Kingshouse to Kinlochleven

This section of the West Highland Way illustrate its strengths and weaknesses. The first hour traverses a flank of upper Glen Coe on an old military road, in staggering scenery but never out of earshot of, and sometimes right beside, the endlessly busy A82 road. In the panoply of Scottish walks, it is eminently missable.  Your enjoyment-average will be increased if you cut this stage, and start where the Way turns away from the road.

The trail then turns north at a sharp corner of the road, up a beautiful but still noisy hillside of grass and heather which becomes the steep but not wildly demanding zig-zag known as the Devil's Staircase. The road is by now visible but no longer heard, a minor blot on the huge and wonderful glen, looking across at its famous, sheer southern corner-buttresses, Buachaille Etive Mor. 

It doesn't take all that long to get to a low pass in the grassy ridge, and you are soon  gazing on a new landscape to the north across the deep Leven valley, which debouches pretty quickly into the sea-loch of Loch Leven, to a wonderful series of ridges and summits, scooped back by fine corries, which make you quiver with the excitement of the possible walking. Behind them looms the high, bleak, flat top of one of Ben Nevis' close neighbours. A really lovely view.

You descend gently on a good path, winding around the mountain sides for some way. To the north-east, a long, wide, high, treeless valley appears, with the beginnings of huge and strange Rannoch Moor at its far end and a shallow-looking reservoir in its bottom.

The wooded depths of the Leven valley gradually appear, and then the outskirts of Kinlochleven itself, far below. The trail then enters sparklingly pretty birch woods, and meets the swirling pool that is the top of the Kinlochleven hydro system. The trail joins a steep and occasionally slippery track in the woodlands, dropping pleasantly enough to the old power station and then the village itself. 

See William Mackesy’s account of this walk.

See more, including practical information, at our West Highland Way and Ben Nevis and Glen Coe Area pages.