46

Munro Bagging
with Queen Victoria

QUEEN VICTORIA could be a difficult person – interesting people always are. It’s a pity that the image of her that has been handed down to posterity, owing to the development of photography in her later life, is of a tubby old woman permanently dressed in black. Age does no favours to anyone.

In her younger days she was a passionate woman, besotted with the love of her life, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. His premature death from typhoid, when they were both aged 42, sucked the life force out of her. Her predilection for black, which she wore for the remaining 40 years of her life, was testament to her undying love for him. His room was kept as if he were still alive. Every night, she still had his clothes laid out for him for the following morning. Every morning, she still had his breakfast made.

Spiritualism was fashionable in the late 19th century and there is cause to believe that Victoria tried to reach Albert through séances. John Brown, the Balmoral gillie to whom she became attached, was said to have psychic powers, and this may have been the reason she came to depend on him following Albert’s death. Her granddaughter Alix, who became Tsarina Alexandra of Russia, developed a similar fixation on Rasputin.

While Albert was alive, not even giving birth to nine children could douse Victoria’s ardour for him. Some of her treatment of her children is difficult to excuse in the light of modern child rearing practice, but those were different times. She was never cut out to deal with the demands of royal motherhood. Children were simply an impediment to the only relationship she really wanted.

If only she and Albert had understood contraception, her life would have been happier… and perhaps the First World War could even have been averted (the belligerent German Kaiser was her grandson). She refused even to breastfeed, as that part of her body was reserved for Albert. It is not recorded whether she was ‘amused’ or otherwise about the genital piercing that now bears his name and which gave an elegant line to the tight trousers of the day.

She could be temperamental and wilful, but perhaps that is not surprising given the constraints of her situation. Hers was a life spent longing for escape, from the restrictions of childhood, from the duties of adulthood and from the abyss of bereavement. It was this that drew her back again and again to the Scottish Highlands, where she found precious freedom. She particularly relished her ‘great expeditions’, as she called them, to the summits of mountains with her beloved ‘Bertie’. Many of these were Munros, although the term did not yet exist (Sir Hugh Munro had not yet even been born).

She was an accomplished writer and sketch artist, and her journals are full of her passion for both Albert and the mountains. The couple first visited Scotland in 1841 as youthful 23-year-olds. From London, they journeyed up the east coast by boat to Edinburgh before riding northwest to Loch Tay. Victoria was enchanted by everything: the coastline, the towns, the people, the language and above all the Highland scenery. In her journal, she name-checked every mountain she passed, listing their names like a mantra.

In 1844 they returned and stayed at Blair Castle. Victoria rhapsodised over Glen Tilt (‘no description can do it justice’) and bagged her first Munro, Carn a’ Chlamain (963m), on the glen’s northwest side. She rode most of the way to the summit on her pony (as befitting a queen), but had to scramble up the final 30m of quartzite rubble. She left Blair Castle hooked, pining for her ‘dear hills’. Carn a’ Chlamain was to be the first of many ascents.

In 1847 she and Albert cruised up the west coast before heading inland to Ardverikie House on Loch Laggan, now made famous in certain circles by its use as a set for the television series Monarch of the Glen. The weather was terrible but the scenery was, as ever, ‘very beautiful’. The following year they visited Balmoral Castle for the first time and fell in love with that too. ‘All seemed to breathe freedom and peace’, Victoria wrote. On her pony, ‘with the wind blowing a hurricane’, she made the first of many ascents of Lochnagar (1,155m), ‘the jewel of all mountains here’.

In 1850 she ascended Beinn a’ Bhuird (1,197m), not by the easy way from Linn of Quoich, but from Invercauld via Carn Fiaclach, which was translated for her as Tooth’s Craig. It was a steep, stony ascent on another cold, windy day, and required more footwork than usual. Undaunted, she still thought that ‘the view from the top was magnificent’ and all in all it was ‘a delightful expedition’.

Lochnagar, Queen Victoria’s favourite mountain

So much did she love the Highlands that she became determined to procure a bolthole up there, away from the royal pressure cooker of London. Her first choice was Ardverikie, but the memory of bad weather and midges persuaded her that Balmoral on Deeside, at the foot of Lochnagar, would make a more congenial base. Work on a new house (the present Balmoral Castle) began in 1853 and by 1856 she would write: ‘Every year my heart becomes more fixed in this dear Paradise.’

From here, she and Albert climbed Ben Macdui via Glen Derry and Loch Etchachan, a route that was steep and awkward enough to require more walking than riding. On another typical Highland day of mist and ‘piercing cold wind’, she even laced her water with whisky to combat the chill. Again, she took it all in her stride, recording the scenery as ‘so wild, so solitary… truly sublime and impressive’.

Her last great expedition was in 1861, when she crossed the summits of Carn an Tuirc (1,019m) and Cairn of Claise (1,064m) on the plateau east of Glen Shee. It gave her ‘such a longing for further Highland expeditions’ but, tragically, it was not to be. Her Bertie died only two months later. She continued to retreat to the Highlands whenever possible, even to the detriment of her royal duties, but could no longer bring herself to climb mountains without him.

In 1865, four years after Albert’s death, she returned incognita to Taymouth, where they had stayed on their first visit to Scotland. Here, she wandered up a hillside ‘not without deep emotion’, pining for earlier days when they were ‘young and happy’.

There is much to be gained from climbing mountains on one’s own, but the experience is intensified if that strange compulsion, so lately discovered by the human race, can be shared with a loving partner. Victoria did not have the happiest of lives but, for a while at least, she was lucky enough to have found her partner, and that is more than some ever do.

‘For today lit by your laughter, between the crushing years,
I will chance, in the hereafter, eternities of tears.’