The Way doesn’t actually enter Drymen, it skirts around the eastern edge before turning and heading off to the north.  As we left the village ahead of us i n the dazzling sunshine we could make out the outline of a lone hiker tottering under the weight of her backpack, occasionally stopping to rearrange her load. We quickly caught up with our photographer from yesterday morning, who although cheerful, seemed to us to be finding her load a heavy one. To my eye she had a sixty-five litre pack that was ready to burst. She told us she hadn’t just come to walk the Way but spend about a month exploring the UK and our impression was that she had brought all of her supplies with her. We quickly outpaced her, indeed we were outpacing most of the other hikers that we met on these early stages.   During our preparation for the walk, as we don’t have anything that could realistically be called a hill in Essex, Chris had slowly but surely upped the speed that we walk at. We did the same before walk

Drymen, where we are headed this evening isn’t pronounced how you might expect. This is one of those quirks that quickly becomes normal in Scotland.   When the locals say Drymen it rhymes with women or swimmin’,  keeping  the emphasis on the beginning of the word and it is said with pace, there’s no lingering over the syllables. So our attempt, which was basically looking at the word and saying what saw ie ‘Dry - men’ was wrong on just about every level.   Leaving the Glengoyne distillery we were walking on an easy path across a flat plain. However we were by this stage becoming aware of the vast numbers of fellow walkers and began to worry about the meal options for the evening. Chris looked online at the various hostelries and decided that he liked the look of one in particular so he booked a table. The hills continued to offer an enticing prospect to our right but the path ignored their siren call. Very quickly we arrived at a road and beside it, handily placed for a lunchtime stop