Mullach nan Coirean, Stob Ban - ? Feb 1988

At the start of my second-to-last term at Trinity I was still going out with Alison, the violinist.  In practice anyway.  In theory I'd just about decided that I ought really to try and give it another go with Ellen.

Executing this decision was proving difficult.

Hector and Wendy had finally had enough of me.  Things came to a head over a toothpaste issue. After leaving them I'd gone from spare room to spare room via a bit of flat-sitting (during which I slept through the famous Michael Fish storm in its entirety), until at last in November the chance came to move back into the rented flat on Ladbroke Grove I used to share with Ellen.  After we'd moved out, Martin had lived there, but now he and Frances were going down to Devon to work in an outdoor centre.  Their relationship seemed to be flourishing.  I could have the flat at least till Martin came back; and he might not come back. 

This suited me fine.  The rent was cheap.  It was in part of London I liked.  It was only just down the road from Ellen, and therefore ideal for reconciliation purposes.  After a rootless nine months it was wonderful to get my belongings out of Hector's attic and unpack everything.  I sat in the living room surrounded by half-empty boxes and tatty possessions, mentally breathing out again. 

But although I was only two minutes' walk from Ellen's, getting back together proved harder than I'd anticipated.  For one thing, she too was going out with someone else, a shipping lawyer called Marcus.  This wasn't much of a surprise.  Ellen used to work with him, and the few times we'd met I'd wondered if there wasn't something in the offing.  And then there was the business of the well-made bed when I came back from Lochailort.  I thought he was a bit of a drip (we used to refer to him  - amusingly - as Mucus); but when she wasn't trying to make me admit that things with Alison were over, Ellen seemed quite attached to him.  In the end they nearly got married. 

The other obstacle to a resumption of relations was that having a flat of my own provided opportunities for concupiscence with Alison which would have required unusual strength of character to resist.  It took me several months to get a grip on myself.  It wasn't until New Year that I decided I'd never sort things out with Ellen while I was still seeing Al.  I'd have to finish with her.  At some point.  But not just yet.

One morning Al and I saw an advert at Ladbroke Grove tube station to the effect that in February Student Railcard holders could buy a return ticket anywhere in the country for £10.

"We could go to Scotland", I suggested.

The realisation that there were over two hundred and seventy Munros, of which I'd climbed only four, had inspired the calculation that I'd need to do at least fifteen a year if I was to finish in this life rather than the next.  Every opportunity had to be taken.

As soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted them.  It wasn't fair.  Now I'd decided to finish with Alison, the honourable thing would be to get it over and done with as soon as possible.  No Scotland therefore.

But I was a coward; and a worm entered my soul saying, If you go to Scotland with her you could see how things work out; and if it's still no good she'll be going down to Sussex to play the violin in "My Fair Lady" for most of March so you won't see her; and then maybe she'll have got used to not seeing you, and it won't hurt so much when you tell her afterwards; and anyway you've never done any winter climbing, and it's so cheap, you'd be an idiot to refuse it.  And so on.

And so we went.

Alison came from Southport and had done a fair bit of hillwalking in the Lakes.  She'd also been in a strange organisation called the Venture Scouts, whose members seemed to do a lot of lying around in tents farting and, she said, having a generally hilarious time; so she was used to roughing it.  She was keen on me, and dead keen to go to Scotland, even if it meant getting cold and wet.

I should have been ashamed of myself, and deep down I was.  But even deeper down I wanted someone to go climbing with.

The snag about British Rail's offer was that you couldn't go on the sleeper, and you couldn't go over a weekend; we'd have to spend a whole day travelling in each direction.  Four days absence from College could just about be contrived, and two days in Glen Nevis seemed just about worth the two train-bound days.  I swallowed my pride and booked us into Glen Nevis Youth Hostel.  This meant no sex, but abstinence would be a sop to my conscience.

We got to Fort William on a winter evening after a long day’s travelling.  I'd no idea how to get to the Hostel, and there was no sign of a bus.  Some taxis were waiting outside the station, so I hailed one with an expansive gesture, nervously fingering the thin sheaf of banknotes in my back pocket.  We drove up Glen Nevis, peering out at the darkness.  In the event the fare was £2, derisory by London standards and about a third of what I'd been expecting.  I tipped the driver out of sheer relief.

In the morning we were up early.  The Hostel wasn't as bad as I'd feared.  There were a lot of relatively normal-looking people there, along with several others who looked as if the asylum wasn't built which could contain them; and inside the dormitory I was transported back ten years to boarding school, which hadn't been such a bad place either.  From this point onwards I took to Hostels with the zeal of the converted.  They were cheap too.

Out of the kitchen window there was an absolutely wonderful view up the valley to a sharp and pointed mountain, Stob Ban, and a much more bulky one which must be Sgurr a'Mhaim.  Both were snow covered for the last thousand feet or so. 

I got Al out of doors as quickly as was consistent with politeness.  A little way up the valley road we climbed over a fence into a plantation on the right, and struggled up through the trees to a firebreak.  Al then said she had on one pair of tights too many, so I fretted and looked at the map while she undressed and dressed again; we had to go south through the woods and round an inconvenient knoll before we could get up onto the hill proper. 

When she was ready we went along the second forestry road till it ran out and the plantation ended; but then there were more trees, straggling away from the plantation like refugees, and we had to fight our way through these and round the knoll before at last we came out onto open ground.  It was all a bit of a nightmare. 

After that though things were easier.  For half a mile there was quite a steep pull till we got onto an outlying hill, Sgor Chalum, but from there it was just a gentle uphill walk.  There was a very strong wind which made Al's hair stream out sideways.  I put my hat on, a claret-coloured balaclava of the type you can pull down over your face.

Alison wasn't impressed.

"You look a right bloody idiot in that."

"Thanks a lot."

"Is that Ben Nevis", she said, pointing across the valley to a big hill whose top was in cloud.

"I think so.  Huge isn't it?"

Soon we came to some fairly hard frozen snow.  I got the ice-axe out.  My Dad had lent it to me at Christmas.  It was a proper walking axe with a beautiful ash shaft, and I carried it with pride.  It hadn't occurred to me that we might need one each.  I thought I'd carry it, and that if there were any tricky bits Al would cling gratefully to me for support. 

The fatuity of this soon became apparent.  A few hundred yards further up she slipped, and in falling clutched at my arm.  We both fell down onto the snow.  This then happened repeatedly.  Al found it hard to keep her balance, and invariably when she slipped we both did.  It began to dawn on me that an ice axe wasn't much use unless you were actually holding onto it.

Nevertheless we were now getting near the top.  On either hand snowy ridges striated with fleeting patches of sunlight rose up to meet our own.  At the summit, a narrow plateau, there was suddenly the most striking view.  Away to the south there glittered what looked like range after range of peaks, a gleaming snowy array seeming all the more vast because we couldn't name a single one.  The Aonach Eagach ridge must be there somewhere, I thought, transfixed.

"We could almost be in the Himalayas", I said.

We stared at this miracle until it was too cold to stand still any more.  Blue bits were to be seen here and there in the sky, but the wind was vicious.  It was well before lunchtime.  The whole ridge stretched away before us, so we set off along it towards Stob Ban, the hill we'd seen from the kitchen window that morning.

In half an hour or so we'd come over a broad lower summit and were descending to a narrow neck.  Ahead, on the Glen Nevis side of the ridge a steep sheaf of black rocks thrust out of the snow, and across a coire on the other side we could see Stob Ban.  To the south, grey clouds were piling up. 

As we reached the col a blast of wind struck with such violence that both of us immediately teetered backwards and collapsed on to the snow.  I smashed the axe in and Al grabbed me with both hands, the ferocity of the blast rendering us astonished and mute.  Long seconds went by.

When it had diminished to a slamming roar, we found we were still on the mountain.        “I want to go down”, Al shouted.  “I'm scared.”

I didn't know what to do.  The dirty weather amassing upwind might or might not mean snowfall.  In this wind snow would mean a blizzard.  We only had one ice-axe.  I didn't want to come down, but it seemed to be the sensible thing to do.  The coire on the Glen Nevis side of the ridge had a steep headwall, but no cornice.  We'd have to get down that way.

Carefully we climbed over the edge, facing in, and went down the side of a frieze of dark red rock.  At the foot of the outcrop was a steep slope of bone hard snow.  I went down first and cut steps for Al, my first stepcutting ever.  A painstaking and tiring business, and once I slipped, stopping the fall by digging the axe in.  You could have great confidence in it, I realised.  The two of us crept downwards together.  If we could get a hundred feet lower, the angle of the slope would be a lot easier.

After ten minutes or so some figures appeared over the edge above and soon caught us up.  They were two English lads who'd been in the Youth Hostel; they'd come down because of the weather too.  Strange to hear their Herefordshire voices in Glen Nevis.  One of them had a spare short axe and lent it to us.  After that we made much better progress.

When we were eating our sandwiches further down the coire, Al said, "Come on, admit it, you were scared too." 

But strangely I hadn't been; only disappointed that we couldn't go on to Stob Ban.  The brief glimpse I'd had of winter mountains had touched me in some fundamental place, and I felt an instinctive sympathy with them in which fear had no part.

Like so many of my insights, this one turned out to be entirely without foundation; but all the same I really hadn't been scared.  Recently we'd narrowly avoided being mugged on the tube coming back from the cinema: that had been scary.  Not this.

It was early afternoon.  In the coire we were almost totally sheltered from the wind.  Scraps of cloud blew overhead in a maddeningly clear sky; but there was no popular vote for a re-ascent.  We went down the glen to Achriabhach, and then walked back to the Hostel along the road.  I persuaded Al to carry the rucksack.  Compared to her I was an old man after all.  Nearly thirty.

It turned out to be a very long trudge, and she complained bitterly.

"You women want equal rights", I said.  "That means you have just the same right to carry the rucksack as me."

This seemed to be quite a clever remark at the time.

In the evening Al did something really irritating.  We'd made dinner and were going through into the dining room to eat when she saw three lads she knew from the Venture Scouts in Southport sitting at one of the tables.  She stopped in the middle of the room and stood irresolute holding her plate, not knowing whether to sit down with them or not. 

It was a moment which neatly encapsulated what was wrong with our relationship.  Her willingness to defer to me was partly what I liked about her; but by now I was bored with it.  Ellen would have gone straight up to them, or swept past without so much as a nod.  But then Ellen wouldn't have been seen dead in the Venture Scouts anyway.

Al was ill in the night, and when I went to see her in the morning she was lying shivering under a great pile of blankets.  Men weren't allowed into the women's dormitories, but communication from the door was ludicrous, and anyway there were few other occupants to complain.

"Don't feel that great", she said.

She didn't look too good either.

"Should I get a doctor?", I asked, hoping the answer would be no: fetching a doctor would put a stop to any climbing.  At the same time it was appalling to find I could be so callous. 

"I'll be fine”, she said.  “Just bring me a glass of water.  And a waste bin.  In case I'm sick again."

I packed up my rucksack and set off for Stob Ban, feeling only moderately guilty.

Outside it was cold and overcast, but the tops were clear.  Not such a bad day, I thought.  Later there were many times when I'd have paid a lot of money for winter weather like this.

I went the same way as the previous day, along the road for a hundred yards, then up into the woods as far as the first forest track.  According to the map it ran all the way along the valley to Achriabhach.  Any hope that it'd be more interesting than the road was short-lived; there was an unchanging wall of fir-trees on either side, treadmill walking for nearly an hour.  No wild-life either: the trees planted so close together they seemed to squeeze everything else out.

Just before the track rejoined the road at Achriabhach, a right fork ran uphill almost to the edge of the forest.  I went up this, then struggled through dense undergrowth to the border fence.  Across a rising slab of moor beyond stood the imposing northern shoulder of Stob Ban.

This initial shoulder was hard work, and I went steeply uphill for nearly two thousand feet.  For the best part of an hour all I could see ahead was an unyielding bank of grass and moss and stones, and looking around I seemed to be making minimal progress against the lower slopes of the hills on either side.  But the map showed an easing higher up, and in time I came out at the top of the steepest bit to find a mile of easily rising snowy ridge ahead, blocked at the top by a rocky pyramid, black against the blue sky. 

After the last gruelling hour this middle part of the ridge was pure enjoyment.  On the right the long ridges of Mullach nan Coirean ran down to Glen Nevis; to the east sat the great bulk of Sgurr a'Mhaim, my idea of the true massive Highland mountain, a revelation to anyone brought up on English hills; the going was good on hard snow, and ahead the ridge rose gently up to the outcrop barring the way.

This looked easiest to turn on the west, where there was less snow.  But when I started up, the rocks were heavily glazed and I clambered up very carefully, conscious of the air under my boots.  Relieved to get back onto the crest, I found that it now narrowed to a delicate snow-arete twenty yards long, perfectly level, but with nasty drops on either side.

It was a great moment in my life.  I hesitated; a strong wind was blowing from right to left, making the prospect of a balancing act distinctly unattractive.  It would be stupid to fall.  And yet knife-edged aretes were part of what mountaineering was all about.  I had been reading Mountaineering in Scotland, and Murray’s accounts of his pre-war exploits with McAlpine and Dr Bell seemed to feature a knife-edged arete on every other page.  I couldn't look him in the literary eye again if I failed now.  Obstacles presented themselves, and you sometimes had to swallow before overcoming them.  

I took a deep breath, and walked across, not looking down. 

On the other side I thought, It's so wonderful to be up here that I wouldn't have turned back for anything. 

An easy thought to have when you're past the bad bit. 

Beyond lay broader ground and firmer footing, and a bealach where my ridge joined the main Mullach nan Coirean - Stob Ban ridge.  Ahead the same extraordinary view as the previous day; wave upon wave of snowy hills, the clouds and light mingling with them in dazzling whites and wintry greys.  To the left, the final slope to the summit.  It was covered in very hard frozen snow, and I slithered up, ice axe stretched out ahead for anchorage, feet scrabbling behind for purchase.

I stayed on the top as long as I could stand the cold.  I thought, It's like a winter wonderland.  A cliche of course, but that's really what it was like.

After ten minutes or so I went down the east ridge, much stirred.  Sgurr a'Mhaim looked very tempting across the coire.  It was only one o'clock or so and there was plenty of time.  But then I thought that Alison was lying sick in the Hostel, and I ought to go back to see if she was alright.  Besides, the day had been perfect already; perhaps it was wrong to ask for more.

I'd read about glissading, and here was a chance to try it out.  I slithered all the way down into the coire, ending up at the snowline with a wet backside but no regrets.  Not about that anyway: looking up at Sgurr a'Mhaim it was hard not to wish that I was up there now.  A path led down the glen to Achriabhach, and I walked back along the road to the Youth Hostel. 

Al was up and about, the waste-bin back in its corner, unused.

"Did you have a good day?"

"Brilliant."

One of the best in fact.

By the evening she'd recovered sufficiently to walk into Fort William for a drink; we couldn't afford a taxi.  It was a bitterly cold night, and I put on my balaclava.  Once we met some people coming the other way, and I took it off again until they'd gone past. 

"Honestly you, you're so bloody vain", Alison said.  "You take your hat off even when it's too dark for them to see how stupid you look." 

The cab to the station in the morning used up the last of our money.  As the train ran east between Fort William and Spean Bridge we could see, glimpsed between the ubiquitous fir trees of the Leanachan Forest, the spurs of Aonach Mor and the Grey Coires, snow shrouded, gleaming pale yellow in the early morning sun.  I'd never seen them before.  What wonderful mountains they looked.

"What kind of sheep are those?"

We were rattling along somewhere in the borders.

"Herdwicks", Al replied.

For someone like myself who knew nothing about farming it was an impressively confident answer.

A hundred miles later I'd received the same answer half a dozen times, and doubt set in.

"How many breeds of sheep do you actually know?"

"One."

"Herdwicks?"

She giggled.

Carn Dearg, Sgor Gaibhre and Ben Alder - May? 1987

On the way back to London from Loch Ailort I travelled along the Fort William - Glasgow railway line for the first time.  It was a dark night, and very cold.  As the train rattled along Loch Treig I stood at the end of the carriage looking out through the lowered window.  On the other side of the loch, just visible as a lighter shade of black, snow glimmered faintly on the slopes of high mountains, presumably the Easains.  Trees swayed by in the light falling from the carriages.  It was a desolate scene.  Once I glimpsed a fire burning in the woods below the railway line.

Shortly we reached Corrour.   Leaning from the left hand side of the train as it approached the station, I could see a bright light burning on the platform.  It turned out to be a Tilley lamp carried by an oilskin-swaddled figure, female I thought, which must have emerged from a house standing some twenty yards back from the line.  Beyond the platform, incongruously covered with neat red gravel, there were no other buildings and no other signs of life.  Just heather, darkness and wind.  A protracted conversation took place between the guard and the woman with the lamp; then a bell rang and we were off again.  Taking a last look at the dimly-seen hills looming to the north east, I shut the window and went back into the warmth of the carriage.

I hadn't given up on trying to climb Ben Alder, and stopping at Corrour on the way south only made me more enthusiastic, since this was the station Hector and I had planned to start from.  Thus one evening the following May we stood in the kitchen of his house in Wimbledon sorting out the the food we were taking to Scotland with us.

Wendy, a southerner in every fibre of her being, looked at the pile of provisions on the counter.

"What are you taking all that lot for?", she said.  "Can't you get a pub lunch?"

I kept my mouth shut.  At the time I was living in their spare room, and didn't want to be kicked out for insubordination.  Hector explained patiently that we were going to stay in bothies, and there were no pubs, nor much else.

I was staying with them because my life was in ruins.  Or that's how it seemed at the time.  Elaine and I had split up.  One awful night in March she asked me to leave, and I was so shocked that I agreed.  Within weeks I'd fallen into the consoling arms of a girl at College, Alison, only for Elaine to say that she hadn't really wanted to finish after all.

And so began the coda to our relationship.  An interminable and convoluted soap opera interspersed with reconciliations and fresh partings, interrupted by the arrivals and departures of new characters, it provided entertainment for our friends and a good deal of misery for us.

By May the initial shock had been replaced by a feeling of displacement and loss, a sort of nagging emotional toothache.  The contrast between Hector's ordered and comfortable existence and mine couldn't have been more vivid.  He and Wendy had moved from their one bedroom flat to a large semi in Wimbledon.  Since leaving home to go to university nearly ten years before, I'd lived in a dozen different places, about which the best you could say was that they were bohemian, although some of them weren't even that.  This on the other hand was a proper house, with a garden, decent furniture, a study, a spare room and central heating; in short, the sort of house that grown-ups lived in.

I still found it hard to grasp that I was meant to be a grown up.

Hector was married, with a well-paid job in the City and a company car.  I on the other hand was in my third year at music college with no idea how I was going to make a living at the end of it.  I had next to no money, went about by public transport, relied on the generosity of my friends for somewhere to live, and had abandoned attempts at reconciliation with someone I loved in favour of a nineteen year old violinist with long legs.

Of course I wouldn't have swapped with him for anything, but that didn't mean I was happy.

We got the train from Euston on a Thursday evening.  I could only afford to go because I had a Student Railcard which entitled me to 50% off.  The journey, or at least the first part of it, was a good deal less romantic that I'd hoped.  We shared a narrow compartment with bunks stacked one above the other, and crammed as much of our luggage as we could under the bottom bed.  There was hardly room for us both to stand up at the same time, and Hector, being six foot plus, made the compartment seem smaller still, even though his head didn't quite touch the ceiling.  There wasn't much to do except talk and drink, which we did until the beer was finished and we didn't feel like any more whisky.  Despite this I didn't sleep very well, mostly because I was too excited; but it didn't help that the train was noisy and kept stopping and starting, or that the bunks were hard and narrow.  Hector was too long for his, and had to stick his feet over the side.

We finally gave up trying when it got light.

"Good job we couldn't book a sleeper for the way back", he said gloomily.  "Couldn't be any worse sitting up in an ordinary carriage."

This turned out to be true.

Peering out of the window we could see an extensive loch.

"Is this Loch Lomond?", Hector asked.

"Dunno."

It was the sea.  We were around Helensburgh somewhere.  At length the steward brought us each a cup of tea.  We ate Mars bars with it, and then cleaned our teeth feeling somewhat sickly.

Writing now that the journey is familiar, it's hard to say what impression the West Highland line from Tarbet northwards made on me that first time.  Coming back the previous November it had been dark, and though I'd driven up the A87 a couple of times, following the railway as far as Bridge of Orchy, that isn't the most impressive part of the journey.  No one familiar with the Lake District, say, would be particularly surprised by it. But that morning, after the line swung east beside the Water of Tulla, away from the road, we came out onto a great brown rolling ocean of heather and bog, Rannoch Moor, which was new territory to me.

I'd expected a lot of the Moor, from Kidnapped and from Bill Brandt's photograph in his Literary Britain series, and I wasn't disappointed.  There were no buildings and no people.  No trees, apart from a few piffling lines of Forestry Commission spruces, and no wildlife that we could see.  An empty undulating landscape, waste as the sea as Stevenson puts it, stretching away into the distance.  I'd never seen anything like it.  A couple of years previously I'd managed after a lot of searching to buy a poster of Brandt's photograph, but it was so depressing that I took it down and threw it  away.  It showed something I didn't want to believe: nature isn't necessarily beautiful.  Watching the Moor go by from the window I could see that Brandt had got it uncomfortably right.  This wasn't beautiful. Impressive, yes, and on a grand scale; but not beautiful.  Although it wasn't a bad day, with some patches of blue sky, the moor gave such an impression of bleakness and sterility that it made the weather look dull.

Shortly before 9 a.m. I went to find the guard and told him we wanted to get off at Corrour.  A few minutes later we were on the platform watching the train pull away northwards.

The station stood isolated a mile or so from the fringes of the Moor, where the land gathered itself up into big hills again.  We crossed the line by a footbridge and passed through a wicket gate into the environs of the station master's house.  Behind a wire fence chickens ran about, and in another more robust pen geese stared at us with aggrieved expressions.  There was a strong smell of diesel fuel, and in a mean looking hut a generator chugged away.  Scattered over a wide area around the house lay the detritus of decades.  I remember specifically only a number of abandoned cars, one of them a Land-Rover, in various stages of rusty disintegration, but there were all sorts of other things ranging from household items to agricultural implements.  Hector and I stared at the mess.  It was the kind of thing you saw all the time in the south, but here there was an acute sense of desecration.

"I suppose it'd be hard to get rid of, all this stuff", I said, "but even so it looks as if every effort's been spared."

Beyond the house a Land Rover track led eastwards, and the lie of the land became clearer.  To the north the trench of Loch Treig parted a jumble of mountains.  Ahead of us to the east a broad treeless valley lay between more hills, rising in the distance to a high bealach just visible beneath the clouds, which all being well we'd be crossing on our way back in two days time.  We walked along the track, a lark singing overhead, and in half a mile Loch Ossian came into view.  At the margins of the loch stood a green-painted wooden building with a smoking chimney.  A sign outside read "S.Y.H.A".

"You ever stayed in a Youth Hostel?", Hector asked.

"You must be joking.  Too much like Boy Scouts."

We left the track and climbed up a heathery slope away from the loch towards the first hill, Carn Dearg.  Here a brutal truth hit me.  My rucksack weighed a ton.  We were carrying clothes and food for three days, plus sleeping bags, fishing tackle and, the heaviest item of all, my Dad's primus stove, a beautiful piece of machinery with two burners and a brass tank full of paraffin.

There'd been some discussion about this before we left.

"Can't you borrow the other one?", Hector had said.  "We only need one burner, and it'd be much lighter."

But I wouldn't listen.  It had to be the double stove.  It didn't occur to me that I might have problems carrying everything.  Reality dawned in the first hundred yards however.  It was really hard going uphill with this load: my heart was hammering at my chest, my legs felt like jelly and I was already panting for breath.

"Are you alright, Simmo?"

"Yes yes.  Fine."

"Is your bag heavy?"

"Weighs a ton."

"Shall I carry the stove?"

"No no.  Really.  Fine."

Thus it was that I came to carry the primus for the entire weekend.

Far from putting things right however, this piece of Captain Oates-like selflessness very quickly made them worse.  We plodded up to the foot of Carn Dearg's west ridge and turned to face the hill.  Thankfully the grassy slope wasn't steep, but this only meant we didn't feel justified in stopping very often.  We probably went up quite quickly.  At any rate I found it very hard work, and my feet were hurting as well; but I was determined to show Hector that although he might be able to skip up his Very Severes in wellington boots, when it came to hillwalking I was a hard man too in my own way.  Consequently I was absolutely exhausted by the time we got to the top, and not in much of a state to appreciate the extraordinary view.

We looked south west over hundreds of square miles of the Moor to the line of the the Black Mount, just visible in the haze, with what must be Buchaille Etive Mor sticking up to the right.  It so happened that while we were watching, the southbound train came crawling across the foreground of the moor.  There was no sense of intrusion.  Although the railway is a thick black line on the map, seen from above in that vast landscape it might have been one darker thread on a brown carpet; the train, awesomely noisy and huge close up, was silent and minuscule from the hill.  A moving sight.

We struggled into our rucksack straps again, and went down the north-east ridge to a grassy bealach.  Hector suggested we have something to eat, but I was all for pressing on to the next top, Sgor Gaibhre.

It was a surprisingly long way up.  I'd more or less worked out a pace I could sustain without collapsing, but my feet, or rather my heels, were hurting in earnest now, rubbing against the back of my boots.  For a moment I thought of stopping to investigate, but climbing uphill as quickly as possible seemed more important.

At the summit we sat and Hector made cheese sandwiches while I gingerly inspected my feet, fearing the worst.  The skin on both heels was broken, exposing areas of raw flesh the size of a penny.

"Did you bring any plasters, Hec?"

"Don't think so.  Did you?"

"Don't think so."

We looked.  No plasters.

"Simmo", he said admonishingly.

The boots were new, or fairly new, a present from my Dad, but I'd never had any trouble with them before.  Then again I'd never walked in them with a heavy sack before either.  From now on every step I took was painful, and it was all my fault.

We ate our lunch and looked eastwards to Loch Ericht, a narrow loch stretching away twenty miles into the distance, and to the north where Ben Alder itself sprawled massively beneath the clouds.  It was chilly, and the air hazy.  In the coire below our feet a circular lochan nestled close against the foot of Sgor Gaibhre's north eastern slope.  Behind us the outline of the mountains had grown faint, as if rain was coming.  We left the top and trudged down towards the lochan.  Briefly there was a view down into Strath Ossian to the north.  For some reason I thought of Ellen, and was momentarily sad; but I hardly thought of her again that weekend.  At the lochan we gratefully threw our rucksacks into the heather, and I extricated the spinning rod.

Fishing had not long previously been my passion, and the idea of going to Scotland and not doing any was inconceivable; later I'd have been about as likely to take a wheelbarrow on a climbing trip.  We walked round the loch feeling as weightless as astronauts without our rucksacks, catching small trout which were eager but not worth keeping.  Hector hadn't done any fishing before, but even he caught one.  At about 2 pm we packed up the rod and set off down the boggy hillside towards the bothy, hidden from us by a shoulder of ground.  Once we stopped to look at a small white-petalled plant, flowers being a rarity so early in the season.  It was probably dwarf cornel, but neither of us had any idea about plants and even so vague an identification was beyond us.  Cloud had come down over the hills we had climbed, and plodding east over the moor drizzle began to fall.

The bothy was a stone building with a corrugated iron roof in a dreich enough place looking out over the stony foreshore of Loch Ericht.

"What if it's locked?", Hector said.

But it wasn't.  The door was open and we went in through a wood panelled lobby to a narrow hallway.  There was one room ahead and one room at each end of the building, all empty.  We put our bags down and wondered what to do next.  I was very glad not to be on my own.  Even if I hadn't known the ghost stories it wouldn't have seemed a very cheerful place.

We went outside and found that there was a sort of stables at the back of the house, which W.H. Murray describes in Undiscovered Scotland as the room the gang of poachers hung their deer carcasses in.  Now there were only delicately arranged piles of shit on the floor, human shit, decorated with pastel shaded scraps of toilet paper.

"Amazing isn't it?", Hector said.  "They can be bothered to choose White With a Hint of Pink, as opposed to Hyacinth.  Or Peach.  But they can't be bothered to kick a hole in the bog outside."

"Perhaps their wives buy the bog paper", I suggested.  "Or their mums".

We didn't go in there again anyway.

It wasn't yet four o'clock, and there was a lot of daylight left.  We made some tea on the primus, which at last came into its own, and wondered what to do next.  It was too early to make dinner so the obvious thing was to find some firewood, an easy job in theory because someone had hauled a great oak stump from a bog hole and left it to dry outside the front door.  Hanging in the entrance lobby was a two-handed saw, so we took this down and set to work.  At first the exercise was warming and enjoyable in spite of the small rain that fell, but the stump was so dense and hard and the saw so blunt that we abandoned the idea.  There might be something more manageable in the wood along the shore.

Just as we were leaving there was the sound of a boot on the step outside, and a young man about our own age put his head round the door.  He saw us, hesitated, said hello, and went with his rucksack into the room at the other end of the bothy.

We fetched the bole of a fallen birch tree, and half-dragged half-carried it back to the cottage.  The mist was still down but the rain had stopped.  Outside the hut we began sawing up the log into two-foot chunks, hard work because it tended to roll in the direction you were sawing.  What was needed was a third person to sit astride the log and hold it still.  Just at the right time the other man came out to help, and we soon had the log in bits.

Later he brought his belongings into our room.

"There's not much point in burning two fires", he said.

For dinner Hector and I had a dried curry.

"Not very nice."

"No", I said.  "Not very nice."

The other man turned out to be a museum curator from Glasgow.  He'd walked in from Dalwhinnie, and was going on to Corrour tomorrow.  We had no idea what the social norms were in bothies, but the obvious thing was to talk to whoever else was there.  I expect we quickly exhausted the subject of museums, but the curator knew Scotland pretty well, and I certainly thought I did, so that occupied us for quite a long time.  We soon got a decent blaze going.  He had a packet of chocolate biscuits and we had a half-bottle of whisky.  The atmosphere became convivial.  We talked until it was dark enough for going to bed to be excusable, then unrolled our sleeping bags and lay down, Hector and I at any rate hoping for a better night's kip than the previous one.

Instead I woke after what seemed only a few minutes to the sound of mass tramping feet and people talking loudly.  Feeling around on the floor for the torch, I looked at my watch.  Just after 11.  The door of our room was pushed open and a light played over our faces.  Someone said Sorry in a foreign accent, and the door closed again.

It sounded as if a dozen people were marching about the hut.  They were an inconsiderate bunch of bastards, whoever they were, stamping, shouting and even singing.    "Bloody noisy ghosts", Leigh muttered in the darkness.

This racket carried on for some time, and it took me ages to get back to sleep.  I must have dropped off eventually though because presently I was woken again, this time by a dog licking my face, an extremely unpleasant experience, and more lights, more tramping of feet.  I've never liked dogs.

There wasn't space for this party in the other rooms so they bedded down with the three of us.  I listened to the sounds of a stove being lit and a brew prepared with angry resignation.  There were more of them than there were of us, which seemed to give them a moral as well as physical advantage.  There was no point in trying to go to sleep again until they were ready.

By dawn there were at least twenty people in the bothy.  The noisy bastards turned out to be a party of Italian students who'd walked in from Dalwhinnie, in training shoes.  We were very pleased to see that they'd got wet feet.  The people in our room were Tayside Mountain Rescue, who'd been out on a night exercise.  I felt distinctly seedy, and as soon as I put my boots on to get some water remembered the painful state of my feet.  Outside it was a grey mizzly day with the cloud down over the tops, which didn't make things seem any better.

After breakfast we hung around waiting to see if the weather would improve.  I examined my wounds ostentatiously enough for one of the Mountain Rescue team to give me some plasters.  For a long time we stood in the doorway of the bothy looking out at the rain.  It was a Saturday, and I'd begun to regret that I was spending it here.

"If I was at home", I said to Hector, "I could go out and get the papers.  Read them over breakfast with some music on.  Walk round Portobello Market.  Do some cooking in the afternoon, and listen to the football on the radio.  Then go to the cinema in the evening with Alison."

And spend the night with her afterwards.

Instead of which I was stuck in a bothy with the drizzle coming down outside.  London suddenly seemed like quite a decent place.

At length the rain stopped.  The cloud still hung about the mountains and it was an unappetizing sort of day, but we'd come here to climb Ben Alder so that was what we were going to do.  There wasn't much else we could do.  We said goodbye to the museum curator and set off up the hill behind the bothy without a great deal of regret.  I hoped that tonight's bothy would be different.

For the first hundred feet or so I was quite optimistic about my heels, but after that the pain came back with a vengeance and it was all a bit of a struggle.  Hector was on particularly good form that morning, and I laboured uphill behind him, every step a vignette of discomfort, struggling with the temptation to ask him to go slower, the primus bumping up and down heavily in my rucksack.  Eventually we came up into a shallow coire and there followed a period of pure hell when we went up steep ground to get onto a ridge to one side.

Once here however everything changed.  We'd come up into the mist, and a mixture of wind and rain in more or less equal parts stung our faces.  Nevertheless the slope up which we now advanced was at an easier angle, with small stones underfoot; and what with the gale and the spray blowing I was seized with one of those fits of wild exhilaration that come upon you now and again, a sort of fierce glee at being on the hill in wild weather.  Hector was lagging behind somewhat.

At the top of the slope we got the map out.  We were on the southern rim of a large coire, and all we needed to do was follow its edge round to the summit, about a mile away.  We set off again, keeping the steep coire edge on our right.  Soon the ground began to go uphill, and we found ourselves on a stony plateau across which raced sheets of murk.  Visibility was about fifty yards.

In ten minutes we came upon a small tarn in a hollow, half-covered with the winter's receding ice.

"This is on the map", Hector shouted.  "We must be nearly there."

In the prevailing visibility there seemed little chance of finding the top; but we kept on in what we thought was the likely direction along gently rising ground and suddenly the cairn loomed out of the mist, an untidy heap of stones.  There was almost no shelter, but we squatted down on the leeward side, where I took off my wringing wet shirt, dug out a dry one and put my anorak on.  We were pleased and quite surprised to have got to the top, but it wasn't the kind of place you'd want to linger, and straight away we had the map out to work out how to get down.

The plan had been to head north from the summit and come off one of the Leachas, two ridges which ran down from the far side of the plateau, but in these conditions trying to find the top of either would have been very hard, so instead we thought we'd make for the Bealach Dubh to the north west.  I got out the compass.

"That's a bit of an antique", Hector shouted.

"Used to belong to my Grandfather."

"Looks like it as well.  Does the dial ever stop going round?"

It was an old fashioned brass-bound compass my Dad had given me.  Instead of a needle there was a rotating card, elaborately inscribed with the points of the compass in what looked like Indian ink.  The card was now going round like a roulette wheel.  When it had settled long enough for a bearing to be taken, we set off confidently into the teeth of the gale.      After an indeterminate period Hector came up and shouted, "Are you sure this is right?  We're supposed to be going downhill aren't we?"

"I think the plateau goes on for quite a while."

"How long have we been going for?"

"Dunno.  Ten minutes?"

We went on, stopping to peer at the map and compass every now and then.

Then the ground began to go uphill.  Again we got out the map, which was beginning to get sodden.

"I suppose there must be a few ups and downs even though it looks flat on the map."

"On the other hand we could be going round in circles, back towards the top."

This had occurred to me as well.

"Show me the compass."

I gave it to him.  The dial was misted up.  The card had stuck to the glass and wouldn't go round at all.

"It's probably to do with my hand being warm and the air inside the compass being cold", I said helpfully.  "Try shaking it."

"I am shaking it."

The dial now floated free.  Then it got stuck.  Hector shook it again, and it floated free.  We stood huddled over it with the rain rattling our hoods.  The knack was to get the dial to float for long enough for it to settle properly.  The trouble was that you didn't know whether it had settled because it was pointing north or because it had just got stuck.  Eventually we thought we'd managed it and off we went again.

I thought, We might be lost; and began to walk faster.  If we were going in the wrong direction it would be as well to find out sooner rather than later.

However walking faster didn't seem to make any difference.  The terrain didn't change.  We weren't getting anywhere.  It felt as if we were going slightly downhill again now, but it was hard to tell because there was no skyline.  We might be going uphill.  We might be going round in circles.  We might even, a forgivable fantasy, have died and gone to hell, and might end up walking around on an endless undulating plateau in a cold gale forever.

Then abruptly the ground began to drop away ahead, and we found ourselves looking down into impenetrable cloud.

It was a Rubicon of sorts.  If it wasn't possible to get down this way, or if we were on the wrong side of the hill, we'd waste a lot of time finding out and might have to regain a lot of height.  I got the map out, but a gust of wind tore it out of my hand and cartwheeled it away down the slope.

A Bad Moment.

We had run after it for twenty yards before I realised that only the pink cover had blown off.  The rest of it was still clasped in my fist.  We pulled up, gasping, the cover lost in the gloom ahead.  Holding on to the remainder with four hands, we huddled round and considered the situation.

Just then as if a curtain had been opened the mist parted, and we stared across a steep-sided valley to another hill of similar height, a valley which rose up moreover to a high bealach on the left.  It could only be the Bealach Dubh, which we'd noticed in the distance from Corrour the previous morning.  Then the curtain was drawn again; but we'd seen enough to work out that somehow we'd arrived within a hundred yards or so of the place we'd been aiming for all along.

Picking our way down into the valley we congratulated ourselves on our skill and endurance.  What hardy mountaineers we were.  Wild weather was nothing to us.  Still, it had been wild, and lesser climbers might still be up there, shivering behind a boulder, if they could find one in that sea of stones.

Actually we'd been rather lucky.  It was a useless compass, and we could have ended up anywhere.  As for the weather, that was just standard for an overcast Scottish summer's day.  But however ill-founded this assessment of the last hour, our relief at getting down was genuine enough, and we weren't too stupid to learn the obvious lesson: get a decent compass next time.  A better lesson still is: get a spare as well.

Hector said, "Have you ever had trouble with that old one before?"

We were trudging down the path towards the Pattack bothy.

"Yes.  Once.  Going down from the top of Bowfell to Ore Gap.  With Elaine.  Similar weather really.  The needle was going all over the place.  Then it misted up in my hand and got stuck.  I was absolutely terrified.  We had no idea where we were going.  And then I remembered Ore Gap's one of the few places in the Lakes where you can't trust the compass anyway.  Because of the iron in the rocks."

"Simmo!"

"We got there in the end.  But then the next day we got lost again.  We were trying to climb Scafell from Wasdale Head, but we ended up on Great End.  Pitiful really.  In fact we got lost twice that day.  On the way down into Langdale we overshot Esk Hause in mist, and ended up on this little col just by Allen Crags.  We went down the wrong way from there, and I only realised we'd gone wrong because there was a stream with red banks, and I knew it must be Ruddy Gill.  That's how I knew where we were."

"How did Elaine take it?"

"She had no idea we were lost.  I didn't tell her.  She thought I knew where we were all along."

We laughed.

"Why didn't you buy a better one afterwards?"

"Skint.  Besides, family heirloom and all that."

I never used it again though.

If the Loch Ericht bothy had been gloomy, tonight's was if anything even worse.  There was one room about twenty feet by ten, lit by a tiny cobwebbed window, with wooden platforms for sleeping on, a table, and a fireplace.  Built on at one side were two more smaller rooms with concrete floors.  There was no one about, but in the big room someone had left two rucksacks.

We made tea and I examined my wounds.  The rucksack owners arrived.  They'd walked in from Dalwhinnie and gone up Carn Dearg, the hill behind the hut.  My Munroing frenzy can have hardly got going at this stage, because it hadn't occurred to me to try and include this in the weekend's itinerary.  We were too exhausted anyway.

After dinner we made a fire.  There were no trees around the hut, but someone had left some brushwood and we had a go at an oak stump with a saw that hung inside the door.  We put our wet clothes on a line above the fireplace.

Later on two more lads arrived.  There were no chairs to sit down on, so we stood around the fire chatting till after darkness fell.  It turned out that the last pair were walking across Scotland.  Hector and I had some whisky left, but there wasn't enough of it to go round, so we finished it off when no one was looking.

"If we can't offer it to the others", I said covertly, "the least we can do is spare them the knowledge of what they're missing."

When it was bedtime I crawled into my sleeping bag, and remember registering the lighter patch of window, but that was all.  Then at last I slept.

Overnight the weather had started to improve.  In the morning we stood at the door in sunshine looking south west towards Ben Alder.  Mist was drifting off the top, and the Leachas were clear already.  It seemed that the big hills were breaking up the cloud as it came across the country.

Hector said, "It's a shame we aren't climbing it today."

"The way my feet are, I'm quite relieved we aren't."

After breakfast we packed up our things and set off up towards the Bealach Dubh.   Although intrinsically an effort, going uphill wasn't quite so bad on my feet.  At the bealach we looked down on the seamed moorland beyond at the head of the Labhair glen, patched by broad bands of sunshine and shadow.  We trotted downhill for a mile to the stream, and then followed a faint path along the bank.  I got out the spinning rod and had a cast in the likely bits as we went along, Hector going ahead at his own pace while I hobbled from pool to pool behind him.  We went down the valley with big hills on both sides and the burn brawling away in its bed below.

On the map it hadn't looked like any great distance from the bealach to Corrour Lodge, but it was well into the afternoon before we got there.  At the bridge over the Labhair where it comes out into Strath Ossian, we scrambled down to the bank to drink.  The water was agonisingly cold.

"I'm going to wash my feet", I said.

"I'll retreat a safe distance."

My ankle had been bleeding and the sock was stuck to my flesh.

"Hector this is horrible, you must take a photograph."

He got out the camera and I repeated the exercise with the other foot, holding the bloodstained sock so he could see it.

"What are you going to do now?"

"What can I do?  We haven't got any more plasters.  Or clean socks.  I'll have to put them back on."

We walked along Land Rover tracks through the grounds of Corrour Lodge and then along the side of Loch Ossian.  Great swathes of spruce trees in the plantations had been felled and half-cleared.  Once a hind bounded away into the forest.

A mile further on we noticed some people sitting on a bank between us and the loch.  As we passed, they looked round, and a woman holding a glass of red wine, which seemed ridiculously genteel in those surroundings, though I suppose she was from the Lodge, said what sounded like "Any luck?"

She must be referring to the spinning rod sticking out of my rucksack.

"No", I lied instinctively.

When we'd gone past, Hector, who'd been walking on that side, said, "Actually she said 'Good luck'."

"I must have seemed a bit negative then."

"Positively nihilistic.  Perhaps she'll brood on it for days."

Soon the end of the loch came into view.  There was an hour or so to spare before the train came, so we found a strip of sandy beach by the water's edge, got out the primus and boiled up some dried soup.  Neither of us particularly wanted soup, but it was a way of delaying the return to civilisation.  To the east, the Bealach Dubh already seemed a very long way away, and it was amazing to think we'd come from miles the other side of it.  In the other direction clouds were gathering over Leum Uilleim, and rain began to spit.

Presently we packed up and walked the remaining miles to the station.  My feet had long ago reached a plateau of discomfort, but it was a relief to get to the end of the journey all the same.  When the train came we checked with the guard to see if there'd been any sleeper cancellations, but there hadn't, so we prepared to rough it.

Railway carriages aren't designed for the inordinately long-legged, but with no-one sitting opposite, Hector could put his feet up on the seat.  It was uncomfortable; but at some point I must have fallen asleep, because raising my head from my folded arms, I woke to find the train speeding through what looked like the Bedfordshire countryside, early on a perfect summer morning.  Two men in business suits sat opposite eyeing me with curiosity and a certain amount of distaste.  We were back in the other world.