch an Ruathair in Sutherland, Young was lucky enough to make a fascinating discovery of a stone crannog – an artificial island in a loch – that wasn’t on her map.
At the time she was lucky enough to be on a short archaeology course and was told by her instructor to get an expert to come out and look at what she had found, at which point things got exciting.
“It was a very basic fortified castle kind of thing, so he measured it all and he put it on Trove which is our database for archaeological sites in Scotland. It was wonderful to have that verified,” she said.
“I feel really privileged to have been a part of that experience. I quite like the idea of looking for more crannogs because I’m sure there are lots undiscovered and it’s a bit of a specialist thing.
She went on: “I had to contact the OS [Ordnance Survey] maps and they put it on their map.
“It had been on John Murray’s map but just before OS came to do a survey, they had put a reservoir on it and that lifted the water level and that hid the island, so no one saw it for about 60 years.”
Young, who works at the National Museum of Flight and spent 10 years as a classroom assistant, had climbed about 50 Munros before she had to stop due to becoming spontaneously ill at the top of climbs.
While heartbroken about having to stop doing what she loved, she told The National how exploring lochs had allowed her to see even more of Scotland than she ever would have by just Munro-bagging.
Her four-and-a-half year adventure took her right from Shetland to the Borders and, while having some frightening experiences in the wild along the way – including being charged at by a stag – she came away with a huge appreciation for so many corners of the country she had discovered.
Young, who did a lot of the exploring with her dog Marty, said she hopes she can inspire others to explore as much of the outdoors as they can.
“If you look at the Munro map, the Munros are over certain areas where the mountainous regions are but the wonderful thing about doing the lochs was that it was all over Scotland – right the way up to Shetland, right the way out to the Hebrides, in the Highlands, in the Borders,” Young said.
She went on: “It’s just been such a wonderful opportunity and I really hope other people are inspired to reach further out and go into more different parts of Scotland.
“There are very few places I’ve not been to now. It was this wonderful experience of learning more about Scotland and learning to love Scotland everywhere, not just Glasgow and Edinburgh, and find out about how people feel about their locality. It was great to see how people connected with their local lochs.
“The Land Reform Act is so great for us, it’s a wonderful thing Scotland has that not many countries have, that you can go out and paddle [anywhere] as long as you are respectful to the land. It’s the biggest playground we have and it’s fantastic.”
