Guidebook to John O'Groats Trail is a new milestone on long-distance walk
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
With the first guidebook due to be published next month, John Davidson spoke to co-author and John O'Groats Trail founder Jay Wilson about the journey
They say all journeys start with a single step, and it's fair to say the 145-mile John O'Groats Trail has come a long way since it was launched nearly seven years ago.
The route, which connects walkers with an off-road route between Inverness and Caithness, was first conceived by Jay Wilson, the chairman of the Friends of the John O'Groats Trail.
The American had come to walk this section of the popular Land's End to John O'Groats route and ended up staying in the Highlands, then kick-starting the development of this trail.
Now he is the co-author of a new guidebook due to be published in February, the culmination of years of work alongside Andy Robinson, the author of The End to End Trail – Land's End to John O'Groats on Foot.
"We've been working on this book for almost as long as we've been working on the trail," Jay said. "Back in 2016, we launched the trail – 2014 was the first time I walked it – and we struggled for any publicity we could get back then.
"A year or two in, Andy Robinson – who had already written his End to End guide – was looking for a guidebook for the John O'Groats Trail, which he had started to hear of, and he asked me if we had one available.
"I said there was one in the works, and I think he could tell by the sound of my voice that really meant it was just a twinkle in my eye!"
We want to make it especially accessible from the villages and towns along the way so that more local walkers can use and enjoy their own coastline
With the increasing popularity of the John O'Groats Trail before Covid, the small group of volunteers were posting out a guide that had been produced to keep people on track when they came to walk the route.
That was the precursor to this full-colour detailed guidebook being published by Cicerone.
Jay explains that the number of walkers on the trail is now higher than it was before that first lockdown, with a combination of long-distance walkers as well as local people.
He said: "People are coming from around the world, I'm not really sure how they hear about us but I guess they do their research – they come from North America, Australia, New Zealand, all across the Continent. They seem to always be looking for a new long-distance trail and one that's maybe less walked than some other ones.
"We had two sets of walkers from Milan a couple of years ago who ordered our little self-printed guide, and of course they give us their address so we can ship it to them. I looked up their addresses and they lived about a kilometre away from each other, so I wrote to one of them and said, 'do you know so-and-so' and they said 'no, we've never heard of them'. It was just completely random that the very same week two people who lived so close had ordered the book.
"We love meeting walkers when they come here and I'm excited about the guidebook coming out – soon we'll see people walking the trail with the guidebook in hand," Jay added.
The guide splits the trail into 14 stages plus an additional three "bonus stages" which provide a link from Drumnadrochit on the Great Glen Way, a popular option for many End to End walkers.
It includes a detailed description of each day's walking, along with custom-drawn stage-by-stage route maps and photographs of key points of interest.
"Cicerone was very kind in letting us self-publish what was to become their guidebook," Jay said. "We've been selling those – it's more of a large pamphlet than a book – for several years and they're well out of date by now because we've put all our efforts into getting the proper guidebook published.
"I'm really pleased with the way the maps have come out and that's 100 per cent Andy's work. That style of mapping is almost reminiscent of Wainwright – it's not hand drawn but it's the fact that the directions are on the map, so there's no flipping backwards and forwards between the directions and the map that you often have in guidebooks.
"They read from bottom to top as you travel north along the trail, so it's a really clever design, and that's the way Andy wrote his End to End guide, so we carried forward with that in our guidebook."
And while the book marks a significant step along the way, work on the ground has not stopped. That's thanks in no small part to the new manager of the John O'Groats Trail, Ken McElroy, who took up the position in September last year.
"We continue to make improvements, even over the winter – we're still building stiles and bridges, talking about a couple of new sets of steps, so really just trying to make the trail more pleasant for long-distance walkers and more accessible for everyone," Jay said.
"The project overall was conceived as completing a missing link for long-distance walkers but it's also become incredibly popular with local walkers and we want to make it especially accessible from the villages and towns along the way so that more local walkers can use and enjoy their own coastline.
"Ken's been fantastic, he's creative and has so many other skills that we need and the fact that he's working full-time is a real game-changer. He's made a huge difference both to the development and to the promotion of the trail and he's only four months in post."
- Walking the John O'Groats Trail by Andy Robinson and Jay Wilson is due to be published in February by Cicerone, priced £16.95.
