The Cateran Yomp asks people to walk fifty-four miles across the Cateran Trail in twenty-four hours, through a night that most of them have never trained for, in aid of the Army Benevolent Fund. As the event team put it on the start line, it makes and breaks people, and you can never tell who is going to walk all fifty-four miles.

That line became the structure of the film. Rather than narrate the event, we filmed people on the Friday describing what they thought grit was and what they expected the night to do to them, then filmed the same event through the dark and back to the finish line on Sunday morning. The claims made in daylight are tested by the footage that follows them. One participant predicted that at three in the morning he would be in some pain and probably some regret; the film plays that prediction back over the night itself.

There is no narrator and no single character. The film is carried entirely by the people who were there, filmed across the muster field, the trail, the checkpoints and the long night, with the landscape of highland Perthshire as the antagonist. It closes with George Pass, the event ambassador and a beneficiary of the charity, giving the film its last word on what grit actually means.

More on how the film was approached, and what event films should do beyond recording the day, is in the journal: Event Video Production in Scotland.

Cateran Yomp 2026