Rannoch Moor

Rannoch is 14 miles of peat bog and lochans, and the lonely cry of the curlew. It's the maze of lakes, and the black streams winding between. It's ten thousand tussocks between you and the distant railway.

Rannoch's where in Stevenson's story Davie Balfour and Alan Breck dodged the soldiers through the heat of a summer's day, in the very year 1752 that, in reality, those same redcoats heaved their picks, and wheeled their barrows, and slapped at the midges as they built Major Caulfeild's road towards the Devil's Stair. Rannoch is where in 1889 seven railway surveyors – including Sir Robert McAlpine himself – wandered a day and a night in a snowstorm.

Rannoch is the way of the raiding MacDonalds, and the cattle drovers. Today's main road skirts anxiously around its edge. A few steps off the A82 your feet sink ankle-deep in black slime, and you're lost between two lochans. The familiar hills stand small around the edge. The beauty of Rannoch is water, and bare rock, and grass stems bending under the frost.

The photos were taken in autumn and early winter; several of them on a two-day crossing of the moor in December 2012. Colour pics (different ones) of the Moor here