This dark green ocean of spruce trees, blowing under the wind with a soughing that sounds like anger, and the sharp grey hills behind rising into the sombre sky, present an irresistible prospect to the solitary walker. The authorities and the rescue services might well wish that this was not so.
The Cairngorms, in the Highlands of Scotland, are these days presented to the world through sunny tourist marketing as some form of gigantic adventure playground. Yet this region also continues to draw in those who wish simply to listen to the sound of their own breathing as they wander alone. These hills and their paths have always seemed especially attractive to the more philosophical kind of rambler.
While the physicality of the climbs, and the harshness of the weather, have a kind of extremity, there is the accompanying extreme of being so far away from anyone else. While in the city, solitude is considered an undesirable, even unsettling state – the word ‘loner’ is only ever used in a pejorative sense – out on jagged, scree-strewn paths, loneliness seems more natural and also much more attractive. In this respect, we have all been preconditioned by the Romantic movement. In the Cairngorms, this freedom to clamber, and to find oneself the sole figure in a wild, high landscape where the clouds skim low over the ground, was hard won. Although all Scots will tell you that, unlike in England, there was never any real law of trespass there, this is simply not true. In the nineteenth century, landowners were if anything more zealous than their English counterparts. In the 1880s, there were some 3.5 million acres of deer forest in the Highlands, and those acres were implacably patrolled by armies of gamekeepers, or ghillies. Since the economy of the north had been fading fast in that period, there was little that could have stopped such a transformation. Yet as that era progressed, another opposing craze took hold: the passion for hillwalking. This found its full voice in the Cairngorm Club, which was founded in 1893. The campaigning MP James Bryce, who had been fighting to push his Access to Mountains Bill through Parliament, was a central figure. In a speech, Bryce said:
I have climbed mountains in almost every country – I have travelled in almost every country where mountains are found, and I have made enquiries but I have never heard of a single instance in which the pedestrian, the artist or the man of science has been prevented from freely walking where he wished, not even in those countries where the pursuit of game is most actively followed.
He went on, blisteringly:
The scenery of our country has been filched away from us just when we have begun to prize it more than ever before … the Creator speaks to his creatures through his works, and appointed the grandeur and loveliness of the mountains and glens and silence of the moorlands lying open under the eye of Heaven to have their fitting influence on the thoughts of men, stirring their nature and touching their imaginations, chasing away cares and the dull monotony of everyday life.
Elsewhere, Bryce evoked a long vanished golden age of freedom: ‘eighty years ago, everybody could go freely where he desired over the mountains and moors of Scotland,’ he said. ‘I am informed by friends familiar with Scottish law that there is no case in our law books of an attempt to interdict any person from walking over open moors and mountain – except of recent date.’ Bryce had been opposed in the House of Commons by the MP for Argyllshire, Colonel Malcolm, who argued that ‘access’ meant that the walker would have freedom to trample wherever he wished. There was a particular Scottish term for what he was against: ‘stravaiging’, which means wandering at will. Another opponent of access was Lord Elcho, who hailed from a Scottish landowning family – Elcho Castle is just three miles outside of Perth. In 1892, Lord Elcho had this to say of the prospect of tourism opening up the hills and the glens: ‘They [the tourists] would bring nothing with them and they would leave nothing behind them. The family paper and broken ginger beer bottles are the only traces left behind them.’1 If only he could see the litter-free swarms of tourists clambering around those family lands now.
Members of the Cairngorm Club were determined, and they were never afraid of confrontations with ghillies and landowners, which would always be written up enthusiastically in the Club’s house journal. They faced apparently unyielding opposition: it is reckoned that by the end of the nineteenth century, the majority of Scotland’s Munros – the peaks that rise 3,000 feet or more above sea level, and so named after Sir Hugh Munro, who in 1891 listed them – were closed off to ramblers. The open countryside was planted with fierce signs and notices warning of the hazard of being shot at. Some old roads were shut altogether. However, by the opening decades of the twentieth century, thanks in part to the intellectual pressure and unfriendly publicity from the Cairngorm Club, those old roads were gradually, if reluctantly, opened up.
Despite all these formidable discouragements, Aviemore, right in the centre of the Scottish Highlands, has been a potent lure for hearty types across the decades. While Edwardian climbers beetled up these hills in tweed and stout shoes, there was, in the 1960s, a burst of startlingly sophisticated modernity as Aviemore sought to reinvent itself as a swish international ski resort. The celebrity factor did not quite match Val d’Isere. Nevertheless, in the winter, the skiing at Aviemore is still huge. Now the town has also learned how to pull people in for the summer months too: angling itself deliberately towards walkers.
In recent years, the Scots – with their fresh new devolutionary assembly – have been taking quite a dramatic stance. Whereas the pro-rambling Labour MPs in England have long faced a formidable establishment of country interests, the Scots MSPs, almost as soon as they had the chance from the year 2000 onwards, have been stentorian about the absolute rights of anyone to walk where they will; especially out in the gusty wild of the Cairngorms. Though the war has long been won, they continue to find fresh skirmishes and battles to fight: there will always be estate owners who seek to block access somewhere (a recent case involved a footpath near a secluded castle just outside Perth). The vast tamed wilderness of the Highlands also presents us with one of those exquisite walking paradoxes. While it is certainly pleasant to have a landscape that is open, rather than shut, to ramblers – a landscape where walkers’ needs are anticipated and catered for – there is also a residual spark of frustration, almost unconscious. And the source of this frustration? It is to do with that desire for complete solitude. It is not so much that the wild places are vanishing; it is more that the opportunities to be fully, genuinely alone are disappearing. The greater the numbers who seek solitude, the harder it is to find; for it is the remotest spots that are now the strongest lure for so many ramblers.
The views from those mountaintop cairns must be shared, and sometimes with a surprisingly large crowd. We might imagine that the Cairngorms is one of the few remaining parts of the country where solitude might be celebrated. It isn’t. In fact, the area has its very own ghostly legend that seems to be a sinister parable about the perils of being on one’s own. ‘The Grey Man of Ben Macdhui’ has the distinction of being a spectral story tailored to walkers. The first to give the tale real legs was Professor Norman Collie of the University of London, in 1925. In keeping with the tradition of the Sunday Tramps and other energetic men of learning, he was extremely enthusiastic about hill climbing. But on one wintry day in 1891, as he was scrambling around near the top of Ben Macdhui and beginning his descent, his view of the hills was changed, as he told the Cairngorm Club: ‘I began to hear the sound of noises in the loose rock behind me coming down from the natural cairn on the high plateau,’ he said. ‘Every few steps I took, I heard a crunch, and then another crunch, as if someone was walking after me but taking steps three or four times the length of my own.’2 Professor Collie, who was alone, tried to reason with himself that he was experiencing some form of natural, aural hallucination. But despite trying to assure himself this, he now began to be seized with an extraordinary irrational fear. As he descended faster, so the footsteps behind him grew deeper and longer. At that point, it became too much, and Professor Collie now ran down that hill, and did not stop until about four miles later.
The story so impressed the members of the Cairngorm Club that it made the press, and there was a mini Grey Man brouhaha. It seemed that there had long been tales of a suffocating, brooding presence being felt on the hill, and a sense among solitary walkers that they were no longer alone. To be on that hill when the clouds are low, or when the heavy mist has set in, you might see how one might suffer the apprehension that something else was out there. But many others have experienced the same phenomenon in perfectly fine atmospheric conditions, which has led to speculation that there might be something about the hill itself. Other walkers came forward with their stories: of a curious noise almost beyond hearing; of an increasing sense of oppressiveness, no matter how fine the day. There are solitary walkers who have heard voices near the summit, even though there was no one else to be seen.
There are stories of some other walkers seeing a large, indistinct figure in the distance on the hill’s summit, giving the idea of this presence a distinctly yeti like feel. These tales seem slightly out of keeping with the rest. Chiefly, the Grey Man is an aural rather than visual phenomenon. Some stories culminate in eminently reasonable walkers being seized not merely with fear, but also with profound depression. Ben Macdhui seems to have a particularly special atmosphere. Those who knew the hills of this region intimately sometimes suggested that there was more to them than anyone knew. In the 1940s, the leader of the Cairngorms Rescue Team, Peter Densham, acknowledged that there was something strange about Ben Macdhui and the hills around it, too. Not just disconcerting footsteps, but also a high-pitched noise that could not be explained, and which left whoever heard it in a profound state of nerves. ‘Tell me that the whine was but the result of relaxed eardrums, and the Presence was only the creation of a mind that was accustomed to take too great an interest in such things,’ he said. ‘I shall not be convinced. Come, rather, with me at the mysterious dusk-time,’ he continued, ‘when day and night struggle upon the mountains. Feel the night wind on your faces, and hear it crying amid rocks. See the desert uplands consumed before the racing storms. Though your nerves be of steel, and your mind says it cannot be, you will be acquainted with that fear without name, that intense dread of the unknown that has pursued mankind from the very dawn of time.’
Possible scientific explanations for the Ben Macdhui tales include the effect of creaking, melting ice around old snowy footprints somehow recreating a noise similar to footsteps. In terms of seeing spectral figures, there is the Brocken spectre effect – a hilltop optical illusion caused by a particular angle of sunshine that can throw one’s shadow into the air. The Ben Macdhui legend suggests a force that is not human, a presence that is generated by the very mountains themselves. We can actually discern something else at the pleasurable heart of such eerie tales: the challenge that stark solitude poses. Those who sense the Grey Man are alone. Their fear, even though it seems to consist of that solitude being invaded, sounds actually as though it might be the fear of being alone itself.
Ever since those soaringly Romantic paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, of solitary men, their backs to us, standing atop mountains and gazing out over richly detailed cloud capped peaks, the idea of walking to find solitude has also had a dimension of therapy, that a temporary removal from society might act as a form of psychic balm. It is not difficult to understand why, especially when the walkers concerned are city-dwellers. To leave the rush and tear of the streets, and to find perfect silence away from all humanity on top of a vast hill miles even from the nearest village, seems soothing, refreshing, natural. There is also an element of temporary misanthropy, which comes to us all from time to time. ‘One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself,’ wrote William Hazlitt in 1821. He felt it was better to dispense with the nuisance of companions because ‘you cannot read the book of nature without being perpetually put to the trouble of translating it for others.’3
The rather less grumpy thoughts of novelist Robert Louis Stevenson nonetheless run in a similar vein on the matter, although we might also see that he was bringing a tremendous amount of energy to the subject, in his essay ‘Walking Tours’:
A walking tour should be gone on alone, because freedom is of the essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must have your own pace, and neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl. And then you must be open to all impressions and let your thoughts take colour from what you see. You should be as a pipe for any wind to play upon.4
Surely this depends on what sort of country one is passing though. Certainly if one is ambling through the meadows of East Sussex, or dawdling along high banked Devon lanes, then certainly one’s mood will be lifted like a swallow on a warm breeze. Out here in the Cairngorms, the solitary walker is not so much absorbing the landscape, as defining himself against it. Moods are not quite so osmotic, nor tranquil. In solitude, a walker develops a distinct relationship with the landscape around him; one that tends to intensify the sense of a spirit of the place. But just because a place has a distinct feel to it does not mean that one will feel at one with it.
In the first half hour of Werner Herzog’s otherwise uneven remake of Nosferatu (1979), the brilliantly authentic Roma villagers in the shadow of the Carpathians will not let estate agent Jonathan Harker take one of their horses for his journey up the mountain. It is their way of trying to stop him going. It is not just their fear of nameless phantoms; it also seems to be the very landscape itself that inspires a sense of terrified awe. So, without horses, Harker is forced to continue on foot all day long if he is to meet the Count at the Borgo Pass. The sequence that follows blends the art of Caspar David Friedrich with the music of Wagner; climbing ever higher up the track into the desolate peaks, Harker takes rests, sitting on rocks, watching clouds skim with uncanny speed over the hill tops, and watching the movement of the pale orange sun as it starts to set behind the highest mountain. He is a man alone in a vast landscape of flitting, fleeting shadows, a landscape that seems, somehow, to be brooding and to be watching him.
In prolonged periods of solitude, the walker will sometimes naturally start to ascribe such attributes to the hills and valleys around him. They cannot simply remain neutral. There is something that runs deeper than that too. Perhaps there is even some sort of geological resonance in these harsh places, maybe even some sort of odd aural effect caused by wind on rocks, that suddenly turns complete solitude into the sense that one is not alone, that the hills are indeed alive. Jean Jacques Rousseau used his solitary walks to concentrate his thoughts on his feelings of separation from society, which he then articulated in a series of essays. A. H. Sidgwick, in his Edwardian walking essays, was having none of it: with cheerful, comical bluster, he set out all that he considered thoroughly unnatural about those who walk alone. ‘Walking alone is, of course, on a much lower moral plane than walking in company,’ he wrote. ‘It falls under the general ban on individual as opposed to communal pursuits. The solitary walker, like the golfer, or sculler, is a selfish and limited being.’ He added: ‘Walking alone … is an abnormal function of life, a subject for pathology rather than physiology.’5
A similar paradox of walking is that walkers are perpetually in search of the unspoilt; yet by their very presence, and by their numbers, they are changing the areas they seek out. The north-east of Scotland, beyond the shadow of the Cairngorms, is one such region. Formerly a land of small farms, with a coast dotted with tiny harbours and fishing villages, it was both sparsely populated and considered remote and poor. Unlike the rugged, romantic west coast, with its great mountains and dreamy islands, the flat, gorsey prospects to the east of Inverness seemed nondescript. Even the vast beaches, looking out on to the stern and flinty North Sea, seemed colourless. In Lewis Crassic Gibbons’ 1933 novel Sunset Song, set in this region, the heroine Chris Guthrie is listening to singing in the barn on the occasion of her wedding. Even though the various folk songs start off being high spirited, they soon become more melancholy, each streaked through with intimations of mortality:
It came on Chris how strange was the sadness of Scotland’s singing, made for the sadness of the land and the sky in dark autumn evenings, the crying of men and women of the land who had seen their lives and loves sink away in the years, things wept for beside the sheep-ouchts, remembered at night and in twilight. The gladness and kindness had passed, lived and forgotten, it was Scotland of the mist and rain and the crying sea that made the songs.6
Of course, the mist and the rain and the crying sea now have their own attractions. Thanks in large part to the business of walking, this once neglected area has now perked up beyond recognition. In doing so, however, it has inevitably lost a little of its old austere, melancholy flavour. Go down to the harbour at Lossiemouth on the remote Moray coast, for instance – it is there as the prelude to a fantastic sandy beach walk that stretches for miles up the coast. Instead of rusting old fishing boats and pungent gutting sheds, you will find instead a rather jaunty and chic waterside restaurant; the very idea of such a thing would have seemed science-fictional in the 1950s. Elsewhere, old railway bridges spanning salmon-flashing rivers are buffed up and pressed into service as properly surfaced walking paths. Rambling among the boulders and twisted branches washed up on the coast at Speymouth, the solitary walker can not only savour the sounds of the sucking waves attempting to pull the stones back off the beach, but also know that his very presence is encouraged. My relatives in the area rather revel in this new walking economy, which has brought with it swanky organic ice cream shops, and walking boot emporiums. What the region loses in unique identity, it surely gains in this evolution of quality of life.
Some areas in England, by contrast, have cunningly sought to trap their essences, even magnify them. The landscape of the Brontës, for instance, is one that the authorities in Yorkshire have worked very hard not merely to maintain, but also to intensify. There, walkers are openly invited to consider that they are rambling into the pages of their favourite fiction.