Rush hour on Glasgow Road. The Edinburgh-bound bus judders to a halt, trapped in a jam of glinting metal. The driver glances in the rear-view mirror. Rows of heads. It is mid-August: festival season. He looks to the right, immediately finding the Pentlands. As ever, Black Hill broods, bedecked in purple heather; the peaks of East and West Kip stand hopefully, straight-backed to their slouching neighbours. The hills seem to call. He sighs – and dreams.
He is 1,100 metres high, climbing in mist and rain. The summit of Braeriach is out there somewhere. He checks the map again, scrutinising contours. Then, in a moment, the clag is gone, removed like a magician pulling a cloth from a laden table. He has risen through the clouds and as if in a rock-strewn heaven, he stands lordly above them. He is spellbound. There is the top. He has been here before, but today the mountain seems reborn, as if Braeriach is his discovery. Euphoric, he runs on.
The driver’s eyes flick back to the road. He reaches for the gear stick. The bus creeps forward, shakes and stops again, now buried in the bowels of the Gogarburn underpass. He looks to his right: a bald, concrete wall.
He is twenty-one, a university graduate. He has a forty-cigarette a day habit and drinks too much. He and his mate decide to enter a half-marathon. From their flat, they plot a one-mile route, a road loop around a golf course. He feels terrible. But he perseveres. He thinks, if I can run one mile, how much harder can it be to run two? There was a transfer of addictions. The mate gave up. He runs on.
John Hammond likes lists; he likes running too. For him, it is logical to combine the two, and he noted down his top five Scottish hills: Cairn Toul, Schiehallion, Ben Cruachan, King’s Seat, Arthur’s Seat. A running journey linking the peaks was not as attractive as the individual constituents. One thought led to another. What about the five highest mountains in Scotland? Or the Scottish 4,000s? Where there is no ceiling to aspiration, you are free to act with extraordinary ambition. A bold new idea fermented. John would attempt the 4,000s, but with a twist: he would also visit Ben Lawers, the country’s tenth highest mountain, on the same journey, and he would run the lot. He made a rough calculation of distance and height gain: 220 miles and 12,000 metres. It was a colossal undertaking: a six-day ultramarathon averaging nearly 40 miles a day, a fusion of road, trail and mountain. He was unperturbed. John had come a long way since relying on 40 fags to see him through the day.
With little fuss and no fanfare, he started, first climbing Ben Nevis, then picking off three more of the mountains. Braeriach, the fifth, lay 70 miles away. He ended the day on the south-western corner of Loch Laggan, covering 36 miles in nine hours. The heat had been stifling. He sat in his father’s campervan beside the A86 and wondered how he could run the same distance a further five times. His last race had been the 53-mile Highland Fling when thigh cramps had hampered him from mile 24. One ultramarathon had been punishment enough. Now he was asking his body to do six in a row.
John had run every day since 11 October, his thirtieth birthday. Waking up the next morning, seven-and-a-half months into his fourth decade, he was not about to quit the streak or overthink what was to come. He pushed headphones into his ears and prepared himself for 39 miles of running, along the banks of Loch Laggan, through valleys beneath mountains that must wait for another day, to Glen Feshie, on the cusp of the Cairngorm plateau. When he was sick of Bruce Springsteen, he moved onto electro; when he was tired of electro, he turned to drum and bass. The rhythm of the music seemed to merge with the rhythm of his feet.
Braeriach arrived on day three, along with the four other Cairngorm 4,000s: Sgòr an Lochain Uaine, Cairn Toul, Ben Macdui and Cairn Gorm itself. Context is everything. If John had started the morning in brilliant sunshine, the plateau might have seemed less wondrous. But for two hours, there was clag, painstaking mapwork and frustration. My luck has run out, John thought. It had not. When he pierced the cloud, his joy was elevated by what had come before.
What followed seems the epitome of futility: running for the sake of running. After summiting all but one of the mountains, John was committed to getting back to the start in Glen Nevis – via the very considerable deviation of Ben Lawers, amounting to 121 miles over three days. In the context of John Hammond, however, it was standard behaviour. This is a man who runs back-to-back Pentland Skylines; this is a man who completed the eight south-of-Forth Carnethy-organised races – totalling 48 miles of running, 5,000 metres of ascent and 150 miles of driving – in a 15-hour period; this is a man who undertook the Seven Hills of Edinburgh by returning to Calton Hill after each of the six other summits, adding 21 miles to the usual distance. Ideas – ‘mini-challenges’, he calls them, without appreciating the irony – burst out of him. He wants to see how many times he can run up Arthur’s Seat in a day. Two ascents per hour, with a total climb of almost 10,000 metres, we quickly establish. He then seems literally fidgety when I tell him there is no official record for the number of Munros climbed in a week. He is immediately planning: ‘If you knock off the Ramsay mountains in two chunks, that’s already 23.’ He often thinks about what it would be like to run Edinburgh’s bus routes. He has done his – the 100 – of course. John is also one of the very few hill runners in possession of the required durability and willingness to undertake a fast, continuous round of the Munros – ‘the holy grail of big runs in Scotland,’ he says. Getting six weeks off work would be the problem. The day after he completed what he named the ‘Highest Ten Round’ – modesty prevented him from calling it after himself – he went for a run, climbing 346-metre Bank Hill above his home town of Dollar. ‘I didn’t think it was anything that strange or different,’ he insists. ‘It’s just what I do.’
John was quite correct, for he was acting in the way Scots drawn to mountains always have.
In 1879, Willie Naismith, then aged twenty-three, walked 56 miles from his home in Hamilton to the crest of Tinto Hill and back. When he was sixty, he undertook another out-and-back journey between Glasgow and Ben Lomond, this time walking for 20 hours and clocking 62 miles, reputedly sustained by a bag of raisins.
In 1889, Sir Hugh Munro, wearing cape and kilt, and reliant on the hospitality of Highlanders for shelter, set off on a cross-Scotland journey, climbing mountains and passes in short February days, from Knoydart to Loch Ness then west again – via Mam Sodhail and the Five Sisters of Kintail – to Mam Ratagan, from where he climbed a final mountain, Beinn Sgritheall. Munro’s Tables would appear two years later, documenting for the first time the Scottish mountains of more than 3,000 feet.
In 1895, William Brown and William Tough sought to be the first to ascend North East Buttress on Ben Nevis. The pair had walked and cycled from Kingussie to Fort William, sharing a single bicycle as the other had punctured, and hiked to the foot of the climb. After a deluge, they proceeded upward, only to be overcome by a ‘man-trap’. Avoiding the seemingly impassable slabs, they summited the Ben shortly after 10pm. A telegraph that captured the apposition of mountains was immediately sent off to the editor of the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal. ‘Extremely difficult and sensational,’ it read. The pair slept for an hour, then descended, eventually reaching Edinburgh after 45 hours of non-stop travel.
Had he been born a Victorian, John Hammond would have been a pioneer too. Moreover, had the pioneers been asked to explain their motivation, they would not have veered far from John’s script: ‘It’s just what I do.’
But like Naismith, Munro, Brown and Tough, for John the doing does not necessarily come easy. On the fourth day, as he ran through Glen Tilt towards Blair Atholl, he was enraptured, revelling in a when-everything-comes-together moment. By the afternoon, his energy levels had plummeted. The last two miles to reach Loch Tay were tortuous. The tumult continued. After another emotional high, this time in summiting Ben Lawers on the fifth morning, frustration and tiredness began to grow. He glanced at his watch. Right now, he thought, he would normally be getting ready for work – a 5am to 1pm back shift driving an Airlink bus between Edinburgh Airport and the city centre. Perspective returned – at least until the midges descended on Bridge of Orchy that evening.
After a night of disrupted sleep and sickness, some 40 miles of the West Highland Way remained. What drove him on? ‘It’s addiction; it’s obsession,’ he admits. ‘I suppose it’s the satisfaction of having achieved what you set out to do. I can’t say I felt any better about managing the highest peaks run than my first half-marathon, because they were both within the expectations of what I thought I could achieve at the time. I like being good at things – good is a relative term though; it is what I perceive as good. I am not the best runner in the world, or the best guitarist, or the best songwriter, but I like doing these things because I feel like I’m quite good at them – and I push myself to be better. I don’t do anything by half measures. What I set out to do, I do properly.’
He had certainly done it properly. When Donnie Campbell and Andrew Murray climbed the same ten mountains as John, they did it in 13 hours. They also drove between the three mountain areas, spending four of the 13 hours in a car. John ran every step. As he neared Glen Nevis, he was racing, his only rival and judge himself, until he was back where it all began. As he sat in front of me, joyfully reliving the journey, he seemed as consumed in the retelling as he had been in the running. When he finished, we were startled into silence, as if waking from a slumber we did not want to end.
After Martin Stone had extended Ramsay’s Round to 26 Munros, the two other male protagonists of the golden generation – Jon Broxap and Adrian Belton – began to believe in the viability of 30 Munros in a day. It is a figure implausible to a hillwalker of any era, but also unthinkable for all but the very fastest, hardiest and luckiest mountain runners. To achieve such a deed, the athlete would have to cover around 80 miles and climb some 10,000 metres. Without carefully coordinated support, the attempt would be beyond the reach of anyone, but those supporters must also be capable of pacing a runner at the very peak of their physical powers. Even then, where can the aspirant find 30 Munros clustered closely enough to be accomplished in one day, and then hope that on that chosen day they are not overwhelmed by the terrain and the vagaries of Scottish weather? The variables are limitless.
A further extension of Martin Stone’s round of 26 was theoretically possible, for a clutch of Munros, stretching to the Ben Alder plateau, rise to the east. In 1988, Jon Broxap, then a youth hostel warden from Keswick, looked further north, however, centring his planning on the concentration of summits that inspired Blyth Wright in the 1970s. The Glen Shiel mountains could be linked to the peaks of Glen Affric, Jon reckoned, enabling him to summit at least 28 Munros, and perhaps as many as 32. In preparation, he reconnoitred the lines, climbing 42 Munros in 10 days, before finishing third at Jura a few days later. With imminent plans to emigrate to Australia, Jon set an attempt date for the end of June. There could be no Jasmin Paris-style delaying: a one-way ticket was booked for the following day.
The story of those almost-24 hours has a split narrative, for while Jon simply kept running, his team of supporters had the near-impossible task of keeping up with him. John Blair-Fish had succumbed to the pace by the third Munro on the South Glen Shiel ridge; Graham Hudson would admit he too was suffering and would meet Jon on the col beneath The Saddle, the ninth Munro. Les Stephenson was despatched early from the Glen Shiel road, with Jon giving chase and soon catching him, climbing close to 1,000 metres in a ‘directissimo, hand on knees’ mile-and-a-half. Like the others, Les began to struggle, finally losing touch on Ciste Dhubh, Munro number 15. Jon then arrived at a support point in Glen Affric almost two hours ahead of schedule, startling John Gibbison and Mark Rigby and spurring them into frantic bag-packing.
Later, descending Mullach na Dheiragain in the dead of night, John tumbled and screamed, turning a double somersault in mid-air. Some 10 miles from the nearest phone box and isolated on the edge of a remote Highland mountain, the runners wondered what was to become of them. Bruised but not broken, John retrieved his torch and carried on. With the pace ‘still hot’, Mark was the next to tire, opting to sit out the dog-leg climb of Carn Ghluasaid, the 26th summit. It was nearly over. Soon Jon was plunging off the last mountain, Mullach Fraoch-choire. A finish line had been chalked on the road at Cluanie. Having climbed 28 Munros in 23 hours and 40 minutes, a ‘celebratory Guinness’ was consumed on a muggy, midgy morning. ‘A day later,’ Martin Moran would write, ‘like the will o’the wisp, Broxap was gone, but the legend of his run lives on.’ Jon’s subsequent report in The Fellrunner never once suggests he was in pain or suffering; those feelings seemed reserved for others. He might have noted the magnitude of those 24 hours had he a looking glass into the future, for his achievement would become a benchmark of human endurance.
Adrian Belton was sitting in Belford Hospital awaiting the consultant surgeon’s verdict. He had been coming off Beinn Bheòil, scrutinising a potential eastern extension to Ramsay’s Round, when he fell. If these mountains could be linked to Charlie’s 24, as the number was in the early 1990s, a 32-Munro round within 24 hours was feasible. Feasible, that is, for Adrian Belton in his prime. Now he was sure his elbow was fractured. He had seen the bones moving through the gash. Alone on the mountain, he was fortunate not to faint. He gathered snow into ice balls to numb the pain. In his mind, he wrote the post-mortem of his running and mountaineering career. It was over.
He waited.
A diagnosis came: stitches were required, but the damage was bruising only. The post-mortem was ripped up, the pieces tossed in the air.
Three days later, Adrian was standing by the dam at Loch Treig, looking up at a cloudless sky. He moved anticlockwise, beginning with the long ascent of Stob a’ Choire Mheadhoin, his only top-half protection from the late-morning sun a bandage extending over his injured elbow. Some nine hours later, having sailed by ‘the whole world who seemed to be on the Ben Nevis plateau that afternoon’, Adrian was in lonelier territory: crawling up the heathery slope of Mullach nan Coirean, pursued by Roger Boswell and his dogs, and the ubiquitous John Blair-Fish. Once over Sgùrr Eilde Mòr, 21 Munros had been seen off in 13 hours. Had he continued on the route of Ramsay’s Round, he might have smashed his own record – but something greater was afoot.
The run through the glen to Corrour should have been easy, but in the darkness progress slowed and Adrian jarred his elbow crossing the Abhainn Rath. Approaching Càrn Dearg, he was ‘lacking willpower’ and felt compelled to succumb to sleep. He entertained abandoning. He knew what that felt like. Twice the previous year he had set out to extend the Munro record; twice he had been thwarted. On the first occasion, he halted after 16 hours, knowing he was not moving fast enough. On the second, the weather did its worst: wind, rain, clag. Ironically, the attempt ended on Ben Nevis in ‘perfect conditions’, but by then it was too late.
On that long journey to Càrn Dearg, Adrian was at a similar crossroads. What he needed was some of his own invincibility. What can I do in the remaining six hours? Adrian had wondered after his 18-hour Ramsay’s Round. He was about to find out how much he would suffer in pursuit of an answer. Even then, the decision was effectively made by others. ‘If I had been on my own I would have given up there and then,’ he said.
Adrian fittingly describes the dropping of clag as ‘clamping’. The clamping on Sgòr Gaibhre forced Adrian to acknowledge that he would have to omit the far eastern Munros of the Ben Alder range, most notably (and confusingly) a second Càrn Dearg, his designated number 29. There had been no need to visit Beinn Bheòil after all. On top of his weakening physical state, he had to overcome the emotional blow that he could now only accomplish a maximum of 28 Munros in 24 hours, the same as Jon Broxap.
As it turned out, he would be lucky to even achieve that. Conditions rapidly deteriorated, with summer cascading into winter. Driving snow accompanied Adrian across the Munros of Geal-Chàrn, Aonach Beag and Beinn Eibhinn in the early hours. At around the same time, Charlie Ramsay was driving north to meet Adrian at Fersit. He looked to the mountains in amazement: snow was falling on the second day of June. Adrian – ice forming on his beard – communicated in snatched words with his pacemakers, Helene Diamantides and Mark Rigby. They agreed to a ‘freefall’ descent off Stob Coire Sgriodain to reach the railway line; from there, it was a two-mile run to the dam. With 16 minutes remaining before 24 hours elapsed, the runners came to the track. It was ‘eyeballs-out’ thereafter. With three minutes to spare, Adrian collapsed by the dam wall, too exhausted to cry.
Jon Broxap and Adrian were effectively equals: both had achieved rounds of 28 Munros, set three years apart. What elevated Jon – albeit by a smidgen – was time: he was 17 minutes faster. Neither, however, could have predicted what came next. In 1997, the Scottish Mountaineering Club took a long look at Sgùrr an Iubhair in the Mamores – a mountain that had previously been elevated to Munro status in 1981 – and decided it was no longer worthy of the title. It was demoted to a subsidiary top of Sgùrr a’ Mhaim. At the same time, Sgùrr na Carnach – one of the Five Sisters of Kintail above Glen Shiel – was elevated. As luck would have it, on his way to Sgùrr Fhuaran, Jon had passed over the stony summit of Sgùrr na Carnach. His Munro count rose to 29; Adrian’s dropped to 27.
That was virtually that. Colin Donnelly, almost inevitably, had a go, making it to the top of 27 Munros in the Broxap hills in 1997. It was not until 2008, when Stephen Pyke drew up a 31-Munro schedule, that someone else dared have another go. The weather won again: the runner ended his attempt after 16 hours and 21 Munros. ‘Whether the 31-Munro route is possible is still to be determined,’ Chris Upson, one of Pyke’s supporters, wrote in the aftermath, ‘but everyone seemed keen to give it another bash once the dust has settled.’
That sounded familiar. After his 28-Munro run, Charlie Ramsay wrote to Adrian Belton: ‘I am convinced that 30 Munros will go, and given the right weather conditions, it will go in style, as the headbanger brigade now have the taste of the challenge on a bigger scale than before.’
Writing in his 1996 book, The Munro Phenomenon, Andrew Dempster was confident too. ‘The 30-Munro barrier will be a difficult one to break but with the young, eager, super-fit fell runners around today it shouldn’t take long before this magic figure is reached.’
For a very long time, they were all wrong.
As for Stephen Pyke, or Spyke as he is known, he went home to the Peak District and had another idea. A year later, he was made redundant from his job in renewable energy technology. There was no cause for panic. He would take a break, he decided. Spyke – a ‘keen, amateurish pub footballer’ turned runner – had excelled on the road, lowering his time for 10 kilometres to a fast 30 minutes. Having only climbed his first Munro in 1999 aged thirty-three, he was a late arrival to mountains and running up them. He became the 41st Ramsayist in 2006, then broke Martin Stone’s record for the Scottish 4,000s the following year. It was the latter that made Spyke realise he had an aptitude for running long distances in the mountains. In April 2010, having summited Sgùrr nan Gillean at the end of a traverse of the Cuillin ridge, Spyke had completed the then 284 Munros. It had taken him 12 years.
A fortnight later, he was on Mull, beginning a second round. This one should be quicker, he decided. Spyke would run, walk, cycle or kayak between the mountains, never resorting to transport that was not self-propelled. If the Munros were climbed in continuous fashion, from Ben More in the far south-west to Ben Hope in the far north, it would be a journey of around 1,600 miles. He set himself a target: 40 days.
An uninterrupted round of the Munros was nothing new. Hamish Brown started it all, completing as a walker in 112 days in 1974. Ben Hope, his final summit, memorably resembled ‘a dead sheep: bare ribs sticking out through a tatty fleece of cloud’. Hugh Symonds was the first hill runner to link the Munros as part of a never-repeated journey between the 3,000-foot mountains of Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland in 1990. Moving south, Symonds reached his concluding Munro, Ben Lomond, on day 67. ‘There was no real sense of victory,’ he wrote in Running High, ‘just a hint of sadness that there was no more wilderness to the south.’ Two years later, Rory Gibson and Andrew Johnstone, former pupils of Glenalmond College in Perthshire, lowered the record to 51 days, bringing it tantalisingly close to the 50-day barrier.
Charlie Campbell, who swam across the sounds of Mull and Sleat, eclipsed them all in 2000, arriving on Ben Hope 48 days and 12 hours after leaving Ben More, having climbed seven more Munros than Gibson and Johnstone following revisions to the list. Campbell would undoubtedly have been faster had he not been hampered by bad weather and injury, the latter forcing him to take a rest as early as the fifth day due to tendonitis. There was an improvement on both fronts until he reached Torridon on day 44, with a muscle strain above a knee making descending painful. His left knee was ‘certainly not fine’, but what did he expect? As he sensed a conclusion, Campbell’s final two days were effectively merged into one: after climbing eight Munros, he cycled through the night, slept for an hour, then summited Ben Klibreck and Ben Hope the next morning. By then, the sun had come out.
What possesses a runner to undertake such exploits, to continue running over mountains day after day? Unlike the Munros, a non-stop assault on the Corbetts was a fresh concept. Manny Gorman, a runner since his days as a schoolboy in Kirkintilloch, stepped up to the plate. On the day Charlie Campbell stood atop Ben Hope, it was Manny who chased the Munroist around the summit spraying champagne. The Highland Council maintenance officer also had previous: he had run 450 miles in 21 days from Ben Hope to Ben Lomond, climbing 112 Munros on the way; he had also crossed Scotland from west to east, adding the Munro outliers of Ladhar Bheinn and Mount Keen, plus the Scottish 4,000s, in a 200-mile solo run. Even with that history of endurance, joining the scattered dots of the Corbetts was an awesome undertaking.
‘The drive is being in the hills,’ he explains. ‘It’s total escapism. Work, phone, family, life logistics – gone. As soon as you start something like this, that becomes your project. It’s the only thing you’re thinking about all day long.’ But what about when you are cold, wet, hungry, tired, fed-up or injured, possibly all at the same time, knowing tomorrow will be like today? ‘You have to recognise that those feelings are temporary. It’s not often you’re down and stay down. If you’re not enjoying it, that’s the time to stop.’ These words need to be read in the context of Manny Gorman: a man imbued with a hill endurance that very few possess. He was the man for this job: starting on Clisham in Harris, sailing between islands to avoid motorised travel, and finishing on Ben Loyal in Sutherland, he climbed them all, 219 Corbetts as there were then, running and cycling 2,400 miles in 70 days.
Here is another infused with fierce resolve: Stephen Pyke. Poised on Ben More on a wet, windy morning, the weather lashing Spyke imitated the dreich conditions faced by Hamish Brown on Ben Hope some 36 years earlier. Perhaps it was a good omen? The clock had already started. Spyke ran down to the road, before clambering on a bicycle and pedalling to Fishnish. Across the Sound of Mull lay the village of Lochaline, the gateway to the Morvern peninsula. Eschewing the CalMac ferry, Spyke breached the gap by kayak, paused in Lochaline for a bowl of porridge, then remounted his bicycle for a 56-mile ride to Glenfinnan, from where he climbed two further Munros: Sgùrr nan Coireachan and Sgùrr Thuilm. He returned to his base camp – the campervan of John Clemens, a drinking buddy and retired fell runner – shortly after 8pm, ending a 14-hour day. The rhythm of the next 38 days of his life was established.
The following morning he cycled from Glenfinnan to Fort William, then ran 10 snow-covered Munros: Ben Nevis, Carn Mòr Dearg, the Aonachs, the Grey Corries, Stob a’ Choire Mheadhoin and Stob Coire Easain. On day three, he ticked off seven Munros in the Loch Ossian area. The day after, he completed the seven Munros north of Ben Alder, taking his Munro count to 27 in four days. And so, bewilderingly, it continued.
‘It was good fun,’ he insists. ‘I’m glad I did it. It was hard work, obviously, but never a slog. There was just an intense purpose about what I was doing.’ What motivated him? He paused for a moment, clearly dwelling on the question. When the answer came, it was as straightforward as it could be: ‘Once underway, you’re committed and doing it.’ It was a simplicity that underpinned the entire adventure. Even in the planning stage, Spyke’s logistics had involved ‘staring at a map, then putting various mountain groups on an Excel spreadsheet, and thinking that’s day one, that’s day two, and so on’.
Spyke climbed his hundredth Munro on day 13. Statistically, he made it to halfway by the end of the twentieth day. On day 23, Spyke was on the Mamores, tagging summits in the diminishing light of day. The glow of sunset was drenching the west, illuminating Ardgour across Loch Linnhe. ‘Despite increasing fatigue as I climbed Sgùrr a’ Mhaim and onwards to Stob Bàn,’ Spyke remembers, ‘I felt that in conditions like this, there was nowhere else I’d rather be.’
The Skye Munros were completed on day 29, one of 11 days on which Spyke claimed more than 10 mountains. In Glen Shiel the next morning, a man with a grey beard approached the gathering of Spyke’s supporters as they waited for him to arrive. ‘Which one of you is Spyke?’ he asked.
‘None of us,’ someone replied. ‘He’s cycling here from Skye.’
‘That’s a shame,’ the man said. He introduced himself: ‘I’m Hamish Brown.’
Moments later, Spyke arrived to save his friends’ embarrassment. They shook hands, posed for a picture, then went their separate ways. For Spyke, that was five further Munros, taking his tally to 213. After criss-crossing Scotland, he was now in the far north. Superlatives remained: the mountains of Mullardoch and Monar; the peaks of Torridon, Fisherfield and An Teallach; Assynt and the two northerly outliers, Ben Klibreck and Ben Hope. ‘The hill running bit almost looked after itself,’ Spyke says. ‘On day one, you set off up the first hill, and you think, bloody hell: the enormity of it hits you. It’s a cliché, but you have to take one hill at a time. But after a day or two I was in a routine and the run was almost incidental. It was an excuse. If I wasn’t doing this, I wouldn’t be out on a mountain at 11pm watching the sunset. The run was the reason I was having beautiful days out.’
Spyke touched the summit cairn of his final Munro, Ben Hope, 39 days, 9 hours and 6 minutes after starting his journey. A parcel from Charlie Campbell, buried in the cairn and containing a bottle of Singleton malt, was passed to Spyke. There was a note. ‘Savour the moment,’ Charlie had written, ‘as the Munro memories will last forever. It takes a singular determination and character to see an enterprise like this through to a successful ending, and you have done that.’
Imagine standing on the summit of Ben Nevis on a day of exceptional clarity, a spring morning perhaps, before the haze of summer arrives. There are too many hills and mountains to count or name, circling the Ben like an immobilised ocean of landskein. ‘He towers high and majestic, amidst a thousand hills,’ the nineteenth century poet Mary MacKellar wrote of Ben Nevis. The waves of those ‘thousand hills’ stretch as far as the islands of Jura, Rum and Skye to the west, the Affric summits of the north, the rolling humps of the Cairngorms to the east, the peaks of Argyll and Stirlingshire to the south. Imagine, just imagine, climbing them all.
Rob Woodall was fourteen when he claimed his first hill – Carnedd Llewelyn in Snowdonia. He was a comparative slow starter. The youngest person to climb the Wainwrights is Coel Lavery, who completed his last summit, St Sunday Crag, aged four years and ten months. John Fleetwood’s son, Ben, had been the youngest to finish the Munros at ten, until nine-year-old Daniel Smith – a hillwalker from the age of three – gained his final mountain. Daniel was six when he tagged his first Munro; Rob was twenty. Aided by an 80-pence booklet, Scotland for Hillwalking, the Englishman started where many Scots, young and old, typically begin – Ben Lomond, the closest Munro to Glasgow, followed by another cliché: Ben Nevis.
‘It began in Scotland,’ Rob tells me. ‘It’ – despite the late outset – is the most remarkable record of peak-bagging in Britain and quite possibly the world. Rob does not just bag hills, he bags lists of them: 214 Wainwrights, 220 Grahams, 222 Corbetts, 282 Munros, 446 Nuttalls, 526 Hewitts. Obsession bred obsession. At 15 rounds, Steven Fallon holds the record for the most circuits of the Munros, but Rob is not a man to merely repeat. His compulsion is fed by finishing lists and as the ticks pile up, his pursuits inevitably move into the realms of eccentric obscurity.
Rob lives in Peterborough, a unitary authority in north-west Cambridgeshire with a high point of 81 metres where the boundary line meets Northamptonshire. Not far away, across the other side of the cathedral city, is Holme Fen; here the land falls to almost three metres below sea level, the lowest place in Britain. And ironically, Rob’s work is based underground: he makes computer models of urban drainage systems, mostly sewers. We speak on a Wednesday night. He had spent the previous weekend in East Devon walking so-called TUMPs – an ever-increasing list of hills, approaching 17,000 in number, that qualify by having an all-round drop of 30 metres. He is nearing a full set of the mainland English and Welsh TUMPs, but completing the Scottish summits seems unlikely: ‘There are too many sea stacks and even the mainland has a few things pretty well unclimbable, like the Old Man of Storr and the Quiraing Needle, as well as lots of obscure, remote hills,’ he says. That coming weekend he planned to chalk off island summits on the Significant Islands of Britain list. Suffolk’s RSPB-managed island, Havergate, was among his proposed destinations. He would not have far to walk – the highest point is two metres above sea level.
Perhaps there is little else for a man who was the first to visit all of Britain’s 6,190 triangulation pillars – Ordnance Survey presented him with a commemorative flush bracket as a keepsake – to do? Several months after we speak, I see Rob has been busy: bagging surveying control points on Guernsey; summiting the islands of Loch Lomond; visiting highest points in Cyprus and Morocco. Rob’s criteria for his efforts is uncomplicated. It does not matter whether he is high or low, it is the highest that counts. Be it Aconcagua – his literal peak at 6,962 metres – or the mud flats of Havergate, a tick is a tick.
By 2008, Rob was a ‘hillwalker that sped up’, and became the 46th person to fulfil Ramsay’s Round. He had been due to support Nicky Spinks in her attempt, with Nicky returning the favour a fortnight later, but in fine weather both completed, Rob finishing six minutes behind Nicky. With an unexpected free weekend in Scotland soon after, Rob ran a solo Rigby Round. He would also run the Bob Graham and Paddy Buckley within 24 hours, but his legacy in round-running came in the form of his own creation: the Cuillin Round on Skye. The route, starting and finishing at either Glen Sligachan or the southern shore of Loch Coruisk, crosses 59 tops, includes the main Black Cuillin ridge, Bla Bheinn, the Red Cuillin and Glamaig, and climbs some 7,000 metres in a mere 34 miles.
Characteristically, after completing the circuit, Rob devised a radical alternative that he called the Transcuillin: a west to east traverse taking in every Cuillin top between Gars-bheinn and Beinn na Caillich, including everything with at least a 15-metre drop all round, within 24 hours. The number of summits rose to 70, the mileage to 38, the ascent – most notably – to 9,000 metres. Rob had made it to 19 hours and 64 summits when he succumbed to the weather. After descending An Coileach of Glamaig – a hill scouted through binoculars from the A87 – he came to the main road and his waiting support crew. The wind suddenly seized Rob, convincing the pair he was continuing without even pausing. He stopped eventually. There was no other choice. ‘Instead of hypothermia and broken ankles, I choose life,’ he said at the time.
Rob is fifty-six. He has no partner or children. He has no time for such things, for his weekends and holidays are dedicated to list-ticking. He typically claims more than 1,000 ‘bags’ per year. Do the people who know him – beyond a circle of like-minded peak-baggers – think he is unusual? He seems surprised at the question. ‘I just like getting out, really,’ he says, ‘and going to different places. I think people generally get that I’m not the sort of person who likes to spend the weekend hitting the shops.’
Among the lists targeted by Rob are the Marilyns – a 1,555-strong group of British peaks that have clout because, although the hills can be of any height, they qualify by having a significant drop of at least 150 metres on all sides. It means that while 251-metre Arthur’s Seat makes the cut, 1,221-metre Aonach Mòr does not. By 2003, Rob had climbed all but six of the Marilyns. Four more came in 2009 when he reached the Marilyns on Boreray, Dùn, Hirta and Soay, the main islands of the St Kilda archipelago. There was a reason that two remained, the reason that the list had never been completed – a pair of inaccessible pinnacles. Stac an Armin and Stac Lee are a brace of sea stacks, teeth-like protuberances that emerge from the boiling waters off Boreray, both rising higher even than the very top of the Forth Road Bridge. From the sea, they seem to swell almost vertically, black and forbidding. Their heads, daubed guano-white, could be imagined on the crests of Himalayan peaks. When the Victorian yachtsman R.A. Smith sailed in these waters he derided the stacks as a haunt for terrible beings: ‘Had it been a land of demons, it could not have appeared more dreadful, and had we not heard of it before, we should have said that, if inhabited, it must be by monsters.’
Despite their appearance, once on the stacks, the task of climbing is relatively straightforward. Generations of bird-hunting St Kildans scaled the islands until the archipelago was abandoned by its remaining permanent population in 1930, as well as ornithologists and Hirta-based military personnel more recently. Simply getting to this starting point – mainly by overcoming the tremendous Atlantic sea swells in the worst six months of the year, October to March, when access is permitted – is the problem. Rob had been on M-2 status, or The Wall as it is known, for four years, when he ventured west, spurred on by a hopeful mid-October forecast, mindful that an attempt the previous autumn had foundered. As there are no places to land a boat, a vessel must be manoeuvred as close to the rock as a skipper dares, near enough for the occupants to hurl themselves over the side and desperately cling to the island. It was ‘easy’ on Stac an Armin, Rob insists, and he would be among a party of eleven that would summit the stack.
Advancing across a bobbing sea to the titanic frame of Stac Lee, Seumas Morrison, the boatman, was more pessimistic, but agreed to attempt an approach. Rob and a smaller party jumped again, using crampons and spikes to grip sea-washed rock. He looked around, noting no monsters, but spotting the gannets the stack is notorious for, as well as groups of rock pipits and turnstones, and got down to the matter at hand. The main pitch to reach the sloping shelf to the summit had a ‘couple of hard moves’, undertaken in a two-inch layer of guano. ‘Initially I ran out of holds, then searched around, found a couple of little in-cut holds and got up okay,’ Rob says. The difficulties were not over. The long upper ledge leading to a little cairn on the highest point was slippery with more guano and fearfully exposed. Is exposure more beguiling when the end is ocean not corrie?
A few more careful steps and Rob was there, atop – 39 years after his first – his last Marilyn, number 1,555. He looked back to the dreaded incisor of Stac an Armin, across to the freefalling cliffs of Boreray, then over the waves to Hirta, and beyond to the enormity of the Atlantic. He shook his head in triumphant disbelief. He had climbed every mountain.