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Who's that man with the mahogany legs? A man in shorts whose wiry legs are the colour of old leather has been talking to the lady in the Cannich shop. ‘They're the brownest legs I've ever seen,’ I say when he's gone.

‘That's Richard,’ says she. ‘He's a great walker. He's out on the hills every day. He's never at home.’

Richard lives in the first house past the bridge at Cannich, on a steep hillside. I've driven past many times and never noticed it half-hidden among trees.

Today he's at home – tomorrow he's off to Wales and more hills. I open the gate and climb the many steps to his door. He leads me into the kitchen, which is bachelor untidy. ‘A coffee?’ Where's the coffee? He searches in cupboards, finds the jar at last, drops a spoonful in a mug and rummages in a drawer. ‘There are biscuits here somewhere.’ He finds a crumpled packet.

‘A broken biscuit is fine,’ I say.

Through the kitchen window, he keeps an eye on the birds. (Birdseed is plainly easier to locate than biscuits.) ‘I can flick a nut out of the window and a chaffinch will take it on the wing,’ he says. Yesterday a great spotted woodpecker visited. One of the pleasures of hillwalking is the chance it gives him to watch and listen to the birds. One day in Glen Strathfarrar, he picked up the faint cry of a ring ouzel, a summer visitor to the mountains, which he reckons must have carried across two miles from a corrie on Mam Sodhail.

His living room is sparsely furnished except for one item – a handsome old grandfather clock (which was his grandfather's) in the corner that strikes the hour with a wheeze and a gentle tuning-fork chime. A pair of time-worn binoculars lie ready on the window sill. His boots rest against the log basket by the black stove.

Richard bought the house and land when it was going cheap shortly after he quit his job with the Forestry Commission 20 years ago. The lure of working outdoors had been dulled by too much wearisome planting of trees from a sack on his back and too many hours spent cooped up in a transit van with a squad of heavy smokers.

We take a walk around his two acres of steeply sloping ground, where he's made a semblance of order out of wilderness. He cleared narrow winding paths through the undergrowth and, over the years, has dug out most of the whin – the last of it, reprieved, glows in vibrant yellow bloom on a bank. Bracken's a curse. He stoops to tug out a frond unfurling at his feet and picks up a switch of birch to whack off any other sign of rogue growth.

He points to a seedling horse chestnut which, he says, he'll transplant to a better spot and an oak sapling threatened by small trees and brushwood around it. He'll clear the brush and give the oak space.

Among the trees high above the house is the wooden summer-house he built as a vantage point, with a mattress inside for reclining on while enjoying the view over sunlit river and strath. It's a refuge, too, when the midges are bad.

Richard has ‘done’ all the Munros, some of them many times. Did he say hundreds of times? Surely not. There are only 360-odd walking days in the year, for goodness sake!

Now he's ticking off the Marilyns. This is a technical term, like Munro, and just as pointless. A Marilyn, he explains, is a hill of any size so long as it's at least 150 metres (or 492 feet) high with a rise of at least 150 metres from base to summit all round, no matter from which side you approach it. In other words, it's a peak and not a lump. According to this crazy definition, Ben Nevis is a Marilyn but Cairn Gorm is not.

There are numerous Marilyns in Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland and the Isle of Man (the qualifying countries) and Richard calculates he has only 32 to go, including the stacs of St Kilda, the island far off the west coast – a severe challenge. He's currently working out how to get there and how to climb them. One problem is to find a safe landing place and another is the attitude of the National Trust for Scotland which discourages climbing in case it disturbs the cliff-nesting seabirds.

Has he a favourite hill in these parts? Yes – Sgorr na Diollaid in Glen Cannich. It's 818 metres high and he's climbed it many times and in all weathers. For Richard, it's a morning or afternoon jaunt. From the bailey bridge, it takes him two hours up and down. ‘You just follow your nose,’ he says – there's no track.

I look it up in my hill book: ‘A fine little rocky peak with particularly good views of the Strathfarrar, Mullardoch and Glen Affric hills.’ It sounds enticing but I'm running out of time. Right now I have another hill in mind.

There's a shadow. Richard tells me that he has inherited a gene which in the end will severely curtail his active life. This surely explains his obsessive pursuit of the heights: forever walking, climbing, scrambling. He's a driven man.