Dances to a different beat: Enchanting An Teallach*

You know that this mountain is anal about its privacy, when ten paces up you are faced with wooden fences along with subtle hints in the form of signboards pointing the way home. Your home.

Being intrepid I looked squint-eyed at the skewed signpost and hoisted my backside up the fence. Only to have my path blockaded by the Sheep Guard. All looking directly at me. I am dead.

Thankfully, I was still wearing jeans that had seen several mountains, mud flats and bogs, but no washing machines. The Sheep Guard wished they had had their Darth Vader masks with them. They were, ahem, negotiated, and the moat encircling An Teallach's abode was breached via this sturdy wooden construct.

I finally arrived at the gates of The Great Wilderness, of which An Teallach is the forward outpost (all these war-specific terms are making me hanker for some computer games). This area between An Teallach in the North and Slioch in the South is aptly named thus. There was not a soul in sight, but then again, souls are said to be invisible. This was a country fit to be inhabited by goblins, elves, and other such buck-toothed, green-panted, pointy-hatted, four-foot-nothings. However, in the eight or so hours of my valuable time that I gave to its inspection, no welcoming party, heck not even an advance party, owing allegiance to the Wicked Witch of the North descended to intercept me.

So, unhindered and undeterred I stumbled on past cairns

and muddy bogs with piles of rotting bones

dragging my game leg and carrying my old war wound heroically. Applause and sympathies please. Donations preferrred and accepted. Thank you in post.**

Finally, I arrived at the source of all evil: Water, streaming down into nothingness,

and appearing out of a mountain melting veritably in front of me.

I followed the source of this evil stream to the corrie of An Teallach, where glaciers had hammered their brains out to forge a beautiful repository for gloriously blue cold water.