NVA staged what was heralded as one of the UK’s most successful cultural events of the Millennium Festival celebrations in May 2000. Over a two hour night-time walk, audiences encountered light and sound installations, alongside international performance and music, highlighting key natural features within Glen Lyon and Ben Lawers.

The act of walking was significant, taking people on a ‘horseshoe’ route that followed the old drover’s road rising to 1,500 feet past a flowing burn with deep pools, rock falls, ancient trees and scattered shielings. The journey into the heart of this powerful natural landscape had the aim of rediscovering what might have been forgotten, rather than creating something new. It crossed a place alive with history and atmosphere, carrying traces of our cultural and physical relationship with the land over the last thousand years. Linking with old associations through procession and pilgrimage, the work picked up on the spirit of wandering, allowing time for discovery and reflection at the participants’ chosen pace.

The Path made an elemental comparison with one of the world’s other great highland cultures, that of the Himalayas, where Buddhism has underpinned and sustained a remarkable connection between people and place over the millennia. Musicians, singers and Sherpa guides were invited from Nepal and Tibet, to create a transformation of the landscape from a Himalayan perspective. The walker may have encountered great hospitality, exquisite mantras, singing bowls in concert, helping hands through difficult terrain and the ever present sacred cairns or stupas which mark significant passes and summits in high places the world over.