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Start with the Maths, Not the Menu

Long days in a Scottish glen are deceptively hungry work. Rough ground, bog, a heavy pack and a cold wind can push a full day's walking past 3,000 calories, and on a big traverse with a big rucksack you may be nearer 4,000. Most of us pack for appetite rather than for effort, then find ourselves scraping the bottom of the bag on day two.

The useful measure is calorie density: how much energy you get per gram of weight carried. Anything above roughly 5 kcal per gram is good; 6 or 7 is excellent. Compare a 100 g bag of crisps at around 500 kcal with a 100 g pot of yoghurt at 80 kcal. You're not choosing between good food and bad food, only between food that pulls its weight in your rucksack and food that doesn't. As a working target, plan for 3,000 to 4,000 kcal a day and try to keep the food itself to around 1 to 1.5 kg dry weight.

This is why the old staples endure. Oatcakes, nuts, dried fruit and a flask of something hot cover a great deal of ground between them.

Foods That Earn Their Place

• Oatcakes — about 40 to 50 kcal each, sturdy, and they don't crumble to dust in the bottom of a pack. They are also a vehicle for everything else.
• Nuts — almonds, walnuts, cashews and peanuts sit around 600 kcal per 100 g. A handful an hour keeps the engine running when you'd rather not stop.
• Dried fruit — raisins, apricots and dates bring quick sugar and a bit of fibre. Mix them with nuts in a bag and you have a ration that works on the move.
• Cheese and cured meat — mature cheddar and a firm salami are calorie-dense, salty and savoury. In cooler months they'll keep for a couple of days without complaint.
• Peanut butter — around 600 kcal per 100 g, and a spoonful on an oatcake is a proper mouthful rather than a nibble.
• Porridge oats — the best breakfast in the hills. 100 g dry gives you roughly 380 kcal before you add anything to it.
• Dark chocolate — 500 kcal per 100 g or thereabouts, and worth its weight for morale alone on a wet afternoon.

Add a bag of dried milk, a little sugar, and some quick-cook couscous or instant mash for evening meals, and you have a lightweight larder that will feed you properly for days.

A Day's Rations, Packed and Ready

Rather than carrying one large bag of everything, decant each day's food into its own bag the night before you leave. It saves rummaging, stops you eating tomorrow's dinner today, and tells you at a glance whether you've packed enough.

A workable day looks like this: porridge with dried fruit and nuts for breakfast; oatcakes with cheese, salami or peanut butter for lunch; a steady trickle of the nut-and-fruit mix through the afternoon; and a hot, salty evening meal with a square or two of chocolate afterwards. That's roughly 3,200 kcal and about a kilogramme of food. Add a little more if the weather is foul or the day is long.

Taste Matters More Than You Think

Flavour fatigue is real, and it sets in faster than most people expect. By day three, another dry oatcake can feel like hard work, and a walker who stops eating stops walking well. Treat variety as kit, not as luxury.

A small bottle of hot sauce, a few stock cubes, a little mustard, some salt and a handful of boiled sweets cost almost nothing in weight but change everything. Alternate sweet and savoury through the day. Save one genuinely nice thing — a good piece of chocolate, a bag of your favourite sweets — for the last hour of the walk, when the legs are tired and the glen still stretches ahead of you. That's not indulgence; that's good planning.

The Flask, the Brew Kit and the Weather

A one-litre flask filled weighs around 1.2 kg, which is not trivial. On a short summer walk in a low glen, leave it at home. On a long winter day, or any day when the cloud is down and the wind is up, it's the best weight in the pack. Hot tea, coffee, or a thin soup at the halfway point can lift a tired walker more effectively than another energy bar.

Fill it at home with boiling water, pre-warm it with a splash first, and it will still be hot six hours later. For overnight camps, a flask of hot water doubles as a hand warmer inside a sleeping bag, and a hot drink before bed makes a small tent feel considerably more civilised. Boil water while you eat your evening meal, so the morning brew is quick and you're walking before the midges find you.

Water, Storage and Leaving No Trace

A litre of water weighs a kilogramme, so carry what you need and refill often. Scottish glens are full of burns, and in the higher reaches the water is usually excellent, though it's still sensible to treat anything taken from below grazing land or near a bothy. A filter or purification tablets weigh very little.

Overnight, keep food sealed in a drybag and either hang it or store it away from the tent — not because Scottish glens are full of bears, but because mice, crows and the occasional pine marten are opportunists. Wrap anything smelly, including used wrappers, and carry every scrap out with you. Bury nothing, burn nothing, and leave the glen exactly as you found it. Then pack your bag again, weigh the food, and plan the next one.