I start to compose this in my head on a cold February morning, as I set out for you in the car. The village is in a mist of sleep when I leave, and Coupar Angus, Perth and Crieff are just stirring, each a little livelier than the last, as I drive through them, heading west and north. A huge, slightly squashed white moon keeps pace with me even as it fades and sinks. I think of my wife, still in bed, and then I think of you. My heart beats a little faster at the prospect of a whole day spent with you, and the many projects, commitments and words that have been jostling in my mind begin to separate and detach, clearing like the lines of mist from the air.
It feels strange, and slightly silly, to address such sentences, such sentiments, to you, utterly indifferent as you are to me. In fact, I will shortly stop writing to you and write instead about you, thus I hope avoiding any embarrassment – not yours, of course, since you neither take nor give offence, and are beyond and above any such squirmings of the human heart. It is myself I don’t want to embarrass by referring, coyly or otherwise, to your ‘many other lovers’ or by decrying the ‘cold heartlessness’ you show to us all. I remember being warned by a teacher, decades ago, of the dangers to good writing of anthropomorphism. He was referring to animals, but he might just as well have been speaking of mountains.
I stop in Comrie and buy some food for the day, then drive on. I am heading for Beinn a’ Chreachain and Beinn Achaladair, near Bridge of Orchy. I attempted these two Munros almost a year ago but had to retreat, fifteen minutes from the top of Beinn a’ Chreachain, because the wind had risen greatly during the long walk in and was so strong on the final ridge that I couldn’t stand up. I made several efforts to do so but each time the wind bashed and buffeted me and dumped me on the packed snow and ice as if I were in the ring with a heavyweight boxer. It was frustrating, but eventually I had to concede defeat and go back the way I’d come. So now I am trying again, intending to retrace my steps and, with luck, complete the big circular walk I was denied last time.
By the time I reach Loch Earn the day’s bright, cloudless beauty is revealed in full. Expanses of dead bracken on the braes above the northern shore stretch like sheets of gold cloth, and even the brown larch plantations seem to shine in the low sunlight. I have driven this twisting road countless times, but it is always new. On the other side of the water rises Ben Vorlich, one of the first mountains I ever climbed. (I was eleven or twelve, and probably did it in wellies or some other unsuitable footwear.) Its profile, along with that of its neighbour Stuc a’ Chroin, is familiar to tens of thousands of people, since, seen from the south, they dramatically announce the start of the Highlands north of the Forth valley. Between the two mountains is a bealach or pass, with a steep ascent from it up the east side of Stuc a’ Chroin. Too late a start defeated me once, and bad weather a second time, before I finally managed to get up this mountain: and on that occasion it was snowing, and the climb demanded considerable effort. I had never before used an ice-axe in earnest, and I remember the sense of triumph as I hauled myself up to the summit ridge. It is, I know, a scramble of no difficulty for any real climber, but for me it was exhilarating, and I will never forget it.
Glen Ogle, Glen Dochart, Strath Fillan – every mile of road takes me further from cities and towns, deeper into the Highlands. There to the north-east is the great sprawling mass of the Lawers range, and the lesser but more rugged Tarmachan hills beside it. A few miles further on, to the left, the twin peaks of Stob Binnein and Ben More loom, the road passing right under the bulk of the latter. (Once, on a Saturday three days before Christmas, I had the whole of Ben More, usually a popular mountain, to myself: I remember being quite sure, as I stood at the icy summit watching long, flat, sun-flushed clouds crowd over the ranks of peaks to the north-west, that there could not possibly be a better gift in all the shopping centres of the world than the view which was being presented to me alone.) And then, beyond Crianlarich and Tyndrum, where the road climbs up on to the great wastes that stretch from Loch Lyon and Loch Rannoch in the east to Loch Etive in the west, I feel an immense liberation: there is no turning back now, the day is going to be fine, I am committed. For the next few hours I will be beholden to nobody but myself.
I used to believe that I went to the mountains in order to think. But when I considered this more carefully I realised that, whatever the intention, the effect was the opposite: I went and I did not think. The physical effort of climbing two, three, four hills, the concentration on underfoot terrain, the crossing of burns and rivers, the watchful eye kept for changing weather, the sighting of birds and other creatures, the sometimes tedious journey back out and the tired triumph of completing it – absorbed with all these immediate concerns, I had no inclination or indeed ability to think in any coherent, structured way about other things. Neither the plots of novels nor the meaning of life are worked out by hill-walking.
But something does happen to the mind on these days: it empties, refills, reorders itself. Superfluous or temporary files are sent to the recycle bin; the brain is defragmented. It is a cleansing experience. I return, not with fresh stories written or problems solved, but with the possibilities of new narratives and solutions. This is the effect of the day’s journey: but where has the journey taken me?
Where is it people go when they go into mountains? When they go alone, as I nearly always do, are they going anywhere other than into themselves? A number of apparently contradictory things, it seems to me, happen simultaneously to the lone hillwalker as he – or she, although the single walkers I meet are almost always male, especially in winter – leaves road, car, bicycle or both behind and pushes deeper and higher into places where there are no mobile phone signals and no human habitations: he is both magnified in himself and reduced in the landscape; he becomes stronger and more vulnerable; more self-reliant and more at the mercy of nature. And this double effect, that works on him externally and internally, is at once exhilarating and sobering, disturbing and calming. There are times, walking alone, when he senses another striding effortlessly beside him.
Certainly there are moments when I slip outside myself: there are two of us then, and both are renewed and re-energised by this dislocation, which is not quite ever a complete dislocation. The great Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean captures this sensation in his poem ‘An Roghainn’ (‘The Choice’), although the circumstances in which he was writing were very different: he describes walking with his reason beside the sea, how they were together and yet how his reason kept itself at a little distance from him. On mountain days, my reason and I walk, sometimes together and sometimes a little apart, but I am not sure which of us stays in the body, and which has stepped outside.
I am by no means a really dedicated hillwalker, out every weekend whatever the weather, let alone a skilled climber. Work and other commitments mean that my days in the hills tend to be single and spaced well apart. I wish this were not so. I’d much prefer to spend more time outside, engaged in this one-sided affair with the mountains, and less in front of a computer screen. Obviously I am not alone in this desire, but one of the advantages of my writing life is that I can sometimes choose, on the strength of a late-night weather forecast or an early morning sky, to abandon work on a weekday and take off. As a result, on many of my outings I meet hardly any other walkers or climbers at all. It is just me and the mountains, and whatever physicality or philosophy it is that joins or separates us.
I have written this much when I begin to pick up echoes of voices other than Sorley MacLean’s in what I am saying. I realise that all I am probably doing is restating things that have been better said by other writers. I go at once to Nan Shepherd’s book The Living Mountain, her testament of love for the Cairngorms, written at the end of the Second World War but unpublished till 1977, and I find the following passage. She is trying to explain the feyness she feels, ‘that joyous release of body that is engendered by climbing’. Surely, she writes, she’s not such a slave that she cannot be free unless her flesh feels buoyant. There is more to the ‘lust for a mountain top’ than that. An exchange of some kind takes place between her and the mountain; place and mind interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered. And at the end of the book – a brief book, which yet contains vast traverses of thought – Shepherd articulates what I was groping for a few paragraphs ago:
… as I grew older, and less self-sufficient, I began to discover the mountain in itself. Everything became good to me, its contours, its colours, its waters and rock, flowers and birds. Knowing another is endless. And I have discovered that man’s experience of them enlarges rock, flower and bird. The thing to be known grows with the knowing.
… It is a journey into Being; for as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain’s life, I penetrate also into my own. For an hour I am beyond desire … I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am.
For an hour I am beyond desire. Perhaps this is where walking alone in the hills really leads: to a place where nothing is yearned for, nothing is required, nothing is lacked. It is strange that Nan Shepherd says that this sufficiency grows, in part, from becoming less self-sufficient, but I think she is right. And there is something else. Man’s experience of them enlarges rock, flower and bird. I wrote in a poem once,
‘I didn’t see a soul
All day on the hills’ would be a chilling tale if there was Nobody to tell it to.
If the landscape is not known, not touched by human thought, then it is truly inhuman, and in that sense desolate and forbidding. It is one of the reasons why humans need to name the land, and why, if Gaelic should ever cease to be spoken, Scotland would become in a way alien to its inhabitants, or its inhabitants alien to it. Even now the general massacring of a name like Bidean nam Bian indicates a common loss of intimacy with the mountain that bears it, and a loss of respect for it too. And yet, at the same time, the need to make contact with the land is why walkers are so often guilty of reciting a litany of mountain names, and I suspect the same need lies at the root of the desire to make lists of Munros, Corbetts and Donalds – all those species of Scottish hills – and tick them off. Names signify, and when you know what they signify – have been among these names and on them – they evoke the very best of days, and sometimes, in weather terms at least, the very worst.
I know, whenever the time comes that I cannot or do not wish to go to the hills, that my own litany will offer a certain compensation. Some folk sneer at the practice of Munro-bagging, but I defend it, because climbing those Munros that I have – along with many other smaller, though not always lesser, hills – has taught me more about the topography of my country, its extraordinarily complex physical composition, its vastness which is also a compact and detailed connectedness, than any lesson or book. And it has given me my own litany, with its own instant mental and emotional associations: simply naming Beinn Dotaidh, for example, calls to mind the weird, creeping sculptures of ice and grass I trudged past on a windy, snowy climb there; I remember the way rock gripped me and I gripped rock on the Aonach Eagach, the notched ridge, in Glencoe, as if we had made a pact (one which, of course, existed only in my imagination) that if I was not foolish it would not throw me to my death; I remember Beinn a’ Bheithir above Ballachulish mainly because the rain and mist were so heavy I never saw more than thirty yards of mountain at any one time; I remember bold sunshine slanting through falling snow on Beinn Udlamain, and a huge herd of deer moving like a dun-coloured shadow below me in the corrie of A’Mharconaich; I remember the long stretch to Beinn Dearg in Atholl, and the ridiculously easy stroll up Meall Buidhe in Glen Lyon; I remember the spectral hares on Ben-y-Hone, the ptarmigan, snow buntings and dotterels that have shared other cloud-thick summits with me; I remember, on the lower slopes of Creag Meagaidh, picking blaeberries so fat and sweet I was, for a while, oblivious to the rain and midges; I remember the arête that snakes like an airy bridge from Carn Mor Dearg up to Ben Nevis, and how I crawled over its narrowest sections because the drops on either side took the courage from my legs, and how I had that vastness of mountain to myself for hours until finally, reaching the top of ‘the Ben’, I found myself among dozens of walkers who had plodded up the so-called ‘tourist route’; I remember seeing the snow-covered Cairngorms, black and white and mysterious and beckoning, from the empty broad back of An Socach above Glen Ey; I remember my first venture into the Cairngorms, a few months later, and how from Beinn a’ Chaorainn I saw the outline of northern Scotland laid out before me, the Moray Firth glinting and grey forty miles to the north. All these and more are in my mind, and will be, like moments from old love affairs, until the mind ceases to function.
In a poem called ‘One of the many days’, Norman MacCaig once wrote of the multitude of frogs he saw at the back of Ben Dorain – a mountain more famously and expansively praised by the 18th-century Gaelic poet Duncan Ban MacIntyre. MacCaig catalogues how the whole long day released a series of miracles: the river like glass in the sun, wading in Loch Lyon, a herd of hinds that gave the V-sign with their ears before cantering off, and the Joseph-coated frogs amiably ambling and jumping around. That’s what days in the hills always do: release miracles, often small, even insignificant, but always memorable.
I have my own story of a miracle in the form of a plague of frogs. On this occasion I was with a friend, and we were climbing Stob a’ Choire Odhar and Stob Ghabhar on the western edge of Rannoch Moor. It was a beautiful, blue, cloudless July day when we set out. The ground was dry – parched, even – and when, halfway up Stob a’ Choire Odhar, we came across a single yellow frog panting in the heat, we thought he was in quite the wrong location and that his circumstances could only deteriorate. But by the time we were on the ridge approaching the top of Stob Ghabhar we were reconsidering: a great black canopy of water-laden cloud had formed across the entire sky, and it was clear we were in for a soaking. The canopy ripped apart as we began our descent: the rain fell like tropical rain, hot, solid and unrelenting, as if from a power-shower. Not a centimetre of us remained dry. Later, I wrote,
We stood beneath the downpour
and our boots filled up and overflowed.
Paths became burns; burns boiled to rivers;
we were like ghosts of sailors
adrift on a mountainous sea.
And then, as if this were not transformation enough, the entire hillside erupted: frogs, thousands of them, yellow, brown, green, so many we could not avoid stepping on them. They had been waiting and now they were in the right place at the right time while we, delirious and absurd, trudged and slid, jumping and wading torrents that hadn’t existed ten minutes earlier, back to the day’s starting-point.
What does this story mean? It means nothing except what it says: that it happened, that we were there, that it will never happen again in quite the same way, and yet that it happens all the time. The story is my story about a particular mountain, but the mountain does not know it, does not give a damn about it. I love the mountain for what it gave me, but the mountain does not love me. I find myself grappling again for other people’s words to explain what I mean. Only this time I am caught between two sets of thoughts: those of the naturalist John Muir, who really loved mountains, really understood them, and those of the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, who knew the futility of such love and understanding. What are we to stones, MacDiarmid asked insistently. What are we to stones? We are nothing. We must be humble, because the stones are one with the stars, however stone-like they may appear to us. It makes no difference to them where they are, on top of a mountain or at the bottom of the sea, in a palace or a pigsty. There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world, MacDiarmid reminds us, but no ruined stones.
This is from the long poem of 1933, ‘On A Raised Beach’, constructed, as the title suggests, nowhere near mountains but on a stony shoreline in Shetland, but the poem transcends its particular place and time. It is so bleakly beautiful and so true that there seems to be nothing else worth saying, although MacDiarmid remorselessly exposes our fragility further: what happens to us, he says, is of no relevance to the world’s geology; what happens to the world’s geology is of utmost relevance to us. It is not the stones who must be reconciled to us, but we to them.
What then is the point? What point is there in my going to the mountains if all they throw back at me is my irrelevance and transience? On the February day on which I began this letter, I did get to the top of Beinn a’ Chreachain and then Beinn Achaladair. I spent six hours on them, alone and happy, and when I came down the muddy track through the corrie and back to where I’d parked the car, I caught up with another man who had done exactly the same. We exchanged a few words about the absence of deep snow and climate change, and established that we were kindred spirits, but I doubt he really wanted to talk to me any more than I wanted to talk to him. We were rivals in some obscure sense, as well as allies, and the silences between us spoke at least as eloquently and profoundly as the words we uttered. Each of us was equally aware, after our long hard day alone, of our own irrelevance and transience, and the immovability of the mountains we had been on, and we knew that in the face of these truths our words were meaningless, mere stour in the wind.
And yet, now, I must try to make them mean something. I think of John Muir, born at Dunbar on the East Lothian coast, an emigrant to North America who became the great protector of that continent’s wild places, and in particular of the mountains of California. You can open, almost at random, any of his books and find a good reason for going to the mountains. More than half a century before MacDiarmid, Muir recognised the same things in himself and in the world’s geology that MacDiarmid recognised, but he made something different and holy from them. For Muir there was relief and redemption, where MacDiarmid found stones without mercy. ‘The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to see,’ Muir wrote. ‘Thousands of tired, nerveshaken, over-civilised people are beginning to find that going to the mountains is going home …’
Ah, yes, going home. The journey I make into you, mountains of Scotland, is just that: a homeward journey. I go, I disappear for a while, I come back, having climbed or not climbed this hill or those – and I have both been, and am still to go, home. I have left a note to my wife on the kitchen table, saying where I am going, and she trusts me to come back. She loves me so much that she lets me go to you even though it fills her with worry, in case one day you should keep me. So I take off my boots, start the car and drive till there is a phone signal, and then I pull over and call her. We are reconnected, in touch again. When I get home I’ll tell her the details of my day; whether or not I have seen another soul, and any small or medium-sized miracles I may have witnessed. And in return I will hear the details of her day. Ten, maybe twelve times a year – enough, but not nearly enough – I will make this journey, and it is indeed a journey of love in both directions. But no matter how often I make it, no matter the quickening beat of my heart as I set off, no matter all these words I have put down here, I know this journey means absolutely nothing to you. To me, on the other hand, driving home in the light of a big yellow moon, beneath the emerging stars that you and your stones are one with, back to her with whom I am one, it means everything.