I have stared many times into the darkness of a flawless winter night, contemplating the confetti of stars that flood a Scottish sky. I looked up now, counting. Seven. It was midsummer in the Highlands, where real night seems elusive. We ran into the gloom, edging deeper along the hushed glen. A shadow above demanded attention: Ben Nevis. As the road began to rise, I sensed Graham scrutinising the grass verge, looking for something: an x-marks-the-spot boulder.
‘Here.’ Graham motioned towards a metal fence beyond the rock, and once over we lurched through a web of forest, branches snagging shorts, dead wood snapping under shoes. Emerging onto a track, we contoured a hillside draped in trees, before entering the forest again, climbing more steeply this time to arrive onto a further road of gravel. Here the forest had been butchered into a chaos of decapitated trunks and stumps. Mist gathered in the glen, as if it now cradled a still, narrow loch. A series of stone steps took us higher still, and finally onto the boggy battlements of Mullach nan Coirean. Heads bowed, we marched silently uphill, as if half-sleeping in the growing light of a Lochaber morning. We turned off our torches. I glanced at the time: 3.35am. There would be no glorious sunrise; slowly and simply, night moved into day, as if some higher force was poised over a dimmer switch.
From the summit of Mullach nan Coirean, Graham pointed eastwards to the quartzite-capped peak of Stob Bàn, two miles away via a high, pitching ridge of grass and rock. Even from here, the mountain seemed colossal. Mullach nan Coirean and Stob Bàn: the first two of 23. Imagine doing them all. I could not. I dismissed the idea. One day, maybe. Today was a day for reconnaissance – or ‘recce’, the hill runners’ colloquial term for such ventures. To recce in the context of the classic rounds is to rehearse the journey you might take from summit to summit (and on at least four occasions on the Ramsay, these are undertakings of more than an hour), to familiarise yourself with the terrain, to engrain the fastest or least complicated course to make the movements instinctive, rendering map and compass redundant. So when you come here again – when the mist prevents you from seeing beyond a grey veil, when the wind courses so cold the last thing you want is to grapple with a flapping map – you know you must fill your water bottle at that lochan, you know you must avoid that gully, you know you must find a way around that carpet of ice. Ultimately, this was a rehearsal – one of many – for the day that might be that one day.
High pressure had dominated the Lochaber weather for a fortnight. The rocks were dry; the bogs were turning to dust; the streams were reduced to trickles. Significantly, the snowfields that can some years linger long into June had melted. The mountains were bare. As such, Ramsay’s Round had, in theory, rarely been more achievable. Theory became reality: runners were getting around. Over the course of 13 days straddling the end of May and beginning of June, five runners, all going clockwise and none faster than 22 hours, took the list of completions to 90. I saw only missed opportunity. It could have been me.
But I was here now, moving anticlockwise if only for the romantic reason of ending, like Charlie, on the Ben. I would run as far as possible. When my ankle started troubling, which I knew it would, I would descend to the glen and run back. I heard late from Graham that he could join me. He was obviously feeling confident. ‘We could do a Tranter if you fancy it,’ he wrote.
Graham Nash, a forty-six-year-old finance director and accountant from Edinburgh, would think nothing of just doing Tranter’s Round. At the time, he was one of three people to have done Ramsay’s Round twice; incredibly, he would become the first to do a third. The first, a midsummer round, left him a ‘physical wreck’. Finishing in 23 hours and 19 minutes, he kissed the youth hostel sign, then his wife, before bursting into disbelieving tears. The second was the realisation of a dream – to undertake a solo, unsupported Ramsay in winter conditions. Shortly after midnight in the shade of an April morning, Graham ate a tub of rice pudding and a banana, before setting off towards Mullach nan Coirean, where he found snow lingering on the ridge. Graham ran through dawn, across the Mamores, and beyond the psychological midway point on Chno Dearg, when a group of puzzled walkers on Stob Coire Sgriodain called after him: ‘How many are you doing today?’
‘Twenty-three,’ he bellowed back.
At Loch Treig, he hunted for a stash of food he had hidden the previous night. His heart sank. The store was peppered with mice holes. If the food was ruined, Graham could not carry on. He carefully examined the stockpile. Rodents had gnawed through plastic bags, but boxes containing the food were untouched. He went for the rice pudding first. Relief was tinged with a stinging realisation: he had to carry on now.
Once on the Grey Corries, Graham’s feet plunged into soft snow. He longed for the sun to set to refreeze the surface into a hard shell. The nub of the round was ahead – the ascent of Aonach Beag. There were three options; two were immediately rejected. A steep ridge of rock to the right was corniced. Charlie’s Gully was choked with snow. Graham was forced into a third option, a channel on the far left, a choice that would typically be the last option for a runner on a summer round because of the extra descent and re-ascent required. Even the final choice was a perilous prospect. ‘The lower slope was fine,’ Graham said, ‘but, as it steepened, the snow covered more of the grass until I was climbing the rocky outcrops to the side. Eventually, I reached a point where it was just possible to up-climb, but would be very difficult to down-climb. The snow was corniced and I couldn’t see what was to the right, behind the rocks. I committed, climbing fluidly until I was faced with a four-metre wall of snow – but no overhang. Axe back out, I pumped my legs and wasted no time kicking steps and flinging my axe and free hand into the soft snow. I hauled myself over the edge onto the flat top and lay in the snow, legs burning with lactic acid and heart racing.’
There lies the reason for most contenders choosing to move clockwise on Ramsay’s Round, tackling the highest hills first – to avoid such obstacles so late in an attempt. There was one more to come: the Carn Mòr Dearg Arête. As Graham tiptoed along a ridge of snow as narrow as a dinner plate, he watched dislodged blocks of ice rush into the night.
A little over an hour later, his body lay crumpled on the grass outside the hostel. ‘Are you okay?’ a voice asked. ‘We were watching your light descending from the top. Have you just run up Ben Nevis and back?’
‘Something like that,’ Graham said.
As the high places had belonged to Graham, so they were ours today. From Sgùrr a’ Mhaim to Am Bodach to An Gearanach, there was no-one but us. Beyond our ridge, we were surrounded by mountains, girdled by rank upon rank, braid upon braid. Reality would puncture the wonder. I had expected pain, and so it came. Every step was a trial, my gait cumbersome and dawdling. A cloudless heat had overtaken the chill of night. I was chain-eating fruit pastilles. I could feel the veins in my calf, stretching down to the Achilles beating hard, as if the blood was on fire.
From Binnein Mòr, we could see the Ramsay mountains to the east, the five Munros that cummerbund Loch Treig. They seemed squashed in the grandeur that immersed them. The group were not so reticent when I encountered them earlier that month. It had only been three weeks after Graham’s ‘wintry’ round, but the mountains were transformed: the temperature had soared; the snow had gone. From Fersit, I had ventured up Stob a’ Choire Mheadhoin and Stob Coire Easain, the summits’ rocks glinting in the sunshine. I descended, faithfully following a compass bearing, strangely surprised by the enormity of these mountains, as if I could have forgotten. Ben Nevis seemed hopelessly distant, standing at the end of a long line of gargantuan mountain offerings that form an eight-Munro route known as the Lochaber Traverse. What should have been inspiring was demoralising. Twice I tripped in the heather, each time cautiously getting back to my feet, on the long drop to Lairig Leacach, a glen that felt lonelier than the wildest reaches of Knoydart. I forded a river, then followed a boggy, intermittent path to find Creaguaineach Lodge, an abandoned building standing on a spit of land where the Abhainn Rath and the Allt na Lairige flow into Loch Treig. The serenity here is unsurpassable, but, as the sight of Ben Nevis over the rooftops of the Grey Corries had triggered a disquiet, so did the brilliance of the mountain-encased loch. It was fear – fear of what I sought: Ramsay’s Round. I felt like an imposter, as if I was trespassing in a place I had no right to be.
With mental frailty came physical fragility. My ankle began to ache on the hard track above Loch Treig and up towards Loch Ossian, turning my stride to a hobble. The climb of Beinn na Lap was slow; the descent steep and rough – just about the worst place for an ankle that now twinged with every step. As for the subsequent ascent of Chno Dearg, I simply remember blistering heat. I should have been more grateful; I did not know the terrible truth of Chno Dearg in those days.
Climbing Chno Dearg then felt like following Graham up Sgùrr Eilde Mòr did now: excruciating. Any lingering doubts on the prospect of continuing for another eight hours on the route of Tranter’s Round were expunged. The idea was laughable. From the summit, the other Stob Bàn seemed to belong to another universe – an impression that sparked Olly Stephenson’s space station metaphor. As we wallowed swollen ankles and feet in a burn that drains into the Abhainn Rath, Graham pointed out where we would have started the next ascent. Another prickle of missed opportunity. I tried to muster pragmatism instead. The right to run Ramsay’s Round, let alone complete, must be earned. The originator – with his 1,600 miles and 80,000 metres in six months – had set the precedent for others to follow. I had not earned that right. Only 90 people in 38 years had. It was impudent to suggest I could be among them. Not yet.
During my first winter in Edinburgh, snow was a marvellous novelty. I remember cycling home from school one night, turning off the main road, and pedalling along a deserted residential street amid tufts of falling stars that glowed orange in the lamplight. I was the protagonist of my own Christmas movie. Such things did not happen in London. ‘It’s snowing,’ I would tell Arielle, with increasing regularity as winter suffused the city, frogmarching her to a window. ‘Look at the snow,’ I would point. ‘Look at it!’ She would shrug and walk off.
In the Lochaber mountains, snow comes and stays, languishing in north-facing nooks long into spring. The Pentlands are more promiscuous. The hills can be clad in white one day, only to be stripped bare under the cover of darkness. When night fell on the Pentlands, on the eve of the Carnethy 5, they were brazenly green and brown. By Saturday morning they were clothed in modest white.
To this white world hill runners went, dumped by coaches in a field next to the main road to Biggar. Cocooned in layers, we trudged in a sullen column to the start, pathetically trying to avoid premature wet feet by hurdling the saturated ground. We arrived at an Armageddon: amid a sodden, snowy wasteland stood a cluster of tents containing half-starved shivering people, clasping hot liquid and looking across to a hazy white chaos encasing the hills, all wondering the same thing: what the hell are we doing here?
The field also happens to be the site of the Battle of Roslin. In brief: Scotland versus England; the year, 1303; Scotland won; William Wallace, inevitably, had a tenuous involvement. A hill race should commemorate the battle, Jimmy Jardine decided, and the Carnethy 5 was first held in 1971. The event has been described in cinematic terms, as ‘something to behold: 500 runners like extras from Braveheart lined up for battle’. There was some similarity between us and a fourteenth century Scottish army. Separated by more than 700 years, we were presumably thinking the same: what the hell are we doing here? And: will someone stop those bagpipes so we can get this over with?
The Carnethy 5 – run over five hills of the Pentlands and covering a little over five miles – has become a traditional season-opener for not only Scotland’s leading runners, but also the class of the Lake District clubs, with Ambleside, Borrowdale and Helm Hill bringing large contingents across the border. Finlay Wild, Tom Owens and Joe Symonds would lead the charge for the Scottish clubs, but it would be Prasad Prasad, a forty-year-old London-born waiter living in the Trossachs, who would prevail. The time on the clock was 54 minutes. Jimmy Jardine would be on the hill for another 1 hour and 16 minutes, eventually descending Carnethy Hill, the final summit, to finish in a position ninth from last. If anyone epitomises the cliché that the taking part is what counts, it is Jardine: this was his 44th consecutive Carnethy 5.
I had listened to a podcast that morning extolling the merits of mindfulness. As I clambered up a slope of ice to Scald Law, grimacing against a wind whipping snow in my face, I mused on the concept. Mindfulness – I looked it up to confirm – is ‘a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations’. I ‘calmly’ addressed the list, deciding very quickly that my ‘feelings, thoughts and bodily sensations’ were deeply unsatisfactory.
As for the ‘present moment’, it was something like this. Heaving and quite frankly in a state of near-shock, I eventually found my way to the summit. I had been here before, of course. Not that I recognised anything in the furore. It could have been the moon. I ran after the dark bodies that accelerated into the whiteout, arrowing towards South Black Hill, the second of the race summits. From the top, a path traverses to a col known as Cross Sward. The cambering track was slathered in powdery snow, flipping runners onto their backs and sides. Further along the racing line, on West Kip, desperate marshals were huddling beneath the ridge trying to escape the ferocity of the wind. I knew exactly what they were thinking: what the hell are we doing here?
The route spilled downhill again, dropping to the glen that splits the east and west ridges of the northern Pentlands. I tried to summon effort. As gravity did its thing and the reduced altitude meant a mellowing of the weather, I was tricked into thinking everything was going to be just fine. I will not let anyone overtake, I told myself, and started to count the number of people I passed. I had reached seven when a hole hidden by snow grabbed a foot. There was a momentary tug-of-war and for a split second I was looking at low, heavy clouds, then an instant later, all too closely, white, cold ground.
I was soon marching upward, an aching hike to Carnethy Hill. Be mindful. Focus on the moment, the glorious, precious soon-to-be-gone moment. Easier thought than practised when slogging up a snow-filled gully, fighting a freezing hairdryer, while poised inches from the rear end of a Lochaber AC veteran. I was midway up the gully – the Lochaber backside replaced by a Hunters Bog Trotter one – when I looked at my watch. I had run a little over four miles in 47 minutes. By this time, Gavin Bland, in breaking the course record in 1999, would have been back at Armageddon. (There was £250 for the runner who could challenge the record; Prasad would not even get within seven minutes of it, such was the severity of the conditions.) I still had to get to the top of this dreadful climb, stumble up and over Carnethy Hill, flounder down a zig-zagging slope of snow-immersed scree and heather, and cross the battlefield to reach the end. It was a humbling thought.
I was humbled too when I saw the results. I was 91st, one second behind a man in his seventh decade. But that (after a great deal of internal head-shaking and sighing), I decided was the essence of it all: to be chastened by the elements, by the landscape, by our own insufficiencies. Besides, I was just another in a long line of Englishmen to be humbled in the hills, glens and fields of the Pentlands.
The last thing I wanted to do the next day was run, let alone run in the Pentlands. But then I had cause to go to IKEA. Situated beyond the Edinburgh bypass in the former coal mining town of Loanhead, the store and car park occupy a position perpendicular to the Pentlands, offering an undisturbed view of the range. Sir Walter Scott could have been standing here in a quest for Swedish flat-pack furniture 200 years earlier when he noted: ‘I never saw anything more beautiful than the ridge of Carnethy against a clear frosty sky.’
The mountains were not calling. They were bellowing as if they were ablaze: ‘Get over here!’ I obeyed, stepping onto a rising floor of sparkling crystal. That the wind had been hysterical, that snow had whirled, that the sky had roared, seemed hardly believable. Now: silent, motionless, flashing sunlight, long shadows, the sky an ocean-blue infinity. The philosopher would have called the white-attired Pentlands sublime: infinitely noble, splendid and terrifying. I descended Carnethy Hill by the way I had toiled 24 hours earlier, then re-climbed the peak by the line we had ricocheted down. It all seemed so easy. Away to the left was Scald Law, its flank smeared in a streak of dark graffiti where 499 head-bowed runners had disappeared into a maelstrom. As utopia emerged from the horror, only poetry could describe the new world. I was reminded of the words of Stevenson: ‘Black are my steps on silver sod.’
As for the hills? What else can offer such magnificent juxtaposition? Here is so much despair and ugliness yet limitless beauty and hope.
I raced sporadically after the Carnethy 5 – an evening dash in the green hills above Peebles; a scrappy Scottish championship counter on the trio of Eildons that rise above Melrose; a Saturday afternoon contest around Arthur’s Seat: through Hunter’s Bog, over Salisbury Crags, up the Radical Road. I excelled in mediocrity, with any hope of unbroken training scuppered by perpetual soreness in my ankle. For a long time, I thought it was psychological, that this pain, the same pain I had felt when I had jogged downhill holding Arielle’s hand, was somehow imagined. There was, however, actually something wrong with me: a scan would identify a fingernail-sized tear in the webbing of the tendon that stretches from Achilles to heel.
Somehow, over the weeks that followed, the tear just seemed to get better. I rested, I stretched, I half-heartedly attempted yoga. Above all, I hoped. Gradually, I returned to the hills, taking the Road to Swanston but not to Swanston, before I was eventually able to run through the village again, and up thereafter – up to the hills. I seemed to re-discover the Pentlands. I saw a brocken spectre on Allermuir; another time, I climbed into an inversion above a haar. Wind blew, sun shone, rain came down, mist loitered, stillness fell – each a different kind of perfection. I watched the seasons change: the snow vanishing for good; the yellow glow of flowering spring gorse; the muirburn tingeing the air with stale smoke; the green unfurling of bracken stalks like aliens’ palms; the popping of gorse pods; the unfurled rugs of purple heather.
Summer quickly subsides into an exaggerated autumn in Scotland. The bracken swamping the hillsides bronzed and like the winter snow simply dissolved. I raced again, staying close to the familiarity of the Pentlands. The first was Caerketton, a two-mile out-and-back sprint from the bottom of the ski road at Hillend. After dropping off the summit ridge, we descended a slope of ankle-deep vegetation, made slick by a soaking pall of mist. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a woman, contouring on my left, draw level. In a moment, she was down, flailing headfirst into heather. She seemed to bounce, as if the stunt was contrived, then wordlessly continued her foot-borne motion. I followed, wondering how she had not broken her neck. I would visit Caerketton again, twice in three hours, in another Pentland Skyline. In still and dry conditions, Kris Jones would snip 31 seconds from Murray Strain’s course record. I suffered: first from raging thirst over Carnethy Hill and Scald Law, then by simple fatigue on the journey home.
It was October, a fortnight after the Pentland Skyline, when I went back to Lochaber. Since I had last been in Charlie’s mountains a further five runners had made it around, most notably Jasmin Paris. She is among the immortals, but there had been mortals too. Among them was John Parkin, a primary school headteacher from West Yorkshire who came to Fort William having completed Bob Graham and Paddy Buckley rounds with just 23 minutes to spare across both successes. A round within 24 hours in the hardest of the three in an unpredictable August seemed fanciful. But as the end neared, he voiced an epiphany to Ben Rowley, a support runner on this occasion but one of the class of 2016 Ramsayists: ‘I’m going to do it, aren’t I?’ The question was rhetorical; the tone defiant.
Descending Mullach nan Coirean, tears came and did not stop. He was to become the 44th person to complete the big three (and, cumulatively, probably one of the slowest), and the 94th to finish the Ramsay. ‘I look at the names on those short lists and see race winners and fell champions,’ he said. ‘Giants of mountain running. I have raised myself to be among exalted company.’
To a chorus of hoarse stags, I would run for six hours, crossing the Grey Corries from east to west and going as far as Aonach Mòr before looping back to my start above Spean Bridge. After the year that had been – a year of an abandoned Tranter’s Round, a year of injury interference, a year of indifferent racing – I expected nothing. ‘If I have to walk the whole way,’ I had told Fi the night before, ‘I’ll walk.’ But I ran. And as I ran, I felt less awed, less hurried, less frustrated by the long descents or going the wrong way, less shocked by the scale of the mountains, less irritated when my body did not quite do what I would have liked. I was not envious of Graham Nash or Jasmin Paris or John Parkin. I no longer saw the victory of others as symbolic of my failure. Their right was undeniable. I was here to win mine. John Parkin was not in exalted company. He was exalted company.
Something was different. The mountains held a significance that was no longer intangible. They were not merely anonymous, arbitrary monoliths of mud and rock that could be ticked off and forgotten. They were the theatre for stories of endurance, fortitude and joy, layer upon layer of decades of narrative. I imagined the popping champagne corks of the last Munro party passed by Jasmin Paris. I remembered Jon Ascroft smiling across a table at the Canny Man’s as he told me about the blocks of rock that line the Grey Corries ridge like a high-level pavement. I thought of Jez Bragg exhausting his pacemakers. I imagined the gently-falling flakes that sprinkled on Glyn Jones some forty hours into the first successful winter round. I thought of Adrian Belton eating rice pudding and tinned fruit, and picking up the pace again. I contemplated Charlie Ramsay, driven by unstoppable will, unaware of what he was creating.
Cloud engulfed the ridge, with the glistening snake of the Abhainn Rath the only hint of anything beyond the shroud. As I descended the final peak of the Grey Corries, like a tsunami in the sky, the wind wrenched the mist away, revealing the immensity of Aonach Beag. I shuddered, a movement sparking a memory. Geal-charn.
Directly ahead, across a high col, was the crux of Graham’s do-or-die dilemma: Spinks Ridge – a rocky line named after Nicky Spinks who descended this way on her 2008 round when snow blocked all other routes – on the right; Charlie’s Gully at the centre; a third gulch, the scene of Graham’s high adrenaline, on the far left. I headed directly up the grassy ramp of Charlie’s Gully, ducking beneath the dripping overhang, before an abrupt, anxious, exciting scramble – a slip here would result in a potentially catastrophic fall – across slick grass and rock that brought me onto the shoulder of Aonach Beag.
I belonged, I realised. That was it; that was all. I was finally at peace in the hills that, physically and emotionally, had troubled me most. They had possessed me, becoming stained in my psyche – a colossal Craig Varr. While I had sought to conquer them, it was they that were conquering me. They were part of me like a physical attachment, as they had necessarily been part of those who had come before.
Touching the cairn on Aonach Beag, I wondered where Philip Tranter had made his bed. The summit occupies a featureless plateau, but a stone’s throw from the highest point, the east ridge falls in a series of frightening crags and buttresses. I peered over the edge, into nothingness, for cloud had returned. The mountain was riddled with snow patches and ice had already formed a cornice on the rim of the east face. The spectre of winter loomed. The hills would soon begin a hibernation, cocooned in a blanket of snow. They would reappear when they were ready.
I tried to imagine being here in the vehemence of winter, the Aonachs transformed into frosty cathedrals, when daylight shrinks to fewer than seven hours, when the air shrieks and snow billows. I thought of Glyn Jones again, looking upward at snowflakes dancing in a shadowy sky, and closed my eyes, attempting to convey myself to this hoary realm. I opened them. I could not imagine. The truth was unfathomable.