The door bangs continually. A portal conducting the well-equipped and the shoddy alike between the warm haven of the bar and the Biblical deluge beyond. Orderly Dutch and German hikers stand tall and proficient in expensive, pristine kit. Reluctant British teenagers hump unkempt backpacks, complaining at their parents to the accompaniment of clattering, colliding walking poles. They bump against frowning disapproval from chisel-faced and heavily biceped fanatics, practically born outdoors, impervious, for whom a little rain is the least of climatic dramas.

Jack and I hear the clatter more than see it. We are both distracted: he, an errant spaniel focused on mind control techniques, willing the bar staff to throw him yet another sausage; me, one hand wrapped around a coffee mug, the other marking my place in Dorothy Wordsworth's account of her own journey to this place.

Dorothy and her brother, the better-known Romantic poet William Wordsworth, together with fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, travelled nearly 700 miles through Scotland, in 1803, on a six-week tour. According to John Campbell Shairp, editor of the first published account of the journey, ‘poor Coleridge’ was ‘ill at ease, and in the dumps all the way, stretched asleep on the car [carriage] cushions’. Dorothy records how Coleridge, having been unwell for many of the 15 days he endured, and being unwilling to continue travelling in an open car through regular downpours, eventually left their party at Loch Lomond to make his own way to Edinburgh and thence home. Dorothy and William continued on together for the full six-week tour. Dorothy recorded her observations for her friends rather than public consumption. It was common practice to circulate such private journals among interested friends and acquaintances. That said, it is likely that she did indeed intend for her ‘private’ journal to be published at some point. C. K. Walker, the editor of the 1997 edition of Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland – A.D. 1803, describes Dorothy's writing up, which she did back home over a period of 20 months, as ‘crafting’ her account. The very fact that her writing was interrupted and that, despite finding the task arduous, she worked assiduously on it until complete suggests it was more than a simple journal for friends and family. Recollections was eventually published in 1874, nearly 20 years after Dorothy's death in 1855.