A two-day Highlands walk to Britain’s most remote pub: the Old Forge, Knoydart

A challenging, awe-inspiring hike in north-west Scotland crosses wild terrain to a community pub like nowhere else

You have to really want a pint to walk to the Old Forge. “It’s a two-day hike from the last tarmac to Britain’s most remote pub,” Knoydart ranger Finlay Greig warns me on the phone. I am desperate. And not just through thirst. Across those hulking mountains, plunging glens and surging waters survives a community that has recently overcome the odds – yet again – to buy its only pub. It’s just the latest skirmish in a baleful battle waged for centuries to avoid last orders being called on a community that literally survives between heaven and hell.

Even finding the start of the walk at Kinloch Hourn is a herculean effort down the UK’s longest dead-end road, 22 miles from what is already the middle of nowhere. Those local names are daunting – Knoydart is a 55,000-acre peninsula sandwiched between the lochs of Nevis (heaven, in some Gaelic translations) and Hourn (hell). A friend drops me off – otherwise it’s an hour by taxi from Invergarry – and as the engine cuts, the mountains threaten, steel-blue waters close in and foreboding clouds scud across the sky. With no escape bar the sinewy trail, I’m struck by a familiar sense of highland awe. I’m dumbstruck by the scenery, yes, but my stomach is churning at the wildness I’m hurling myself into, and I feel incredulous, too, that humans have stubbornly managed to eke out a living here for thousands of years.