The Line Between Simplicity and Insanity

As soon as we hit the heather, it was like death by a thousand cuts

Dissecting almost the entire width of Cairngorms National Park, it’s only through sheer luck that the line avoids the most technically demanding features. There’s no denying though that these are Scotland’s wildest landscapes and having barely laced a pair of boots in the past year, Jenny knew that no mile would come easy.

‘I’m a keen hiker and I’m in the Mountain Rescue team, so I knew I had it in me. But on the first day, my ankles hurt so much, I was a bit like, oh, no, what if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew here? They’re going to have to help me limp off the hill. But thankfully, that didn’t happen. Your body soon adapts, doesn’t it. It’s so clever.’

Finding some form of a rhythm in the line, committed Jenny and Calum would do everything in their power to stick to it like glue.

‘Navigationally, it ended up being one of the toughest expeditions I’ve ever done,’ says Jenny. ‘You think you know what a straight line is and then you look ahead, and you have to sort of cut the land up into sections and you end up going in really strange directions because of the camber of the terrain. It sounds strange, but when we were traversing around a gully or a steep hillside, staying exactly on this straight line doesn’t necessarily mean walking in a straight line. But it was our sole focus, our entire purpose for being out there. We both have quite obsessive personalities. The things that we go off and do by ourselves, they mean nothing to anyone else, but we can get completely absorbed by them. Once I set my mind to it, I knew I’d stick to that line and I knew that Calum would too.’

For four days, this arbitrary line across scree and scrub was their entire world. Everything they’d experience before them on this one direct path. But with the novelty of the concept starting to fade, monotony would surely creep in.

‘The highs and lows weren’t extreme enough to counteract one another,’ she says. ‘We were never scaling this huge mountain that we weren’t sure if we would get up and it was never so hard that we felt like we couldn’t physically go on. We both knew that we could do it, we just had to keep going. It was a bit dull in places and we were travelling incredibly slowly – like some days we were averaging one mile an hour. It was laughable.’ 

Result of fatigue or tedium, soon enough, despite their best efforts, stepping off the line would be inevitable.

‘The one time we went majorly off, it was probably a couple hundred metres. We were on this flat plateau in some of the big mountains. We’d topped out. It was first thing in the morning and it was beautiful. We’d just been chatting and I looked down, like oh, no, we’re totally off the line. We’d just met the film crew and took our eye off the ball for literally like four minutes. And that was it. Way off.’

An integral part of any purist straight-lining mission is of course checking for accuracy. And as is the case in any niche scene worth its salt, the straight line disciples have constructed the tools to ensure precision is held to the highest standards.

‘There’s a website where you can upload your GPX file to check how straight your line is because this is a whole thing. And so Calum uploaded our route but because of that major navigation error on the plateau, we scored zero. But when he took that I and maybe there was like one or two that we just wiggled off slightly, we got we got like 90% or something. So over four days, with this huge line to follow, we were quite chuffed with that.’