Newtonmore, the first Saturday in August, always the first Saturday in August. We run a lap of the games field, duck under a rail, hurdle a gate, dash across a field of long grass, jump a fence, then another, wade a river, scramble up a bank of earth, find yet another fence, cross a road, fling legs over a crash barrier, follow a rough, twisting track, file along an ever-rising path through birch woods, climb a steepening slope of naked rock, meet a wall of soil, toil along a heather-lined thread, crest a windy summit. There is a sport, synthesised into 2 miles and 23 minutes.
There, on the top of An Torr, we are at the centre of Scotland, at the pulsing heart of beautiful madness, a hill running summer pirouetting about us.
The Cairngorms are a grey pile to the north-west; Jim Mann had made a ‘race-track’ of them, toppling Jon Broxap’s twenty-nine-year-old record for the number of Munros climbed within 24 hours. But imagination was the victor here. So established were the core of the long-distance mountain routes pioneered by Philip Tranter and Blyth Wright, the assumption that a greater concentration of Munros could be found elsewhere had not been seriously considered. A little imagination was all that was required. Not long after meeting Jon to discuss the record, Jim received a note through the mail. Written on an attached post-it were the words: ‘An alternative!’ Beneath a puzzling title, ‘The Phil Clark Round’, there was a list of mountains and the distances between them. The names of the Munros, at first, were unfamiliar. These were not peaks in Lochaber or Affric or Shiel; these mountains were the Cairngorms. The overall distance was further than Jon’s 29-Munro round, but with less ascent. ‘It might just work,’ Jim concluded. It did. Starting on Lochnagar and finishing on Bheinn Bhreac, Jim summited 30 Munros in 22 hours, making it back to Invercauld Bridge in time for last orders. The round, named after its innovator Phil Clark, has three provisos: 30 Munros, one pint, no more than 24 hours.
The summits that circle Glen Coe, meanwhile, could only be imagined. In a year in which he had twice climbed Everest without supplementary oxygen and won the Hardrock 100 despite dislocating a shoulder in a fall at mile 13, Kilian Jornet arrived in Lochaber several days ahead of the Glen Coe Skyline. It was his first time in Scotland, but he quickly got into the spirit: climbing wind-blasted Tower Ridge, before finding the summit of Ben Nevis immersed in clag – he probably had a better view from Everest – and later posting a photograph of himself grinning behind a midge net. It was on the Aonach Eagach that Jornet made his break, moving decisively clear of Jonathan Albon. It seemed like a true race, with only six minutes separating the pair at the end, but Albon insisted his rival won ‘easily’. In terms of mountain running, Jornet was ‘two brackets’ above Albon, the latter reckoned. ‘Two brackets.’ Where does that leave the rest of us?
So, to Ben Nevis. Could the monarch of the glen make it eight in a row? It would be easy to assume so, perhaps to even entertain creeping cynicism about the whole affair. But no-one wins Britain’s greatest hill race by luck. To succeed year after year requires a level of commitment and consistency that only man can truly appreciate. Nor did Brice Delsouiller, a sheep farmer from the French Pyrenees, and Rob Jebb, come to Fort William just to make up the numbers. Yet there is nothing they can do. Finlay Wild is first to the top and first to the bottom – finishing six minutes clear of Delsouiller. He leaves Claggan Park by bicycle. Car horns toot; passers-by give him a thumbs-up. Finlay just smiles.
From An Torr, Wigtownshire is as distant as Orkney. Glyn Jones has had a busy summer. While he hoped to return to hill running, he had been ‘welded limpet-like to the grind of daily chores on the croft’. He wondered: ‘How did I ever find enough time to do those hill challenges?’ What he misses most is the inspiration they brought. ‘Enthusiasm for anything is so lacking in this insipid grey climate of “cool”,’ he bemoans.
He does not mean this sport, of course.
The chance for John Hammond to spend 24 hours running up and down Arthur’s Seat had not arisen. It had for Lewis Breen. The twenty-five-year-old project engineer from Duntocher had walked Arthur’s Seat as a boy, but running to the top was a new experience. ‘I couldn’t really remember what it looked like,’ he said. Lewis would soon be over-familiar, summiting 48 times, fuelled by the bakery aisle of Lidl, climbing a cumulative 7,500 metres.
For others, a single ascent of any hill or mountain will suffice. A figure, bending forward, was on the last of the wall of steps that decorate the western outlook of Blackford Hill. ‘Hello, Bill,’ I called as I passed. Others on the hill that day would have seen old age and frailty. They would greet the doddering man with a sympathetic smile. I imagined Bill Gauld dancing.
Another who dances is Jasmin Paris. No major races, no rounds, no records. ‘What is Jasmin up to?’ people were asking. She would stand on the start line at Caerketton, finishing sixth woman, two-thirds of the way down the field. But Jasmin had a handicap – she was six months pregnant. I watched the end of her race, a bulge prominent under her shirt, remembering this was the person who ran Ramsay’s Round in 16 hours. That did not seem to matter now. Some things are more important – and some things no ‘lad’ can emulate.
The once-purple heather is brown and frayed as I stand again on the summit of Allermuir. I am facing north, looking across city and forth, when I sense a touch on my back. I turn to look at the Pentlands, bathed in the low pink and yellow of sunset. I am not a ‘white-haired one’ here. I am untouchable. Glory cradles me. What else is there to do but run on, for the mountains are calling.