SGURR ALASDAIR, SGURR MHIC CHOINNICH, SGURR NAN EAG, SGURR DUBH MOR, BRUACH NA FRITHE, AM BASTEIR, SGURR NAN GILLEAN, AN GEARANACH, STOB COIRE A CHAIRN, AM BODACH and SGURR A'MHAIM

SGURR ALASDAIR

SGURR MHIC CHOINNICH

Sun 4th June 1989

SGURR NAN EAG

SGURR DUBH MOR

Tuesday 6th June 1989

BRUACH NA FRITHE

AM BASTEIR

SGURR NAN GILLEAN

Thursday 8th June 1989

AN GEARANACH

STOB COIRE A CHAIRN

AM BODACH

SGURR A'MHAIM

Saturday 10th June 1989

Emerging from Music College in the autumn with no prospects and no money, I fell back into the world of office temp jobs.  The following spring I was working in the mail room of a publisher in Covent Garden, and one afternoon on the way to the Post Office I bumped into Ruth.

"I'm so sorry for being so horrible to you", she said, before I'd even opened my mouth.  "I felt dreadfully guilty about it."

This was gracious.  Then, perhaps undone by the awkwardness of it all, she went on in a rush, "I'm getting married.  To guy I met in a choir.  He's called Dan.  He's a banker".

A lot to take in at one go.  I tried to stand looking friendly and unconcerned.  In two minutes our encounter was over and she went off into the Trafalgar Square crowds.

It hurt.  But not that much.  Perhaps I'd got over her.  At any rate, shortly afterwards I imagined I was in love with an Australian girl called Paula I'd met at work.  After the mail room job finished, Paula and I kept in touch, and I really did think for a while I was getting somewhere with her, until one night in the Museum Tavern in Holborn.  It was hot in there, and standing up to take her jacket off, she caught sight of me glancing covertly at her bosom.  Frankly, to avoid looking would have required Olympic standard self-denial.  Paula put the jacket back on, and things were never quite the same again.

In the summer I had a spell working for a division of British Telecom, answering phone calls from disgruntled customers.  Like a lot of temp jobs it was only meant to last a week or so, but just went on and on.  If the phone wasn't ringing, and it didn't ring often, I larked about or argued with the other temps.  Every weekday I got up at 6 a.m. to work on a Viola Concerto, and when things were slack I carried on writing in the office.  The weather was baking hot, the sort of London heat I'd never entirely got used to, and it was torture to be frittering life away indoors and in the south of England, hundreds of miles away from the nearest mountains.  Every day I stared vacantly out of the window dreaming of climbing in general, and Skye in particular. 

For years an old copy of the Scottish Mountaineering Club guide had been a familiar object in my parents' bookcase.  They'd been to Skye on their honeymoon, and as a kid I'd found its panoramic photographs and pull-out diagrams interesting in an abstract sort of way.  Now I asked Dad to lend it to me, and in its yellowing pages began for the first time to realise that Skye might be a real place after all, where there were real mountains you could go and climb, eleven of which were Munros. 

My parents knew someone who’d often stayed in a caravan belonging to the owner of the Glen Brittle estate.  In May I wrote mentioning his name, and asking if I could rent it during the first week in June.  Back came the reply.  The caravan was available.  The rent was only £30 as it was "not in tip top condition".  That didn't bother me.  £30 was an outright bargain.

Now I only needed someone to go with.  It'd be more fun if there were two of us, and now I'd decided to risk some rock-climbing there'd have to be another person to hold the other end of the rope.  Hector was very much married, and a week off for him was out of the question.  I didn't know any other climbers, and the only other person who might come was Annie. 

I'd met her a couple of years previously in another temp job.  At that time all her friends called her Eggy, but this was undignified, and later when she reinvented herself as an artist a subtle transformation took place and people began to call her Annie instead, and then Anne.  It had more gravitas.  We were just good friends, at least as far as men and women can be; although once the previous summer she'd hinted she'd have liked it to be more than that.  I hadn’t taken her seriously: we’d spent the day at the Notting Hill Carnival and she'd been drunk.  The subject hadn't come up since.  She was good company and liked the outdoors.

And she had a car.  How else were we going to get there?

We drove up via my parents' in Manchester.  Whatever my intentions towards Annie, there was no doubt what Mum thought they were.  Her son was thirty, his relationship with that unsuitable woman Ellen was finally over, he had a job of sorts, and here he was turning up at home with someone else.  He might claim not to be going out with her, but why else did your sons go on holiday with women?  Perhaps this was why she got out the honeymoon photographs, sitting there with a pensive look in her eye as we leafed through them after dinner.

Two of those pictures hang on the wall of my house: Dad on Sgurr Alasdair, balding but absurdly young; Mum looking out over Sgurr nan Eag and Garsbheinn, bare arms, breeches and nailed boots; both pictures taken on a clear day with all the peaks standing out brilliantly sharp.  Half a lifetime ago.

Although I had no designs on Annie, I did want to impress her, and on the way north she had to put up with a great deal of what Hector referred to as Simmo the Caledonian Tour Guide.  And six hours into the journey north, pulling up the bank above Loch Tulla onto Rannoch Moor, I couldn’t resist ruining the surprise by telling her that in a minute she was going to see the Buchaille.

But the Buchaille was surprising enough for all that.

“Have you climbed it?”, she asked.

“No.  You could just walk up it, but there’s loads of rock climbing.  I’ll have to get Hector to take me.  There’s a route called Agag's Groove I want to do.”

I’d begun to take an interest in climbing history, so I told her about Agag's, and about the dashing Hamish Hamilton, and how he beat some of Bill Murray’s friends to the foot of the route by half an hour, and about the vertiginous crux high above the sweep of the Rannoch Wall.

“They were the real heroes, the pioneers”, I said.  “Hemp ropes.  No helmets.  No harnesses.  No runners.  Climbing in nailed boots or pumps from Woolies.  One mistake, and that was that.”

“They must have been mad.”

“That's the Crowberry Ridge", I said, leaning across and pointing out of the passenger window.  "Agag's goes up the side.  And to the right that's Raven's Gully."

Looking up, I found that we were about to hit an oncoming lorry.

The sound of its horn receded.

"And that's the North Buttress to the right again."

"NICK", she shouted, "YOU'RE DRIVING ON THE FUCKING VERGE.”

Late in the afternoon, beyond the Skye ferry at Kyle and with Fort William far behind, we turned off at Carbost onto a single-track road, and found ourselves climbing up onto a moorland plateau dotted white with sheep and lambs.  Mounting a rise we saw what we’d come all this way for.  Or what I’d come all this way for.

Ahead was laid out a great range of mountains.  The sun was nowhere near setting, but nevertheless the golden northern light lay slanting across the ridges and gullies, giving an intricacy of feature to the whole that made them look enormous.  The Rockies or the Urals.  Bigger than they really were anyway.  Immediately in front, on one side of Coire na Creiche, stood what must be Bruach na Frithe; on the other side Sgurr Thuilm sent down a vast flank to Glen Brittle.  Rising centrally in the coire rather like the cone of an old fashioned lemon squeezer was Sgurr nan Fheadain, a great pyramid split down the middle by Waterpipe Gully.  I stopped the car.  Outside, the clicking of our cameras sounded loud and awkward in the silence. 

This is one of the greatest moments of my life, I thought.  I loved mountains, and here were mountains to compare with any in the world.  I was young, or youngish, and we were going to climb some of them.  How could it not be a great moment?

At length we got back in and dropped down into Glen Brittle, a narrow valley only partly desecrated by forestry.  A river meandered through boggy flats.  The view up to the left was now constricted by impending slopes.  We drove on past the Youth Hostel, through farm buildings and then right past a surprisingly lush and grassy field.  Blue water appeared in front, and then the foreshore, sprinkled with tents.  At the road end we parked the car and got out.  This was it.

We'd stopped sufficiently far from the first lift of the hill to have a clear view of the tops.  The west ridge of Sgurr Dearg was end on, but we could see part of the way up into Coire Lagan, bounded on the right by what would be Sron na Ciche, its bristling rocks flushed red with the evening light.

“The Cioch’s up there somewhere”, I said, pointing.

“What’s the Cioch?”

“I’ll show you tomorrow.  If the weather holds.”

We walked along a rough track through the campsite, mostly climbers, and found the caravan, key in the door as promised.  It might not have been "in tip top condition", but it was good enough for us.  There were seats at one end, and what was obviously the sleeping area at the other.  In the middle was a sink, into which a tap dripped water from an unknown and mysterious source, and a cooker.  I’d brought Dad's old double Primus anyway.  We unloaded our baggage and brewed up.  For thirty quid it was a bit of a bargain.

Only in Skye can there be a hill like the one behind the Glen Brittle camp site, where the slope's easier than you expect, and you can mount up as we did next morning, the long arm of Loch Brittle stretching out in the sun below, and think how young and fit you still are.  Surprisingly soon we came up over the crown of the moor and looked across into Coire Lagan, where beneath the jagged skyline of Sgurr Sgumain and Sron na Ciche the crags plunged down to the scree below.  I'd dreamed of this on many office-bound afternoons.

Crossing the floor of the coire we were immediately out of the sun.  Ahead the ground rose and became a stony slope, penance for the first mile.  In half an hour we'd pulled up to a bouldery terrace lying beneath the crags.  Looking back, Glen Brittle was hidden behind a fold in the moor, but we could see over the low hills beyond to where islands stood outlined faintly in the haze. 

I knew from Dad's old S.M.C. book that the way onto the Cioch slab was to find another terrace higher up, so we plodded uphill again in a sea of stones looking for an obvious weakness in the wall of rock above.

Lower down we'd passed a slower-moving climber, and now came upon his friend sitting on a boulder.

"Have you come to do Cioch Direct?", he asked.

I shook my head.

"We're going round by the Terrace."

With so little experience of rock-climbing I couldn't account for his energetic dash up the hill in front of us or obvious relief at finding we weren't planning the same route. 

Soon after this we passed an uninviting looking gully.  Someone had scratched "LG" on a stone.  If this was Little Gully, the Terrace couldn't now be far away.  There was a final steepening, and then we were looking up easy ground on the right to an obvious shelf.  This must be it.  We clambered onto the shelf, and there fifty yards away, looming above a large brown slab, was a great bulging boss of rock, the Cioch. 

I'd read so much about it, and seen so many pictures.  Humble's photo of Bill Murray, looking out over a sea of sunset cloud like something out of Caspar David Friedrich, must be one of the great mountaineering images.  To stand beneath the Cioch in the flesh was a strange feeling.  Wonderful too, but strange, to find something previously inhabiting only my imagination could have an independent existence. 

Also a nervous moment.  I was going to lead up it.

By now I'd been rock climbing with Hector perhaps four or five times.  In the couple of years after our weekend in the Lakes in 1985, we'd been to Bowles Rocks, to Harrisons Rocks once or twice, and to the Roaches in Staffordshire, where I actually seconded a Severe and led a V Diff.  I still had no PAs and no gear though, and on this trip Hec had lent me one of his old ropes, two slings and two karabiners.  At the time I found this stuff reassuring, but it was probably worse than nothing at all.  It gave a sense of security which was entirely false.

Annie had never set foot on rock before.

We scrambled down off the Terrace into Eastern Gully, which here separated Eastern Buttress from the Cioch Slab.  In the gully bed we roped up, and I showed Annie what I knew about waist belaying, which wasn't much.  We climbed out of the gully by the right wall, and then up a rough brown groove, emerging ten minutes later underneath the slab itself.

Here I felt for the first time that adrenalin rush people get on steep rock.  Annie had scarcely emerged onto the Terrace and turned to admire the view when, unable to resist, I'd laid hands on the rough brown gabbro and was catwalking up the slab.  All my doubts fell away.  Small pockets and irregularities appeared under my hands, and I simply pushed with my feet from one to another.  In about ten seconds I'd belayed off one of the slings under the great overhanging boss, and was hauling up the rucksacks.

"What's it like?"

"Piece of piss", I said, assurance surging in my veins like a tidal bore.

The second pitch was a short one round a corner, and as far as I was concerned it might have been a staircase.

Out of sight now on the first stance below, there was a certain amount of confused shouting as Annie struggled to tie on the rucksacks again.

Suddenly the sound of something falling, and I braced my back to the rock against the coming shock, then for a moment when no shock came I thought Surely she can't have untied from the rope; then the next instant something small and blue bouncing down the slab.

A splintering sound as it crashed onto the terrace.

"Are you alright?"

"Yes.  But we'll need a new Thermos."

After that we abandoned hauling rucksacs, so she had to climb the second pitch carrying both.

"You're doing brilliantly."

"How many pitches left?", she asked, breathing hard.

"One.  Up to the neck, there."

Climbing under the weight of my own rucksack, there was one move, almost at the top, where the supply of holds dried up.  I only noticed it once I was past though, which is how it is when you're climbing well.  The rope ran out just as I got to the neck, but by dint of a bit of pulling and tugging I managed a rather insecure belay, and wedged myself into the narrow gap.  

When Annie was up I scrambled round the side overlooking Cioch Gully and up a little crack onto the roof.  In ten minutes we were both standing surveying the wonderful scene below.

I felt like a king.

Behind us to left and right stretched the great grey walls of Sron na Ciche.  Further right, the view into Coire Lagan proper was obscured by the West Buttress of Sgumain; but we could see the glacier scoured slabs that guarded its entrance, where the burn plunged down like a white thread into the lower coire.  Opposite rose the shattered flank of Sgurr Dearg.  Far away on the shoulder of the moor Loch an Fhir-bhallaich took its colour from the blue sky above.  I'd never seen mountains with so much naked rock and so little grass.

For a while we were content to sit and look.  Then we ate a sandwich and took pictures; then the sound of other climbers coming up the slab prompted us to get moving again.  Annie went down the way we'd come up, which was quite tricky because there was a bulge which made it hard to see where your feet went.  Nearer the neck there was a wider crack down which you could easily bridge, and I'd soon climbed past her and up the narrow gangway which links the Cioch to the mountain. 

She hated this bit.

"I'm going to crawl up here.  Is that alright?"

"Fine.  Not very stylish though.  I'll pretend I'm not with you."

We were now at the lower end of an overhanging shelf which cut across the cliff, forming the upper edge of the Cioch slab.  We scrambled up the shelf, sometimes bent nearly double under the weight of the overhang above.  At the top end there was an easy scramble down into Eastern Gully again.

"Which way now?"

"Up the gully.  On to Sron na Ciche."

A hundred feet up the stony bed was blocked by a massive chockstone.

I'd read about this.  Either you turned it on the left wall of the gully, or grovelled about underneath where there was a through route.  The right wall was vertical; out of the question for the likes of us.  The through route looked narrow and wet, and I didn't fancy it much.  Instead I took off the rucksack and climbed tentatively up to the left of the chockstone.

After a minute or two I climbed down again.

"Well?"

"There's a big hold right up there for your left hand", I said.  "But the rock's greasy, and it's a bit committing.  Once you went for it I think you'd either get up or fall off.  Couldn't come down gracefully."

We stood and thought.  Sandwiched between the towering walls on either side I felt suddenly small, confidence draining rapidly away.

"Could we not go back down the gully to where we crossed it earlier on?"

I shook my head.

"It gets a lot harder between here and there.  We'd have to abseil."

"I've never abseiled before."

"Neither have I.  And we haven't got the gear anyway.  Look, you stay here, and I'll go and look down there a bit.  See if there's another way up the left wall.  It doesn't look quite as steep."

I clattered off down the gully.  What we were going to do if there was no other way past the chockstone I had no idea.

A little further down there was a weakness in the left wall with a broken groove above.  It looked possible, the bottom bit anyway, and moreover as if it might take us above and to the left of the obstacle. 

I yelled for Annie to come down.  A few minutes later she was looking doubtfully up at the rock.

"Is it in the guidebook?"

"No.  But not everything is.  Probably most people don't need to look for another way up.  I'll just climb up the first bit and see what it looks like." 

We put on the rope.

There was a hard move near the bottom, hard for me anyway, but above that the angle eased and the only difficulty I had was finding a decent spike for a belay.

On the second pitch I began to be aware of the drop into the gully on the right.  I thought, We were mad to come up with no runners.  But then I thought of The Pioneers, the men whose names graced the old S.M.C. guide: Murray and Bell, Steeple and Barlow, men in tweeds who called each other by their surnames.  They had no runners either.  So shut up and get on with it.

In three pitches we had rejoined the gully bed above the chockstone.  After that it was a straightforward plod up the scree to the shoulder of Sron na Ciche.  To emerge from the gloomy confines of the gully out on the open mountainside was a tremendous relief.

It was about mid-day.  Slowly we made our way over the boulders onto Sgumain, and though Annie wanted to stop there I goaded her into climbing the last few hundred feet to the top of Alasdair.  The Bad Step we never saw.  On Alasdair's narrow airy summit a chilly breeze had sprung up.  To the north the panorama had now expanded to include Dearg and Mhicoinnich, with the main ridge snaking away into the distance; the other way we looked out over the Dubhs to Garsbheinn beyond, all the mountains dark and forbidding under a sky that had clouded over.  South and west lay Soay and the sea.

I'd never climbed anywhere before where the sea was so close.  In the Lakes you could sometimes see it, and the Sutherland hills were near enough; but here, instead of looking across to the sea, you looked down into it.  Paradoxically, it was part of the landscape.  Being there at all it made the mountains higher and steeper; being flat it allowed you to see over to other islands that lay in it; Rhum, Canna and Eigg in the middle distance, Soay only a few miles away across the sound, almost two islands really, like those laboratory photographs of a cell splitting; and in a long low line across the western horizon, what must be the Uists.  After the uncertainties of the gully, this eminence and this outlook were intoxicating.

We didn't stay long on Alasdair.  Getting down to the head of the Great Stone Shoot is supposed to be tricky, but I don't remember anything about it.  Getting from there onto Thearlaich was harder.  Immediately above the bealach there was a short but steep wall on which Annie failed.

Words were exchanged, but she was adamant.

"It's too hard", she said.  "I'm just not doing it, OK?"

A diversion arrived in the shape of four lads coming down from Thearlach to Alasdair.  Three of them got down into the gap easily enough, but the last and smallest claimed not to be able reach a crucial hold.  While his mates jeered I offered to lend him our rope so he could abseil the last few feet.

When they'd gone on Annie got up and climbed the pitch, no trouble at all.

"Sorry to be such a girly spasmo", she said.

From there we went easily over Thearlach and down into the gap, with MhicCoinnich's steep crenellations above.  By this time Annie'd had just about enough.  She'd wait while I went up MhicCoinnich.

Once up onto Collie's ledge it was an easy and airy traverse round the side and onto the top; almost a path really.  We'd only seen a handful of people, and on top of Mhic Coinnich there was no one else.  The wind had dropped entirely.  For some long moments the stillness was so intense that I could hear the blood rushing in my ears.  I looked out over that twisted mass of mountain and shining sea.  Just briefly the world seemed to have spiritual as well as material dimensions. 

Temporal dimensions too: I'd said I'd only be half an hour.

Annie was asleep in a sun-trap, but she woke at the approaching clatter of my feet. Presently we scrambled down steep slopes to join the great stone shoot. 

"Hard not to feel bad about it", I said, a few minutes and a thousand feet lower down. Generations of climbers had dug out a great scar with their scree running, and we'd just made it fractionally worse.

Nevertheless we carried on racing downhill.

Hard under the cliffs of Alasdair suddenly the sound of big birds flapping this way, louder and louder; we looked up' surprised, in time to see two stones crash into the scree a few yards away.  I'd never heard stonefall before.  An ominous sound, like the beating of wings.  And not angels' wings either.

At the bottom, the waters of the lochan were aquamarine in their rocky hollow.  We went round to the further end where massive ice-planed slabs bulge at the lip of the coire, and lay down gratefully on their gritty warmth, paddling our feet at the water's edge, boots rimed white with scree-dust.

The mountains stood around us in a great semi-circle.  If we craned our necks and looked behind we could see the cliffs of Sron na Ciche, the Cioch's long shadow stretched out left across the slab.  A satisfying feeling to know we'd been up there that morning.  Reclining by the lochan, an improbable colour, squinting up at the surrounding battlements sunlit against the deep blue afternoon sky, we could have been excused for imagining that by accident some back door to heaven had been left ajar.  And that we'd stumbled through it.

For half and hour we lay and dozed, roused in the end by the voices of climbers coming down from the back of Sgurr Dearg.  The spell not broken, rather suspended, we balanced our way down the great cascade of slabs into the lower coire, and went wearily back across the moor, turning every now and again to look at the changing light up in Coire Lagan as the sun dipped and cloud gathered around the top of Sgumain.

On Tuesday I announced that I was going to climb Sgurr nan Eag, Annie said she'd potter around in Glen Brittle and take some photographs.

It was another fine morning; but I was learning that the mornings often started fine and then clouded over.  Something to do with water vapour.  I went up the shoulder of the moor as we'd done on Sunday, but then, instead of heading up into Coire Lagan, went along a boggy path round the foot of Sgumain.  At the burn in the next valley I took off my rucksack and drank deeply.  Coir' a' Ghrunnda was desolate, hardly a blade of vegetation to be seen, and the burn slid over naked boiler-plate slabs.  It had become a warm day, and setting off again the rucksack pressed my sweat-damp shirt dismally against my back.

After Coir' a' Ghrunnda the path disappeared, or I lost it, and the way lay along a steep hillside overlooking Soay Sound and Soay itself, seen even better here than from Alastair.  Traversing with one foot always lower than the other was aggravating.  I began to understand a piece of advice I'd once read.

If you are ever chased by a herd of elephants, run along the side of a hill.  Elephants are very bad at this.  They overbalance.

As advice goes, not likely to be of use, admittedly.  After half a mile's stumbling progress towards Coire nan Loigh I found myself thinking, Humans aren't very good at hillsides either, and by the time I finally came round the corner into the coire I was walking with a pronounced limp.

According to the S.M.C. book, there were three gullies at the back of this coire, two of which were Moderate or less, and one Severe.  I'd thought I might just manage one of the Moderate ones unroped, and stood breathing hard in the silence, scanning the back of the coire for gullies.

Only two.  I hadn't brought the book with me, so there was no way of checking I'd remembered rightly.  Looking from one to the other, I worked out the permutations.  Evidently one had gone missing, but there was no way of knowing which.  The book must be wrong; or perhaps there'd be a plausible semi-gully on one side that you couldn't see from where I stood.  I walked a bit further into the coire.  Still only two.

I struggled with the maths.  If the Severe had been the right hand gully in the book, I'd have been safe climbing the left of the pair; and vice versa.  But the Severe was supposed to be the middle one, so where did that leave us?  The person I really needed was my Dad, who liked maths, and might be able to work it out.  I couldn't.  The only safe thing to do was avoid them altogether and scramble up the open hillside to one side.

In the event this proved demanding enough.  There were some nasty rock steps a bit like minature versions of Broad Stand on Scafell, and once, stepping up with my left boot, I found I lacked the momentum to get back into balance and could only collapse ignominiously onto my chest and scrabble around with my hands on the rock in front for purchase.  Once all the difficulties were over there still remained a few hundred feet to the ridge.  Long before reaching it I'd begun to feel horribly unfit, tired and dehydrated: like an idiot I'd brought up no water.  At the top I sat panting by the cairn, watching the few remaining drops of moisture in my body drip from forehead to ground. 

It had been worth the effort though.  On the other side of the level rocky edge you could see straight down to Loch Scavaig, the waters the same marvellous ultramarine as Lochan Coire Lagan two days ago.  A yacht swung gently at anchor.  Along a curving mile or so of ridge, the pointed head of Garsbheinn poked up to the south, with blue sea behind and a long way away a peninsula I couldn't name, perhaps Ardnamurchan.  Further round towards the head of Coruisk, the Dubhs stood louring appropriately black under gathering cloud, with Alistair and Tearlach silhouetted even darker against the sky.

Coming down towards Caisteal a'Garbh-choire, I reflected that, feeling so knackered, I could honourably miss out Sgurr Dubh na Da Bheinn, which wasn't a Munro, and traverse the rocky glacis beneath it on the Coruisk side round to Sgurr Dubh Mor.  I could leave my bag here and collect it on the way back.
To the east of the Caisteal there were huge boulders of the coarsest gabbro I'd seen all week, almost spongy, and underneath one of them I stuffed the rucksack.  The weather was closing in, and I pulled it out again to get my waterproof. 

The short cut, like most, was only a qualified success.  The ground falling into the Gharbh Coire proved to be a series of sloping rubble-filled terraces interlaced with with rubble-filled stone shoots, horrible to cross.  One of the few solid bits of rock I came upon was an exposed slab, which had to be climbed.  I looked for a long time at the detour necessary to reach the far side a less dangerous way.  Amidst all that scree it seemed more attractive to risk death.

The moves turned out to be simple, but the moments before I found that out were lonely ones.  Funnily enough this place was much easier on the way down.

Fortunately from my vantage point underneath Caisteal a'Garbh-Choire I'd had the sense to count the number of stone shoots to cross.  Otherwise I'd have got hopelessly lost in that sloping stony wasteland.  At the right one it was just a very arduous and loose slog upwards till I came out beneath the tor-like prow of Sgurr Dubh Mor.  I thought, It looks far too steep; I'll never get up this.  But then the climbing became surprisingly easy, and I was soon pulling up onto the topmost rocks. 

A narrow walkway ran along the summit.  The group of ravens that had been skulking around had retreated to the far end.  In a spirit of competition I advanced along towards them, and ignoring their mild protests sat down in a sheltered corner and ate a second or third lunch in a patch of sunlight.  Over Mhic Choinnich, the Inaccessible Pinnacle stood up on Sgurr Dearg's back like the dorsal crest of some primeval lizard.

Getting down off this exposed reef wasn't a prospect to relish; but a narrow path made its way down the Garbh Coire side and I followed it with one eye on the drop, the other on the tendrils of mist creeping over the ridge from Coir' a' Ghrunnda.  Back at the rucksack, the summits of the Dubhs were just about obscured.  I clambered around Caisteal a'Garbh-choire, and picked my way down the bouldery slope into Coir' a'Ghrunnda.

Some way down this slope a sound in the rocks to the right made me stop and look about.  A few feet away a bird stood in the angle between two blocks, shifting hesitantly from foot to foot.  It was a ptarmigan, a drab-looking creature, its red eye-wattle the only thing marking it out from the background.  I'd seem one before, but never so close.  How long would it sit there before flying off?  Long enough, it turned out, for me to take off the rucksack, get out the camera, change the lens and take a photograph.  And for some reason ptarmigan aren't extinct.  Perhaps they don't taste very good.

We might have gone on looking at each other indefinitely, but soon the voices of some climbers descending from the ridge floated down through the mist.  I shouldered my rucksack and left the bird pottering about among the rocks.

I thought Coire a'Ghrunnda, when it came into sight below the cloud, less beautiful than Coire Lagan: much stonier and the ground more broken.  The lochan seemed to have been clumsily intruded, its waters a dull blackish colour quite unlike Lochan Coire Lagan's outrageous turquoise.  Maybe it looked better when the sun shone.  I was very thirsty though, and once it had got past my lips the water's appearance didn't seem so important.

Late in the afternoon I went slowly back across the open moor at the mouth of Coire Lagan.  Now and again the sun shone on Loch Brittle below.  Ahead, a bird piped fitfully, a brief and mournful note somewhere between a flute and an oboe, dipping just fractionally in pitch, less even than a quarter tone.  A Golden Plover, I thought; and there was the bird itself, watching from a hummock a little way off, a dull ochreous creature, black beneath.

The bird then did something extraordinary.  The nest must have been close by, because when I was within ten yards it began to run, the same direction I was walking, or nearly, perhaps a slight tangent, dragging one wing pathetically in the grass.  I knew about the broken wing trick some birds did to lead predators away from their young, but I'd never seen it done before.  You'd never have guessed it was a con.  For a full hundred yards the plover trailed diligently in front, every appearance of an easy lunch, before abandoning the pretence and watching the intruder go.

The caravan was empty when I returned.  I unlaced my dusty boots and lay on one of the seats drinking beer and wiggling my sore toes.  After a while, overcome by a kind of stupified and weary satisfaction, I switched on Annie's radio.  The PM programme.

Under the same sun as Skye's mountains and moorland, Chinese people were being killed in a place called Tianenmen Square, Peking.

On Wednesday we went to Portree to buy provisions, and in the afternoon drove over to the other side of the island, where on a south-facing beach we sat in the sunshine and each painted a watercolour of the view across Loch Bracadale to the Cuillin.  I was a bad painter, and though Annie later went to Art college (and taught there) this sort of thing wasn't her forte either. 

It was the only time when I thought something might happen between us.  The day was warm, and when Annie took her jumper off I couldn't help noticing what a shapely bosom she had.  At the time I wasn't aware of the faint echo of the incident with Paula in the Holborn pub, but nevertheless I made myself look away again.  Staring was bad manners.  And even assuming she was interested in me, what a disaster it would be to get involved with someone I didn't love.

In the middle of the night I woke to feel myself being nudged in the back.

"Budge up", she whispered.  "It's freezing down my end".

Fuddled and semi-conscious, I wondered whether this meant just budge up, or budge up and something else besides.  Too tired to work out the answer, in thirty seconds I was asleep again.

Neither of us mentioned it in the morning.  Annie was up before me. 

"I thought the weather was supposed to be crap on Skye", she said.

"What's it like?"

"Glorious.  Again."

We drove to Sligachan, and left the car half a mile short of the Hotel, just by the start of the Glen Brittle track.  We weren't the only people setting out that way.  A couple of car loads of fairly elderly walkers left just before us, and we passed and re-passed them on the way up towards the Bealach a Mhaim as the morning wore on.

After an hour or so we left this track and headed across the bog towards the toe of Bruach na Frithe, jutting out to the north.  My Dad had set off to climb this hill with his friend Bob Johnson, one summer in the 50s.  They'd turned back in rain.  It was easy to imagine how you might want to do this, I thought.  The bog wasn't easy going, and the slope ahead looked as if it'd want some working on.  However, again the usual miracle: we got onto a preliminary knoll, and the change of ground from moor to mountain seemed to serve as encouragement.  We'd get to the top if we kept at it.

The shoulder of Bruach na Frithe was different from Alasdair and the other Cuillin hills we climbed; some of the rock was loose, and though you could scramble along the spiny ridge, there was a path beneath the crest which was easier and quicker.  You didn't have to look where you were going quite so much either.  On our right, the sloping cone of Sgurr nan Fheadain rose from its coire between tendrils of mist. 

As the ridge levelled out higher up, a few drops of rain fell.  But this had stopped by the time we got to the bouldery summit, and extraordinarily for Skye it was the only rain that fell on us all week.  The mist had cleared too.  In Fionn Coire below, the people we'd seen earlier were mounting the path which ran like a pale stripe up its bed.

We must have come down from the top of Bruach na Frithe past the great lump of Sgurr a Fionn Coire, but I remember nothing of it until further down when, approaching Am Basteir, we were unsure whether the Coruisk side was passable, and so turned the great prow on the north, where a scree slope falls away from the overhanging face.      

I thought this an inhospitable looking cliff, all the strata seeming to run the wrong way for climbing and the rock horribly steep.  And yet there are some quite easy routes up it.

The Basteir Tooth itself didn't seem any more inviting.

"The Pioneers were dead keen on this place", I said.  "They spent days scrabbling around inside that bloody great chimney, King's Cave Chimney.  God knows why."

"Very Freudian", Annie said. 

Beneath the crag was a fairly substantial patch of snow, substantial but soft, and having floundered down it to the bottom we then had to struggle up the other side to rejoin the ridge.  Here we left our rucksacks, and set off on the quarter-mile scramble up Am Basteir's east ridge.  The most fearsome and desperate Moderates were a stroll for us now, and having patted the cairn at the top we sought out the harder bits on the way down to make it more interesting.

If I'd had one definite objective before we set off from London, it was to climb Sgurr nan Gillean by the west ridge.  I'd rather have done it by the harder Pinnacle ridge, but neither of us was experienced enough, and I couldn't forsee a time when I might be.  We scrambled up to the foot of the west ridge until our way was barred, then traversed round to the left, ignoring Nicholson's chimney, too easy even for us, to the Doctor's Gullies.  The right one was in a recess and looked feasible for a determined novice in big boots. 

I climbed up the first few feet, but then got stuck.

"Is it difficult?", Annie called up.

"Not really.  Going to come down and take the rucksack off though."

            Minus rucksack, things went much better until the upper end of the chimney, where there was a chockstone.  The holds ran out.  I'd never done any chimney climbing before, and knew about backing and footing only from reading about it.  Now was the time.  Straining and panting furiously in the confined space, I udged upwards till I could reach over the top; a twist, a long pull with the right arm, scrabbling feet, and suddenly there was level ground.  Triumph. 

"I'm up!"

In theory this was probably too hard for Annie, but it was her day, our day, and she pushed, I pulled and soon she came tumbling over the chockstone, looking distinctly red in the face.

After that it was easy scrambling over big blocks to the airy top.

"There used to be a bloody great obelisk here, The Policeman", I said.

I knew from somewhere that he'd finally gone the way of all flesh and tumbled down into the Coruisk side.  We couldn't even spot where he'd stood, so thoroughly had he disappeared. 

At the summit the sort of view that some people visit Skye many times before seeing: all the mountains, the sea, the islands, the mainland.

"In a way it's a shame to see all this at once", I said.  "It's a bit like looking at a naked woman.  More interesting if she gets her kit off bit by bit."

Annie looked at me pityingly.

"You really are a sad case aren't you?", she said.

We came down by the Tourist route, which was simple enough, though it wasn't immediately clear where you came off the ridge on the Sligachan side.  The day was wearing on and we scrambled down in shadow, with Glen Sligachan and the Red Hills sunlit to the west.  A path appeared, and we followed it slowly down to the footbridge at the junction with the Coire a' Bhasteir track.

"This bloke I used to play cricket with, Cliff, came to Skye on his honeymoon", I said.  "They weren't climbers at all, didn't have a clue; but one day they thought they'd climb Sgurr nan Gillean.  From Sligachan.  He was telling me about this, and he said they got up to about here, and it was a lot further than they thought, they'd been going for hours without getting anywhere, so they thought they'd sit down by the track and have a picnic.  That was what he said, have a picnic.  He said, 'People going by kept giving us most peculiar looks.  I think', and this was the killer, 'I think it was because we were drinking our tea out of china cups'.  Imagine bringing up china cups."

"Not really surprising people stared at them.  Did they get to the top?"

"No.  Gave up and went home."

A mile or so out from Sligachan we saw some people out in the bog to our right.  Flying round them in circles was a wading-bird of some sort, a greenshank perhaps, making the most pitiful calls.  At the time it didn't occur to me that they might be bird's-nesting, though that now seems the obvious explanation.  Perhaps they were just stupid.

I was looking forward to the Hotel at Sligachan, and not just for the drink it promised: I thought it'd have the atmosphere of a great climbing hotel, like the Wasdale Head or the Kingshouse.  Whereas the public bar round the back was about as dingy a place as neglect and rotten design could make it.

"This is a bit like the waiting-room at Doncaster bus-station, circa 1976."

"Keep your voice down", she hissed.

We drank our beer and ate packets of peanuts, while the PA played teuchy music of a sort; which was about all the amenity you could reasonably require. 

When we'd had enough of this, which wasn't for a while, I said I'd run up the road to fetch the car.

We went outside. It was still light in that northern summer way, but Sgurr nan Gillean was now more an outline than a three dimensional mountain, the sky a duck-egg green at the horizon, darkling to an inky blue above.  A faint breeze drew across the moor, and our boots made loud scrunching sounds on the car park gravel.

"I bet you can't really run all the way to the car", Annie said.

I can't remember now if I did; but I certainly ran all the way I was in sight of her, and for the purposes of the bet that was the only bit that mattered.

There was no repeat of the budging up incident that night.  I'd pretty much forgotten about it anyway.

On Friday we drove to Fort William and stayed in Glen Nevis Youth Hostel.  In the morning we drove up to the road end at to the top of the glen.

"So what's this we're climbing today?", Annie said.

I was looking out of the window at the valley passing by.  What a relief not to have to walk along the road like last time.

"The Ring of Steall, so called."

"Sounds like some constipation condition."

"Ha ha."
At the car park, tucked in below the southern flank of Ben Nevis, the ice cream vans and their customers hadn't yet arrived.  We put on our boots sitting on the bumper of the car, looking up at the steep flank of Sgurr a' Mhaim, where clouds made fast-moving shadows on the hillside.  It wasn't a bad day, but it'd be windy on top.

We went briskly up through the woods with the river thundering away in the gorge down below, and soon came out on the flat at Steall, where despite the dry spell the waterfall showed a spread of white on the far slope; perhaps it had rained in the night.  The next thing was to cross the river.

Surprisingly, the bridge over the Nevis wasn't so much a bridge as a trio of wires suspended from stanchions at each side.  We walked up to inspect the structure in some trepidation.  There was a fairly substantial wire for your feet, and another thinner wire at each side for your hands; these ran in a dipping span of about twenty yards to the other side.

"Go on then", I said.  "You go first.  I'll take a picture of you falling in."

It was actually rather easy. The technique was for you to put your feet across rather than along the lower wire, so minimising the chance of slipping.  The only awkward thing was that the wires gave and swayed under your weight, in my case considerable because I had the rucksack; I lurched over like a drunk weaving unsteadily across Oxford Street between the buses.

"That's the kind of obstacle I like", Annie said.  "Looks impressive, but dead simple really."

We walked on along the south bank of the river congratulating each other on our fortitude and bravery.  Outside the Steall hut a man was cleaning a frying pan on the front step.  We waved.  There was an alluring smell of bacon and sausages in the air.

Beyond the waterfall our path began to zig-zag uphill in a narrow combe with a long rock-band on the right.  We were out of the wind, and it was hot going.  Stopping to rest at a turn in the path, sweat fell in salty droplets from our foreheads.  Annie's face was flushed pink.  On the far side of the valley, a deep and enclosed trench, the near shoulders of Ben Nevis and Aonach Beg thrust out massively towards us, their summits just capped by cloud.  It was a largely green and sunlit view, though compared with Skye the mountains were great rounded lumps.  We swatted away the circling clegs and plodded upwards. 

A little way short of the broken crags which prevent you climbing straight up over the nose of An Gearanach, we left the path at a turn and traversed out onto the spur of the hill, where we could look round into the huge glaciated bowl of Coire a'Mhail and up at where the hills encircling it would have been had the mist not come down to shroud them.

"That's where we're going", I said, "all the way round there to that hill opposite, Sgurr a'Mhaim."

"Looks like a long way."

"Not long, but there's quite a bit of up and down."

The wind hit us afresh, and the day didn't seem so sunny.  We struggled on upwards for twenty minutes, up a steep grassy slope broken by strange little tor-like outcrops, sweating under our waterproofs, until the path suddenly reappeared, rising more gently now to a green-spined hillock whose herbiage looked as if it had been cropped close by generations of rabbits. Then steeply up again until clambering over some rocks we stepped thankfully on to the summit of An Gearanach, a narrow place with a long narrow ridge extending south in the direction of a lower top, An Garbhanach.  It was very windy, and fragments of cloud tore by like attenuated cotton wool. We'd been going for just a bit less than three hours.

At the far end of An Garbhanach's level ridge, we went downhill to the first bealach.

"Thing is", I said, "there's five mountains on this circuit, and four bealachs between them.  So after each bealach you've got to shag uphill again to the next top.  Four times."

"It is a deeply unattractive word, 'shag'", Annie said.

"Isn't it?  Hector uses it.  I blame him."

We set out uphill to Stob Coire a'Chairn without much enthusiasm.  Soon the prospect east to the drab slopes of the Binneins Mor and Beg was blotted out by mist, and the vague path petered out.  On the summit twenty minutes later we had to cast about for the cairn.

Between this top and the next, Am Bodach, there were two cols, separated by a low green hump in the ridge, unnamed on the map. Just as sometimes a place strikes you for no obvious reason as inimical and hostile, other places have a kindly atmosphere unconnected with their being picturesque or pretty.  Walking up this gently rounded hill, I felt full of calmness and well-being, full of sympathy for the place.  I didn't say anything about this to Annie.  It seemed both private and irrational.

The day was wearing on.  Just before the climb up to Am Bodach began we sat down on the lee side of the ridge and ate lunch with the mist coming and going.

"Show me where we are then."

I got the map out, and we held it flapping in the wind.

"D'you think you'll get all the way round to Sgurr a'Mhaim", I asked, chewing a jam sandwich.  "You could miss out this next hill altogether, Am Bodach, if you contoured round here, and I could meet you at the next bealach."

"No, I'll keep going.  I'm OK.  It'd be daft if we got separated."

As we got going again up Am Bodach's near slope, the cloud lifted briefly.  In the distance, beyond the southern shoulder of Na Gruagaichean, the Blackwater Reservoir gleamed faintly in a sepia, half-tone landscape, stretching away towards Rannoch.  Then the mist came down again and the ground in front of our noses was all we could see, feet struggling to get purchase on the stones and reddish earth.

I remember nothing about the top of Am Bodach, apart from feeling glad that there were only two more summits to go; there was nothing to see anyway.  We were in cloud all the way down to the next bealach, and all the way up on to Sgor an Iubhair too.  At the time I thought this was the day's fourth Munro, but eight years later the S.M.C. in their wisdom decided to revise the list, adding some hills and deleting this one, presumably because of its proximity to Am Bodach and the modest dip between them.

There are no certainties.  Not even in Munro's Tables.

Three squaddie-type blokes sat by the cairn, the first people we'd seen all day.  They knew where they were and had a map, but didn't seem to know which way to go to get to Stob Ban, so I got out the compass and showed them.

We went north west from the cairn, and scrambled down towards the shallow col at the start of the Devil's Ridge.

"Fancy not having a compass", I said, thinking about the squaddies, and forgetting conveniently a certain half hour with Hector on Ben Alder.  "It's amazing how stupid some people can be."

Afterwards I bitterly regretted not saving the Devil's Ridge for winter.  This isn't to denigrate the ridge in summer, because once we got up onto it the crest was knife-edged enough, sometimes only just wide enough for the path, with steep slopes plummeting down on either side.  Still, it must be a great winter route on a good day.

"Shame we can't see anything", Annie said.  "I bet it's spectacular in clear weather."

But just then the mist, blowing up over the lip of Coire a' Mhail, lifted like the curtain in a theatre.  It was most dramatic: we found ourselves looking directly down into the coire, a great green bowl seamed at the sides with gullies and running with the ribbon of a stream; and as we watched, the mist blown out of it was caught in an eddy on the leeward side of the ridge, so in that direction we could soon see no more than ten yards. 

A few minutes later there was a brief moment when this cloud lifted too, and we caught a glimpse of Stob Ban a mile or so to the west, looking a very different mountain to the ice-sheathed cone it had been when I came up with Alison eighteen months before.  Now its pewter-coloured crags showed only faintly against the drab surrounding slopes, and only in the gullies on the east face were there any lingering patches of snow.  A strange sight.  I could no more imagine Stob Ban in summer than, say, my Dad in drag.  Then the mist came down again, and that was the last of the view for the next hour or so.

Both of us were very tired, and the last climb of the day, up to Sgurr a'Mhaim, was trying and slow.  We were in mist all the way and struggled upwards with only the hillside immediately above to look at. 

I'd always found Sgurr a'Mhaim a rather intimidating hill: it blocks the head of Glen Nevis like a bully, square shouldered and aggressive-looking.  I couldn't quite believe that we'd actually got to within a few hundred feet of the top without any great catastrophe taking place.  On a green level place we rested; then the stones began again, and we trudged uphill in a cold wind that blew the mist across the hillside. 

Thankfully there are basic laws of physics - or is it maths? - which ensure that if you keep going long enough on any finite ascent, you'll get to the top.  The slope eased in the end and we came out onto the summit, where a large cairn stood.  I was delighted, and gave Annie a chaste hug.  It'd been a great day, but an ignoble part of me was just as pleased by the addition of five Munros to my total.  The shame of it all.

In the lee of the cairn we looked at the map to find the best way off.  The obvious way would be straight down into Glen Nevis by the north west shoulder, but this would mean a long walk up the road back to the car.  On the other hand we might be able to go more directly down into Coir' a'Mhail to the east, and then steeply down beside the waterfall behind the Steall hut.

"Show me", Annie said, when I'd explained all this; and then, "Are you sure we can get down there?  The contours are pretty close together by the waterfall.  Perhaps it might be a bit better a bit further over here, to the west."

"No no, it'll be fine.  Can't be that steep or there'd be rock climbing all over it.  Which there isn't."

In three quarters of an hour we'd come down the rocky north east ridge, and into a small side coire which opens out onto a shelf of moorland a hundred feet or so above the main burn.  By now Annie's uncertainty had begun to work on me, and I wasn't at all sure that we were going to be able to get down beside the waterfall.  As usual when unsure of the way, I started to walk faster.  Annie was just beginning to flag, and fell behind.  I waited for her, exasperated.  I thought, But she's probably exasperated too.

Soon enough we came out onto the lip of the coire.  The Nevis ran a very long way beneath, with the wire bridge and the Steall hut, looking like a doll's house only smaller, clearly visible.  Separating us from the valley floor was a thousand feet or so of very steep wooded hillside.  We looked straight down into the crowns of the trees.  

"We'll never get down there", she said. 

It had the ring of truth.

"You stay here. I'll go and have a look this way", nodding over to the left. 

The map seemed to show an easier gradient there.  I cast about for ten minutes trying to find a way down that didn't involve clinging to vertical grass, but none appeared.  There must be one, but I couldn't find it.

I broke the news.

"Does this mean more uphill?", she asked suspiciously.

"Only a bit."

"You're lying."

"Yes."

Frustratingly, it meant more downhill first too.  We dropped down to the stream and then plodded slowly back up the far slope in the evening sunshine, to a half-way shoulder, then up on to the north west spur of An Gearanach just above the rock band lining the combe we'd zig-zagged up in the morning.  By the time we got there Annie had a bad-tempered look on her face.  The mutual trust and confidence that binds expeditions together had begun to fray somewhat.

After that it was just a matter of dropping through scrappy bracken to the path, and then trudging back down the missing thousand feet to the Nevis.

Here we discovered what we should have realised in the morning.  Crossing the wire bridge was completely unnecessary.  The river was so low that some distance upstream we could walk across it dry-shod.  So much for raging torrents.

The path through the wood was deserted: it was tea-time, and all the tourists had gone off to have tea.

Sensing that some of the gloss had gone off the day, I said, "I bet you I can carry you all the way back to the car."

"What, me and the rucksack?"

"Well we can't just leave it here, can we?"

As it turned out, I couldn't manage it; but the effort made the final half-mile pass a bit quicker.

In the evening we went down to Fort William and drank pints of Guinness in some bar or other.  The place was heaving, and the two of us sat there, eyeing up the talent, which was not negligible.  It was a peculiar feeling.  We were both single and both would have preferred not to be.  I was quite happy that nothing was going on between us, but it made me feel rather lonely all the same.  Somehow it'd have been alright if she'd been a bloke.  Later on we went for an overpriced and second-rate curry. 

Next day we drove to Manchester and drank tea in my parents' back garden.  I thought, Mum's wondering what's been happening.  Then on to London, where the Indian restaurants are better but there are no mountains. 

The following week a letter arrived.  Inside, in Annie's unmistakeable neat handwriting, was a poem.  Her own work, by the look of it.

Quite obviously I'd got it horribly wrong.

Not knowing what to do, I did nothing.

A few days later another poem arrived.  Again, I did nothing.  I suppose I should have phoned her, but I could just hear myself saying of course we can still be friends, and the horror of it appalled me.

Despite this I might have called her had I not by this stage already been going out with someone else.

I'd been round to a friend's for dinner, and there was a girl there, Stephanie, I liked straight away.  She was a pension fund lawyer, though nothing like as  dull as this made her sound.  Another night three of us went out to the pictures, and afterwards it turned out that Stephanie and I were going home on the same tube.

On the Central Line platform at Holborn I said to her, God knows why, "Kiss me."

"What!"

"Go on.  Kiss me."

"What, here?"

The contrast between my licentious behaviour, snogging with a more or less complete stranger on the Underground, and Annie's, earnest, brave and sincere, couldn't have been sharper.  Perhaps I felt ashamed of myself.

The memory of Scotland was beginning to fade when the package arrived.  Inside was a packet of Bird's custard.

I turned it over in my hands.  No letter, no message.  Then the light dawned.  Custard.  Cowardy custard.  Cowardy yellow custard, in fact. 

For a minute I was angry.  I hadn't asked to be put in this position after all.  Then I thought, Well it is quite funny.  And churlish not to respond.

"You led me on", Annie said when I rang.

"I hadn't had a clue."

"Yes you did."

"No I didn't.  At least not beforehand."

"Yes you did."

"Well, anyway.  I'm sorry."

She said, "Oh well."

I didn't tell her about Stephanie.