As love drove Alec Keith to the mountains, love drove me from them. A year had elapsed when Fi called to say she was staying with family in Findhorn, 30 miles east of Inverness on the Moray coast. Did I want to come over? After supper, her aunt and uncle made their excuses and left us alone. ‘I came to my senses,’ I later wrote.
It is the closest my life has come to fiction. The author Ian McEwan is a purveyor of the literary turning point – the single instant on which providence hinges. That evening in Findhorn was my watershed. Looking back as I write now, every moment of the last eight years leads back to that moment. I would move to London to be with Fi. I would leave journalism and re-train as a teacher. Fi and I would get engaged in New York and married in London. I would teach in Croydon; Fi would teach in Tooting. Abstract conversations about children became a startling reality: we would have two. Finally, years later, we would call Scotland home. I would run in the hills again. I would write this book.
My wanderings among mountains remained unfettered. Nothing – even love – could interfere with that. Having committed to returning to London, the realisation that the hills would not always be there, that time in these places was not perpetual, elevated each encounter: the glimmer of low winter sun on a loch; the floating mist of thistle seeds in a glen; the beauty of simply turning back to glimpse an ever-shrinking world.
Perhaps the most wonderful day of all, that year and those that followed, was in the Cairngorms, on an autumn morning of passionate sunshine, fanned by the merest of breezes. The ascent of Braeriach from the Lairig Ghru was hot and slow, but as the plateau unravelled, the granite shimmered and twinkled. I felt as Nan Shepherd had: ‘Up here, no movement, no voice. Man might be a thousand years away.’ In mirroring brilliance, I came back to the plateau a fortnight later: peering into howffs by Loch A’an, passing the unruffled waters of Loch Etchachan, climbing tor-studded Beinn Mheadhoin. Once over Cairn Gorm, I paused to look across the bare tableland for a final time when I was stirred by the ricochet of dislodged stones. A reindeer herd processing upward split into two lines, passing either side of me as if I were a stone in a river.
As the days shortened, I made for the less glamorous side of the A9, gaining the innocuous Geal-charn Mòr and descending lumpy slopes of heather to eat curry and chips in Aviemore. There was time for one final expedition before winter swooped on the Highlands. I went again to the Fannichs, this time to run the two southernmost Munros in the range. From Meall Gorm, I could see the rubbly dome of Beinn Liath Mhòr Fannaich across a glen. It was real, after all.
If anything can be guaranteed in hill running it is that you will fall. I was on Craig Dunain – where else? – when the inevitable happened. As a foot caught a branch that had fallen across a path, I tumbled awkwardly, my weight crashing onto my right knee. Beneath the knee was snow; beneath the snow was mud; beneath the mud was concrete. Leaving a stain of red on white, I pressed on with the group, limping at first, then regaining relatively normal movement as the shock gradually dissipated. We summited in the lazy fall of portly snowflakes, as if in a film. On any other day, I would have appreciated the perfection of the moment. An hour later, as I cycled alongside the River Ness at high tide, my injured leg was too weak to drive the pedal. I dismounted and pushed, slipping in the still-falling snow. Once inside, I scraped away my trousers to reveal a swollen and bloodied knee. I placed a hand on the wound: it glowed red-hot against my white palm.
I hobbled into a new year. The Highlands were in the grip of a deep freeze. At its peak, I measured the depth of the glacier on the picnic table in my garden: 41 centimetres. With no car and unable to cycle on icy roads, I trudged three miles to and from work at an edge-of-city business park, my knee throbbing a little less as each day went by. As a temporary thaw began in mid-January, I was able to resume running and a month to the day after the fall, I stepped into that other world again on Craig Dunain. But I was destined for another world altogether: Fi and I were in the process of buying a flat in London. There was time for a last Craig Dunain hill race before I left. My hill running days in Inverness ended as they had started. ‘Torture,’ I wrote.
Driving south, the A9 rose to the Pass of Drumochter. I glanced at Geal-charn. The hill was grey and gloomy, decorated by strips of melting snow. The summit slunk away from the road. I did not stop this time. I tried to dismiss the place from my consciousness.
Home was a first-floor flat opposite an ambulance station in Streatham, once a hamlet on a street, now a seething mass of humanity. The view from our south-facing windows stretched across trees and rooftops to the three-mile Norwood Ridge of clay, adorned by two tall transmitters synonymous with this part of London. At night, even in the depths of winter, there were no stars. London dared out-glow the universe. The dazzle of aircraft lights, an orderly queue of languid shooting comets, took the stars’ place. Streatham High Road, a four, sometimes widening to a six-lane ogre of a road once named Britain’s ‘worst street’, was a half-mile walk away. I was horrified when I first saw High Road. This was London as I remembered in sporadic visits as a child from the Midlands: lines of seemingly identical and dilapidated shop fronts and takeaways oiled by traffic fumes.
I was in Streatham for a month. With a commission for a book that would become Isles at the Edge of the Sea, I embarked on a three-month journey among the west coast islands of Scotland. The trip became a glory lap of the Highlands and islands. I ran, climbed and walked up and over everything I could: Goatfell on Arran and the Paps of Jura in races; the Inaccessible Pinnacle on Skye; the ancient volcano of Askival on midge-addled Rum; the upturned boat of An Sgùrr on Eigg.
Having reached Conachair, the apex of the St Kilda archipelago that drops in sheer cliffs to the Atlantic, I began the longest journey home: descent to sea level, boat to Harris, bus to Tarbert, ferry to Skye, car-ride to Sligachan, lift to Inverness, bus to the airport, plane to Gatwick. A subsequent train drifted through Reigate and Croydon, and I disembarked at Clapham Junction, ‘the world’s busiest train station’, before one further connection to Streatham Hill. I shouldered my rucksack on steps that I counted from one to 36, and plunged through ticket barriers, popping on to High Road. It was warm and busy, as it always seemed to be, even in winter. As I waited to cross, two thoughts collided: the woman I love is a half-mile away in a first-floor flat opposite an ambulance station overlooking trees and rooftops to the Norwood Ridge. But in the next moment: what have I done?
London would embroil me thereafter. I had a wedding to plan, children to teach, books to write. Life was happily chaotic. It was not until we had a daughter, Arielle, then a second, Aphra, 19 months later, that I realised how truly full a life can be. In parenting, we had found something more demanding than running up mountains. Scotland seemed to drift away, its high places becoming ethereal.
I remember once driving to Glen Feshie, a 40-minute outing from Inverness, with the intention of running the two Munros on the western haunch of the Cairngorms. As I climbed, the wind was up and my legs were unwilling. I was surprised to see pockets of snow on lower slopes in what was still early November. I just don’t fancy this, I thought. Not today. I stopped and sat on a boulder, and decided to turn around, to go back to the car. And why not? There was nothing defeatist about that. The hills will still be here tomorrow, I reasoned. I also reckoned that I would never run out of tomorrows. I had not bargained on love, for there are not endless tomorrows in the Highlands for those who reside in London.
When I returned to Scotland as a tourist, my enterprises took on an air of desperation and irrational urgency. I was an impatient Sassenach, rushing and racing, and never truly being. I sought to dash up mountains in the way I hurried to top up my Oyster card before the train left Streatham Hill. It was in such a panic and on such an unstoppable treadmill that I scooped up twelve Munros in three foolhardy summer days.
Fi was eight weeks pregnant with Arielle when we spent a week in Skye. We were in that we-are-not-telling-anyone-yet stage, so when Fi swam from Skye to Scalpay across the 800-metre channel in an act of defiance to the independence she was about to cede, she could only be judged in retrospect. At the end of the week, I travelled to Knoydart, a west coast peninsula described so frequently as Britain’s ‘last wilderness’ or the ‘land of the giants’ that the phrases have become clichés.
I woke early the next day, clammy in a sleeping bag, on the dirty floor of a bothy at Barisdale. My hands instinctively reached for my ankles, now dimpled with a rash of spots following the previous evening’s encounter with an epidemic of midges on the six-mile walk from the cul-de-sac settlement of Kinloch Hourn. What elevates Knoydart is its splendid isolation. There is truth in the clichés. As I reached an immense, empty valley known as Coire Dhorrcail below Ladhar Bheinn, I was wracked with guilt. A throwaway comment to Fi that I ‘might’ go to Knoydart was an unhelpful starting point for mountain rescue. I gained a ridge, then the summit, seeing no-one. Touching the roof of Scotland’s greatest tract of wild land was like being on the rim of a smoking volcano: a proliferation of mist on one side; nothing on the other, offering an unobstructed outlook across an island-dotted sea.
That was the end of the poetry. The rest of the day was an unremitting struggle. Outside of racing or rounds, I have never subjected myself to such rash punishment. The arch of my right foot had ached from the first step out of my sleeping bag. I was happier – and in less pain – when climbing, even if that meant an unrelenting hike up the flank of Meall Buidhe. On the way to a third Munro, twice I turned an obviously weak and unstable ankle – the second time sparking a sharp surge of hurt – until I could no longer run. I felt like the ‘first and last man’ again as I finally clambered onto Luinne Bheinn to see an emerald Loch Hourn below. Pathetically, I shuffled, tried to jog, limped, hopped – doing anything required to get back to Barisdale.
Inexplicably, I could run again two days later, although able to run is a relative term. My ankle and foot merely seemed sufficiently healed to sustain another battering. From Kinloch Hourn, I had driven to Findhorn for a night’s respite, then retraced my journey west the following afternoon, camping on a grassy plateau by the River Cluanie. Breakfast was a can of lukewarm macaroni cheese and without a fork or spoon I mounded the contents onto a Debenhams gift card. I ate facing what I could see of the South Glen Shiel ridge, a nine-mile line comprising seven Munros. I was after two more as well – Sgùrr na Sgine and The Saddle, that rise to the north-west of the main ridge. I could not see the tops. Cloud was taking care of them all. The forecast was for the theme to continue: mist and intermittent rain.
I do not know what compelled me to go to the hills that day. I had no need of them. They certainly had no need of me. I was committed, I suppose, as I had been in Knoydart. Once the conveyer belt of decision-making had been triggered, I could not alter its course. I had to go. There was no alternative.
I broke into a slow jog, soon passing my campsite of the previous night. The hours here had been dreadful. I was woken repeatedly by swirling wind, and then a nightmare. Sleeping on my front, I felt the weight of a man on my back, pressing down hard. As his mouth reached the back of my head, he began to lick my neck, immediately beneath the hair line. As hard as the pressing was, the licking was gentle – like a cat’s tongue on a hand. I struggled frantically for breath. Three times I tried to cry out, but the shouts were strangled by terror. I woke on the third and lay petrified in my sleeping bag, such was the haunting lucidity of the dream. ‘It’s the spirits of the glen,’ Moira, Fi’s aunt, told me later with conviction. ‘A Jacobite, no doubt, fleeing from the English to Skye after Culloden.’
Peter, her husband, is the pragmatist in this relationship. He was kneeling before a wood burner, pushing in fuel, shaking his head incredulously. ‘Winter is coming,’ he muttered. It was August.
The trouble with calling on nine Munros, particularly in mist, is that it is subsequently difficult to recall the characteristics of the individual mountains and summits, or even to remember their names. I have not been back since, but I am sure if I did, it would seem like I had never been there. As I moved west, the weather worsened, the mist now carrying a smirr. Amid the unpleasantness, there were the briefest moments of unexpected rapture: a bird’s eye view to Loch Quoich and the twisting road to Kinloch Hourn as the cloud momentarily cleared; minutes later, some real birds: a dozen ptarmigan gallantly flapping in the wind.
Strangely, my motivation never waned, but motivation for what? I was compelled by the summits, by getting to the next one, then fixating on the one after. The mountains, in return, gave nothing. Why should they? I was the antithesis of Nan Shepherd. ‘The mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him,’ she wrote. Somewhere, somehow, I had forgotten how to do that. But deeper, unspoken emotions were also at play: Scotland and me, this long-distance love affair, it just was not working.
But you keep persisting, don’t you? Keep hoping. Perhaps this relationship can be mended? I tried again. After a night at the bunkhouse at Tulloch, my intention was to run over Stob Coire Sgriodain and Chno Dearg, some form of demented warm-up for racing over two other Munros at Loch Lochy the next day. Even by the time I reached the end of the road at Fersit, from where a track continues to Loch Treig, I knew I was kidding myself. Feeling weak and dehydrated after two days of sickness, there was no way I was climbing mountains today. We needed a break, that was clear. I walked to the dam instead, finding a large rock to sunbathe on. They were innocent moments. There would be no time to pause to sunbathe by Loch Treig again.
I felt no better the next day, but I was here now, on the Loch Lochy start line – and I did not know when such an opportunity might arise again. To reach the first summit, it was classic Scottish hill racing: forestry track, open moorland, pathless bog, a formidable climb dotted with a queue of runners. London simply could not prepare me for the gradient and length of such ascents. The lack of any extended climbs within running distance of Streatham meant I was compelled to do hill repetitions – essentially, repeatedly running up and down the same hill. And so every Thursday night, I found myself on an angle of tarmac on the edge of Streatham Common. The climb started at about 50 metres above sea level, rising to 75, with each ascent taking around a minute to run. I would do eight – a height gain that would not get me a quarter of the way up the first Munro. I struggled on. Unlike on the South Glen Shiel ridge, I really had no choice: the fastest way to the end was to run the race. Back on the tarmac road to the finish, I glimpsed a runner ahead – the first I had encountered since the summit of the second Munro. Accelerating, I caught him quickly, glancing sideways at a man twenty years my senior. I finished and dropped to the ground. Was it always this hard?
Worse was to come. Arriving in Fort William by train, I walked the length of Glen Nevis and through the gorge to Steall. Dusk was upon me when I camped on waves of tussocks above the river. As the wind intensified, I crawled outside to reposition the pegs and add a circle of rocks. I was glad of my efforts: I would spend much of a sleepless night listening to a snarling, midsummer gale and torrential rain crashing on the roof. In the morning, I crossed the swollen river and marched up a zig-zagging path, trespassing on Ramsay’s Round at An Gearanach. I proceeded over Stob Coire a’ Chàirn in low-slung clag, before dropping off Am Bodach to the West Highland Way and Kinlochleven. From the village, it was a near 10-mile tramp to the Kings House Hotel in Glen Coe. Alone, I nursed a pint of something in the bar, then camped close by. Inevitably, as day gave way to night, midges descended, with rain – an unlikely blessing – later chasing them away. I awoke, stiff and uncomfortable, in the half-light of a Highland dawn, sensing an unusual weight on my legs. There was no Jacobite this time. The tent had buckled, snapping a pole. The flattened material now lay draped across my sleeping bag, transferring raindrops to down. With the bag saturated from toe to waist, my tent was no longer any sort of refuge. I wriggled free, emerging to rain falling from an ashen sky. My camp lay in a tangled pile at my feet.
Suddenly, I had no desire to be here anymore – a sensation and a decisiveness that filled me with shame. How could I reject this place? I walked as far as the road, rolled the pack on the verge to become a seat, and wrapped my hood over my head. I sat, waiting, checking my watch. I looked down the ribbon of road again. It was finally coming, a careering white oblong framed by moor and mountain. I flung an arm out and watched the bus brake to a halt, mists of water spraying from the wheels. The door hissed open, warm breath escaping. There was a flicker of doubt, then I climbed aboard, slunk into the first available seat, and almost wept with relief. Within minutes, as we hurtled south to Glasgow, those feelings of relief seemed absurdly shallow. An agonising guilt fell upon me. I was the cause of the split. I had abandoned the Highlands.
I lived in London for five years, a period characterised by a perpetual crisis of running identity. Where there was once Craig Dunain, there was now Tooting Bec Common. Choice was not the issue: South London was a hotbed of competitive cross-country and road running; there was a 400-metre track a mile from my front door; a short train journey would get me to the trails of the North and South Downs. But London is no place for the hill runner, with the Box Hill fell race the only concession to the sport in south-east England. In the end, I attempted everything and excelled at nothing. I ran cross-country in the winter, moving to the road in the spring, then track in the early-summer.
I traded in numbers, not summits. I can remember personal bests for every distance – from one mile to marathon – to the nearest second. Running was experienced through the digits on my watch, filling the vacuum hill running once offered. I spent one summer obsessing over my time for five kilometres, coinciding with a series of evening races held in Battersea Park. The events were run on the same flat course and the leading runners would comfortably break 16 minutes. My best time for the distance was 16 minutes and 30 seconds when I posted a time 22 seconds slower. I knew by the end of the second mile: my pace – by a mere five seconds per mile – had irretrievably fallen away. I was disconsolate on the jog home. My running identity seemed to have become even more complex in a matter of minutes. Disconsolate over 22 seconds? I struggled to realise then the extent of my obsession with time. I needed a distraction – the purpose mountains had served – but the memories of that morning at the Kings House Hotel had shattered any lingering romanticism. I needed something else, somewhere else.
It came soon, mercifully. As I left the track at Tooting one night, I overhead a clubmate, Robin Sanderson, talking about the Bob Graham. He was attempting the round with a group of friends later that year and was planning a series of visits to familiarise himself with the route. They were going to camp in Borrowdale and track one of the later sections that connects Wasdale and Honister Pass that weekend. Was I interested? Rain was forecast, Robin announced cheerily. ‘I’ll come,’ I said, unaware what I had set in motion.