Hearts bursting against ribs, two specks on a green-brown canvas reach for the sky. Plunging through the heather of a Scottish mountainside, the runners climb relentlessly, the gap between them and an exhausted chasing group widening with every ragged breath, nothing mattering but this and now.
Another runner, moving with the nonchalance of a mountain stag, is in pursuit, having started later than the rest.
‘Let me run, let me run,’ the kilted Highlander had begged.
‘Go if you wish,’ he was told, ‘but you are too late.’
The crowd watched him clear the plain, then begin the ascent, clambering on hands and toes, grasping tresses of heather. He reached the end of the line of runners, now diminished to tiny, hunched figures, and began to pass them. He lifted his eyes to the mountaintop, lingering on the two distant bodies ahead, overcome by desire – desire to be the first to touch the sky.
‘Look how he ascends!’ exclaimed one of the onlookers. ‘He will beat them all.’
The leaders, McGregor siblings, are approaching the brow of the final steep pull. Sensing a following presence, they look back in astonishment. The runner is their younger brother. McGregor leads McGregor from McGregor. ‘Halves, brothers, and I’ll stop,’ the fledgling urges.
‘No, never,’ came the response.
An omniscient commentator seems to see them with the eye of a curious buzzard wheeling above: ‘They felt their heads dizzy, their eyes dim and painful – the breath rolled quick through their nostrils like fire – their hearts beat louder than the sound of their footsteps – every muscle and sinew was tightened to breaking – the foam in their mouths seemed dried into sand – their bleeding lips, when closed, glued themselves together – the sweat pearled on their skin in cold drops – and their feet rose and fell mechanically more than otherwise.’
The finish line is in sight, the suffering nearly over. The brothers have never felt so alive, never felt so close to death. The junior McGregor, sensing he is strongest, surges ahead of his seniors. Fierce instinct rules their minds, overriding family obligation. Desperately, the oldest claws at his sibling, clutches his kilt, seizes hold and refuses to let go. With the middle brother gaining and the other clinging to a garment that is not his own, the impulse of the youngest emerges: he loosens the belt of his kilt and resigns it to his brother. ‘I have yielded everything to you,’ he declares, ‘and I will that also.’
Dennisbell McGregor of Ballochbuie – the original mountain runner – runs on to victory.
It is the first Saturday in September. As 500 runners are gathering at the foot of Ben Nevis for the annual race up and down Britain’s highest mountain, some seventy-five are back where a sport began: Braemar, the Aberdeenshire village that intrudes on the vast arctic wilderness of the Cairngorms.
We congregate on the turf of the games field, awaiting the crack of a gun. When it comes, as if a single entity, we launch ourselves forward. An elbow drives into my chest; my knees knock together. We are soon striding freely, parading around a track, then along the home straight, past the Royal Pavilion, and up and out of the stadium. At the end of a car park, we strike across a booby-trapped swathe of rough heather, disguising loose rocks and foot-sized holes.
I notice the silence first. There is sound – the rising of my own breath and the gurgle of feet on wet grass – but no noise. The suffering comes next: a trickle, then a seep, then a torrent. I do not fight it. It is why we are here. I am climbing steeply, through a clutch of birch, then on the open heath of the mountain. I think of the McGregor siblings – their heads faint, their sinews contracting, their gaping mouths dry. A millennium lies between us and them. Everything has changed; nothing has changed. We are running up a hill, a column of bodies compelled to go higher, feeling the way three brothers once felt. We are the same, for we long to touch the sky.
Running up hills has always been hard. With hill racing part of a re-established Highland Gathering in Braemar in 1832, McGregor’s peak of Creag Choinnich, a hill that marks the western conclusion of the Lochnagar massif, was the stage. When Queen Victoria first came to the games in 1848, she followed the progress of runners through Prince Albert’s telescope, while steadying herself on the shoulder of a general. She was delighted when one of the Balmoral ghillies, Charles Duncan – an ‘active, good-looking young man’ – won the race in 1850. ‘Eighteen or nineteen started,’ Victoria observed, ‘and it looked very pretty to see them run off in their different coloured kilts.’
Spectating from the grounds of Braemar Castle, she watched them scramble through woods of larch and pine, then climb over heather and across boulders to the summit cairn, with Duncan ‘far before the others the whole way’. His victory came at a price. ‘He, like many others,’ Victoria wrote, ‘spit blood after running the race up that steep hill in this short space of time, and he has never been so strong since.’ Victoria put two and two together – in this case, upwards motion and its perceived impact on a man’s health – and decided, however ‘pretty’ the sport might be, mountain running should be abolished. ‘The running up hill has in consequence been discontinued,’ she noted matter-of-factly in her diary.
It took another female monarch – and a gap of 129 years – to overturn the prohibition. The permission of Elizabeth II, Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter, was gained to reintroduce a games race in 1979, with a midweek trial event justifying its potential as a visual spectacle that even Victoria with her spyglass would have appreciated. By the 1970s, the Gathering had switched to a permanent base to the south of Braemar, and rising above the Princess Royal and Duke of Fife Memorial Park was 859-metre Morrone. The new race had a new mountain, the mountain on which – to the naked eye of those below – I appear as a slow-moving red and yellow dot.
While the ethos of the Gathering – a spirit of toughness and tenacity – continues to be inspired by that first hill race, it is not easy to live up to such expectations. Right now, therefore, it is best to be glimpsed from afar. I stoop, hands on thighs, walking when the gradient steepens, willing my legs to run when it eases, even if the effort feels like I am pushing back an ocean. The games – now adrift beneath our feet – continue without us: the heats for the 220 yards race, the throwing of the 22-pound hammer, the local competition for the sword dance. Banchory Pipe Band provides the musical background that comes to us in whispers on the wind. The Cairngorms are spread on a painting of brown and green and grey, a realm of forest and mountain. I am clinging to a wave in a storm, with Morrone at the centre of a titanic sea. The sky, overweight with cloud, is hardened by a blue-black hue, as if rain could fall at any moment. This land is so familiar, yet it seems as if I am seeing mountains for the first time. As Nan Shepherd wrote of the Cairngorms in The Living Mountain: ‘However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.’
Time pauses again. The race over, the McGregors would have buried their faces in moist heather, panting furiously, light-headed from breathless exhilaration. Looking up, they would have seen what we saw, what Victoria observed on Ben Macdui, the crown of the Cairngorm plateau: a land possessed by a ‘sublime and solemn effect, so wild, so solitary’.
We emerge suddenly into the consciousness of the crowd. A flare erupts, heralding the arrival of the first runner at the highest point. To those who glance up, I am still a red and yellow smear, only smaller, and doggedly sweating through heather. In time, I get there: a place where the gradient is momentarily gentler and the ground rockier. A line of cairn cones straddling the 730-metre contour marks our zenith. We go no further, for if we do, continuing perhaps to the summit of Morrone, we vanish from the view of the games field. The McGregors stopped at the top of a hill in 1064; in Europe, they still stop here; in Scotland today, we come up – and then we go down.
If there is something primeval about mountain running, then to run downhill is simply to answer instinct. For early man, running equated to survival – running to escape, running to eat, running to live and not die. We are destined to run – and perhaps it is running downhill that allies us most closely to our distant ancestors. After the suffocation of moving uphill, my legs – now descending more hurriedly than feels sensible – are stung into action. I dash across low heather, as if taking a direct bearing to Creag Choinnich, some two miles away, before swerving left to rejoin the path. I leave it almost immediately, following others who veer left again, as if we are a clutch of frightened deer, this time down a steep, slippery bank, ending a long way below at a fence. I lose height rapidly, first in a succession of leaps, lunges and slides, then in a seemingly uncontrollable set of bounds, arms flailing above my head, embroiled in euphoric terror. It is the closest a human can come to flight, and, as it was for the McGregors, life in these moments becomes only this. Runners are scattered below: a flash of yellow emerges from behind a knoll; a blue-green streak scales the deer fence like a ladder; a dash of white juxtaposes the green and brown of the moor. We are free; we go where we want. The summit is the only stipulation. How we get there – and back – is our concern.
As I cross the fence, I am disorientated for an instant. Everyone has gone. I skirt a hummock and climb a mound, pausing momentarily to glance about – then, like the skipping flicker of a lone doe, I glimpse a blue burst behind the bushes. I instinctively follow, finding the path and a familiar outcrop of rock. I retrace my steps, tiptoes on the way up, gallops now: back among the birches, across the field of tripwire, through the car park, down an angled slope of grass into the arena, accelerating towards the empty Royal Pavilion and the finish line. Elizabeth is not there; she would arrive in a blaze of pomp and pipes soon after. It was enough that she lets us be – and we all have our reasons for being.
McGregor was racing for the medieval equivalent of stardom. In the wild and uncertain world of eleventh century Scotland, his race was the decree of King Malcolm III to recruit the fastest runners to operate a post system across the clan lands. When one runner was exhausted, he would pass the literal baton, the fiery cross or crann-tara, on to the next. Made of two pieces of wood fashioned into a cross, one end alight, the other daubed in blood, the crann-tara would rouse the clans in a call that could not be ignored. ‘Woe to the wretch who fails to rear / At this dread sign the ready spear!’ wrote Sir Walter Scott centuries later. Every relay team needs its fabled last leg runner, its Usain Bolt – that was McGregor, a monarch among messengers.
Kris Jones, a Dundee-based Great Britain orienteer, was McGregor’s twenty-first century equivalent. He would collect a purse of £300 for winning the race. Only the champion of the caber toss would take home more.
What about me? I finished a penniless nineteenth, seven minutes back from Jones. Why am I here?
The question implies a choice, like I could be somewhere else. As the environmental philosopher John Muir wrote in a letter to his sister in 1873: ‘The mountains are calling and I must go.’