Into the wild in a tux: a Highlands adventure by luxury sleeper train

In It Had to Be Tough, his history-cum-memoir of UK Commando training during the second world war, veteran James Dunning vividly describes new volunteers’ arrival at their Scottish Highlands boot camp. “No matter what the weather, rain or shine, as the new arrivals tumbled out of the train, in marching order and carrying their rifles and kitbags, the orders ran out like a burst of machine-gun fire: ‘Kit bags on the truck and get fell in on the road.’ No ‘cushy’ ride in trucks for the 7 miles to Achnacarry, their training was to start right there and then.”

Eighty years later, the arrival of the first batch of Highland Survival Adventure customers at the same station, Spean Bridge, was a more leisurely affair. Though we too were due to receive instruction at Achnacarry, it wasn’t until the next day, and besides, we were too busy polishing off the Rannoch Moor venison loin, skilfully paired with a 2016 Yohan Lardy Moulin-à Vent Les Michelons, even to stir from the dining car.

This was the Royal Scotsman, after all, a burgundy-liveried luxury hotel on wheels, complete with a spa, wall-to-wall wood panelling and a maximalist repertoire of cutlery; the food was flawless, the booze unlimited and, having embarked at Edinburgh only about seven hours before, the passengers — 34 in total, including nine booked for the HSA — were still getting to know each other. 

“It’s like a three-day house party,” is what Fredrik Laseen, general manager of the Royal Scotsman, had told me earlier that day, when we all assembled in Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel for an ice-breaking glass of champagne. Given that I was travelling alone and didn’t know any of these people, I’d had my doubts, but by Spean Bridge the flow of fine wine and conversation and the friendly, attentive service were fast eroding them. 

‘For formal dinners,’ the website advised, ‘a dark suit and tie, tuxedo or national costume such as a kilt are advised for men’

That shouldn’t have come as a surprise: the Royal Scotsman has been running for nearly 40 years (the last 16 under the ownership of the company now called Belmond, since 2019 part of LVMH’s luxury empire) and so has had ample time to refine its offering.

The HSA, though, is a new departure. Presumably the aim is to broaden the brand’s appeal, to draw in customers eager for more testing experiences than a distillery tour or a climb up the steps of the Glenfinnan Monument. 

It certainly allows the Scotsman to capture a fuller range of the possibilities offered by its routes, which stretch from Edinburgh up the west coast to Plockton, just across the sea from Skye, and up the east coast to Tain, north of Inverness. The Highlands’ stirring history and single malts are second to none, but the region is as much known for being a vast playground for hikers, climbers and anyone whose idea of fun includes the possibility of blisters and hypothermia.

That’s how I first came to know that soggy, sublime part of the world. In the 1980s, my family would set off thrillingly early from our home in Nottingham — where I’d goggle at the small-hours streets, eerily deserted beneath Home Ales hoardings — to make the long drive along ever narrower roads through ever more spectacular scenery to holiday caravans owned by crofters in Diabaig, Inverasdale, Stoer.

From there we’d set off to explore boggy, boulder-strewn moorland where cottongrass quivered in the breeze, skim stones across resoundingly silent mountain lochs and — despite the fine, drenching rain, the swarming midges and a memorably dour injunction not to hang washing out on a Sunday — delight in the rugged, emphatically non-Midlands landscape. As an adult, I tried higher-end variations on these holidays with my own kids, though tiny ticks seem to have left a deeper impression than mighty Munros. 

The upshot was that packing for the outdoors was a breeze: broken-in boots, check; waterproofs, check; hiking trousers, check. . . check, check, check. It was packing for the rest of the trip that was tricky.

“For dinners, smart casual is appropriate,” the Royal Scotsman website advised. “For formal dinners and gala dinners, a dark suit and tie, tuxedo or national costume such as a kilt are advised for men.” An abyss of wardrobe dilemmas opened up. What if I was the only one weedy enough to go with the suit? Or, conversely, the only one in a tux, like the dope who missed the WhatsApp about the party not being fancy dress after all?

After much head-scratching — and some reassurance from Laseen — I settled on the tux. And as the trip wore on, it turned out that I wasn’t the only one with sartorial issues: a kindred spirit confessed that he too had wrestled more with the indoor than with the outdoor gear.

At the final night’s formal dinner, one guest — mortified the next day once he’d realised his mistake — wore his hired kilt back to front. If anyone noticed, they were too polite to say so: not the space tourism entrepreneur, not the brace of wildlife photographers, not the tech investor, the brand guru, the ethics professor or the asset manager; not the Belgians, the Americans, the Russians, the Canadians, the German, the Ukrainian; not the young couple fretting about their children’s imminent birthdays, not the grandma and her vivacious granddaughter, not the amicably divorced ex-husband and ex-wife. 

As more than one person observed, it had all the makings of a vintage murder mystery, and indeed Belmond also owns the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express. But, as Laseen had predicted, it all gelled congenially. The granddaughter’s 30th birthday was celebrated; group photographs were taken; contact details were exchanged.

That all this took place on the regular railway network added a surreal tinge: ScotRail trains slid past, their passengers eyeing us as we lingered over breakfast in the plush dining cars. The run-up to the formal dinner coincided with a passage through Glasgow; tux-clad on the observation car’s open-air platform, I watched industrial units — Roofing, Packaging Solutions, Colour Printing — and graffitied cuttings go by, like Noël Coward on a fact-finding mission.

The Survival Adventure ran across two days. It was orchestrated by Wildnis, an outdoor adventure company founded by ex-British army personnel, and the first stop for its Land Rovers, after we’d disembarked from the train and signed our disclaimer forms, was Spean Bridge’s Commando Memorial — a trio of watchful giants in second world war battledress, gazing southwards across the valley to the cloud-draped expanse of Ben Nevis, the UK’s highest mountain. 

Between 1942 and 1945, thousands of men underwent Commando training in nearby Achnacarry, an estate that is the seat of Clan Cameron and was, Dunning says, “without any reservations. . . one of, if not the finest of all the Allied special training centres established in the second world war”. Among its gruelling, sometimes lethal array of exercises were 36-hour expeditions across the moors and up to the top of Ben Nevis. “This country was their training ground,” runs the inscription on the memorial. Next to it is a small garden of remembrance, with crosses and photos in tribute to generations of servicemen: Achnacarry veterans who made it into their nineties, men killed in Afghanistan and Iraq who never reached their thirties.

From there we drove to Achnacarry, or at least nearby. Once parked, we crunched up a forest trail for a couple of miles, donning and undonning waterproofs as the rain clouds toyed with us, pausing to pick tiny wild strawberries and blueberries, and watching twists of vapour curling against the sheer pine-clad hillsides in the saturated air.

Then, as we broke through the trees, and higher, barer vistas beckoned, we changed course and descended to a thunderous waterfall, all foam and white noise, underpinned with the bass drum of water on rock. Venturing on to a slick rock platform halfway down, you could get drenched in seconds by the spray. Our guides — ex-Marines George, Mike and Rory and survival consultant Eliza — told us that the previous day’s heavy rain had swollen the waterfall from a trickle to a torrent.

Descending further, we threaded our way along a sinuous woodland path, where Eliza gathered wood sorrel, clover-like and with a sharp green-apple tang, from among moss-grown boulders. As we went, the roar of the waterfall gave way to the softer gush of the river it was feeding, the Arkaig, its black water flowing swiftly past as we emerged from the trees.

The task now was to cross it, which we did via a zip wire slung between two massive pines that would have been likewise used by trainee Commandos in the 1940s. A regular exercise, Mike told us, involved crossing by rope, then swimming back, then crossing by rope again, all amid explosions and machine-gun fire using live ammunition. A nearby garden wall (this part of the river is just downstream from the Camerons’ castle) still bears the traces, in the form of a crater gouged into the red bricks by countless bullets.

As Belmond clientele, however, we had an easier time: once across, we stepped into a canvas bell tent containing a portable wood stove and a ring of director’s chairs, where we were plied with whisky sours garnished with the wood sorrel.

Nearby, Tom, Wildnis’s chef, tended flatbreads and a dish of locally caught salmon over a fire pit. To sharpen my appetite, I elected to go for a swim in the Arkaig: it was bracingly but not brutally cold, and deep enough to luxuriate in, thrashing my limbs against nothing but peaty water. Inevitably I lingered too long; once dried, I was glad to un-numb my fingers at the stove, with a plate of succulent, smoky salmon and a glass of birch-infused vodka to hand.

After lunch, we should have ended our jaunt by packrafting down the river, past gentle rapids and into Loch Lochy, but the same rain that had made the waterfall so impressive had also made the rapids too fierce for novices. “Mother Nature’s done me no favours here,” sighed George. We had to content ourselves with learning how to make a fire using a knife and flint, with lichen, wood shavings and twigs as kindling. Or trying to. The overwhelming lesson was that, despite the best efforts of high-net-worth individuals, ex-Marines and survival consultants — despite frenzied scraping and showers of sparks, despite incredulity that something this simple could defeat us — it’s not easy to make a fire.

The next day, the Royal Scotsman’s itinerary took it south, to Wemyss Bay. Since this is an area of seaside resorts and holiday parks only 25 miles or so from Glasgow, it posed a stiff challenge to the Survival Adventure concept. The solution was to take us on a high-speed rib-boat ride in the Firth of Clyde, which, as we slammed into the waves and cheekily swooped around the venerable Waverley paddle steamer, yielded the familiar funfair emotion of exhilaration tempered with unease about health and safety.

This was followed by a shelter-building exercise on another estate, where, amid dripping trees, George advised on positioning (south-facing, to boost morale), branch selection and positioning of foliage to allow rain to run off. Visible at the edge of the wood was smoke rising from Tom’s cooking fire. The afternoon wound down with smoky venison, asparagus and tiny succulent turnips, washed down with more cocktails.

Whether the weekend truly qualified as a Survival Adventure is doubtful. It Could Have Been Tougher would be the memoir. I suspect that, for this inaugural version, Wildnis (which is about to be rebranded as Rvival) was erring on the side of caution; participants in future iterations may have more chance of breaking a sweat. Whether they will want to is a different matter: because if the weekend had more of Eat Pray Love than Touching the Void about it, so what? As George remarked during the shelter-building, you want to do more than merely survive. 

Where the package really scored was in allowing a leap through the Royal Scotsman’s fourth wall. For most of the journey, the mountains, lochs and moors simply spooled past (and it was sheer luxury to retreat idly to bed and watch, half asleep and half awake, as the carriage rocked and the wheels clickety-clacked).

But what a pleasure to break out and grab them: to check your footing as you followed a trail, to stride across a chuckling burn, to gauge the weather and estimate distances, and — in counterpoint to the champagne and conversation — to drink in the heady Highland air, and the sounds of wind and water. 

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