16.61km; 5 hours 22 mins; 826m elevation gain.
Huddled from the cold in the back of our camper van, Pete and I were planning the final ‘big mountain day’ of our trip to Scotland. The route itself was largely fixed, it was only the details that needed to be ironed out – mainly the thorny issue of how many Munros (mountains of over 3,000 feet) could be sensibly crammed into one last all-day hike.
Our target was the group of peaks just south of Braemar known as the Glas Maol Munros. We would leave our van in a large lay-by on the A93, hitchhike slightly further down the road, then slowly meander our way back over the course of the day. The question was, how many peaks would we take in along the way? There were a choice of two routes: one roughly 16km that included four Munros, or an alternative some 8km longer that would allow us to take in an extra two. Personally, I felt that four Munros was achievement enough for one day. Pete had other thoughts. After a lengthy debate at the Flying Stag, he conceded: four peaks it was.
Fast forward some twelve hours, I find myself legs shaking, outstretched arms clinging to the vertical face of Meall Gorm, a gnarly tuft of heather in each hand and another inches from my eyes. Cautiously, I manoeuvre my body around a deep traverse half way up the mountain, feeling for the next narrow grassy ledge with the tips of my boots. The wind is assailing me. It has bewitched the loose straps of my bag, causing them to snap up and flick me sharply in the face. It has forced its way up my nose, giving the impression of temporary asphyxiation, and the beat of it pounds my eardrums, the soundlessness it has caused gives the impression that I have gone deaf. My face is numb with cold and the pain of what feels like an endless battering by the elements. Slowly and painfully, I raise my head to see how far above me Pete is, unable to open my watering eyes more than a slither. We haven’t even ascended our first peak.
A few hours later, once I had recovered my senses, he asked, not a little pleadingly, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to do the extended route? It’s just that… They’re right there!’ He had a point – once you are up on the plateau, including extra peaks in a route doesn’t add much in terms of elevation or difficulty, only distance. Nevertheless, I scowled at him.
Fast forward six months, and I’d give anything to be clinging to the side of that mountain again.
These are tough times for adventurers – these are tough times for everyone! In the three weeks since the UK lockdown officially started, my permitted daily exercise has taken the form of one of a limited number of circular routes that start at my front door, take in one of a variety of possible paths around the Cambourne nature reserve, and back again. These rather uninspiring routes have been devised over the course of the four years we have lived here. We have even named them: the mini, midi, and maxi loops, with variants offered by the solar farm bypass, the fishing lake deviation, or – quite a highlight – scaling to the top of ‘Mount Cambourne’ – an arduous climb to the 82 metre high-point of our town.
Cynicism, however, gets us nowhere. Instead, I have two coping mechanisms. One (that I try to remember to deploy whenever adventures are forcibly suspended) is to stay fit and strong ready for when the next adventure opportunity arises. The second is to read – to go on proxy-adventures through the words of others. Like many others, I joined in with Robert Macfarlane’s #CoReadingVirus, at long last reading a book that has long lain on my reading pile, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain.
I was hoping that this book would allow me to vicariously travel to the Cairngorms. It certainly did not disappoint. More than anything I have read before, Shepherd’s prose itself seemed to conjure up the mountain ranges. Each chapter resembles a hike, in which the end of each paragraph marks a pause in the ascent or descent – a slight shift in perspective, sometimes smaller (a turn to a different point on the same subject), sometimes greater (when she shifts direction entirely). As in the mountains, one almost never encounters people in The Living Mountain. Where we do, they temporarily interrupt the flow, but Shepherd quickly returns to her main subject. More often, the trace of previous passers-by is merely evoked through sparse references to cairns, bridges, or abandoned huts.
In one passage, describing the wildlife in the mountain, our gaze is turned to the skies as we observe the movement of a bird that ‘rises in short low flight, [then] comes to earth again’. Our own focus has no choice but to do the same. We are brought back down to observe the ‘comical’ shape of a white hare flying across the landscape, before being swooped upwards again in the wing-beats of a ptarmigan that are so rapid that they ‘lose all appearance of solidity, they are like an aura of light around the body’.
This is another key feature of Shephard’s description of the mountain, and one that makes her vision of the Cairngorms so seductive: that it is rooted in paradoxes. In The Living Mountain, solids, such as the ptarmigan’s wings, lose their form, whilst non-solids like mist and light take on shapes. A few further paradoxes: globes of light emerge from deep inside water; in snowy conditions, it is the darkness, not light, that can be seen. Snow itself is both visible and invisible. Rather than hindering vision, darkness can be revealing.
Nan Shepherd would not have liked my way of walking. She implies as much in the opening chapter when she states that ‘the plateau is the true summit of these mountains’. To seek out the peaks is to miss the point. She pokes fun at ‘circus walkers’ who ‘will plant flags on all six summits [the six highest peaks of the Cairngorms] in a matter of fourteen hours’. But although she might not approve, she certainly understands the temptation to approach the mountain in this way: in the final chapter, she suggests that she too had once approached the mountain as I do, which she describes as ‘seeking only sensuous gratification – the sensation of height, the sensation of movement, the sensation of speed, the sensation of distance, the sensation of effort, the sensation of ease’. ‘I was not’, she says, ‘interested in the mountain for itself, but for its effect upon me’.
I consider myself chastised.
I doubt I will be giving up my passion for heights any time soon (I take too much pleasure in both the climb and the sudden total change in view from the top) but I do think this book will have changed how I experience the ascents and descents in-between – and the pauses, too. Shepherd makes few mention of timings, and none of distances (that I can recall), but it is clear from her descriptions that she has spent a great amount of time simply staying still and watching: she tells of observing changes in the colour of the cliffs that last ‘about an hour, precipice after precipice glowing to rose and fading again’; elsewhere, she describes ‘watch[ing] many burns in the process of freezing’. That this process is something that can be seen seems almost unimaginable. This is as much a book about being still as it is one about walking across mountains.
Since finishing The Living Mountain, I have started to try to enjoy small details in the Cambourne nature reserve that I have not observed before. The rippling of the lake water. The surprising alpine scent given off in warm weather. The tiny changes in the Spring blossom against the backdrop of a still Fenland sky… Tiny, mundane details compared to those Shepherd evokes, but a coping mechanism all the same, one that helps to tide me through these seemingly endless weeks and to find some beauty in them.
If nothing else, living vicariously through Nan Shepherd has made the last few weeks a little easier to bear, giving the illusion of wider horizons when our own are so very limited. And once this is all over, it has given me something to look forward to – I cannot wait to go back to Scotland to see The Living Mountain for myself.
Mini Adventures on Foot 