One day my father took me climbing. We were staying up in
Sutherland with my mother and elder brother Rory. They weren’t really
interested in coming; anyway the small tent was only big enough for two of
us. Dad and I drove down through Ullapool and along the Road of
Desolation. We left the car near Dundonnell, and trudged up a wooded
valley onto a moor studded with lochans. To the north-west, across a
waste of glacier-planed slabs and heather, brooded An Teallach, the mountain
we’d come to climb.
Between its east facing arms lay a great coire. I’d been walking in the Lake District and in Assynt before, but had never seen anything like it. Toll an Lochain was an awe-inspiringly gloomy place. Great cliffs lined the headwall, their tops shrouded in mist, and although summer was well advanced there were still traces of snow in the gullies. We pitched the tent by the lochan below. The fly-sheet had been left behind to save weight, and the inner hung naked from its A-pole. I lay awake for a long time after we’d gone to bed, conscious of the presence of the mountain outside.
Between its east facing arms lay a great coire. I’d been walking in the Lake District and in Assynt before, but had never seen anything like it. Toll an Lochain was an awe-inspiringly gloomy place. Great cliffs lined the headwall, their tops shrouded in mist, and although summer was well advanced there were still traces of snow in the gullies. We pitched the tent by the lochan below. The fly-sheet had been left behind to save weight, and the inner hung naked from its A-pole. I lay awake for a long time after we’d gone to bed, conscious of the presence of the mountain outside.
Next morning the mist was still down, and only the lower tiers of the
buttresses were visible. For breakfast we ate slices of ham out of
tin-foil, followed by Christmas cake. I was a fussy eater and hated ham,
but this seemed to be a special occasion. We put our boots on and crossed
the floor of the coire to the foot of Glas Meall Liath, the spur that separates
An Teallach's two main coires. An hour’s toil then, up the giant heap of
rubble and scree. Every few hundred feet Dad would say “Pax”, and
we’d collapse onto the stones. At one of these rests I found I'd left my
balaclava behind and had to go down and retrieve it.
Approaching the top, the mist grew lighter overhead and then parted briefly, revealing to the south-west a glimpse of Lord Berkeley's Seat and Corrag Bhuidhe, jagged summits further along the ridge. Dad took a photograph, and later in his dark-room superimposed another of me taken the same day, attempting in a pre-pubescent way to look mean and moody. Droplets of mist had settled on his extravagant handlebar moustache, a growth which made any public outing with him an embarrassing trial. Fortunately there was no one else about.
The main top, Bidean a'Ghlas Thuill, is a Munro, although neither of us knew that at the time. At some point on the ridge leading to or from it we crossed a narrow gap where there was a definite change in the colour of the rock, from pink Torridon sandstone to grey something else. Further on, something strange and wonderful: sunshine pouring through a rift in the clouds projected our shadows onto the mist below, surrounding each silhouette by a circle of rainbows. Dad said it was a Brocken spectre, the phenomenon which had so unnerved the Taugwalders after the Matterhorn first-ascent disaster. By the time we'd got the camera out it had gone.
Beyond Bidean a'Ghlas Thuill the mist lifted and dispersed. In the coire below our tent made a tiny orange triangle by the lochan shore. Through rents in the cloud there were glimpses of unknown mountains and valleys beyond. I thought, Scotland’s a huge place.
Dad decided we'd better come down. Bitter disappointment: now we were on the ridge I wanted to go all the way round. But perhaps we were short of time. Scrambling down a steep grassy gully, the sun came out. We packed up the tent and walked down Coir' a'Ghiubhsachain towards the Dundonnell valley. The cloud had broken up and it was a bright day. At one of our stops I left my balaclava behind for good, the first of many such losses.
Coming abruptly on an S-bend in the stream we found ourselves overlooking a sun-filled pool, in which a dozen small trout scattered.
Dad was forty eight and I was eleven. Although the family had summer holidays in Sutherland for another decade and more, I didn't find out what a Munro was for another fifteen years and Bidein a'Ghlas Thuill was the only one I ever climbed with him. The discovery awoke in me no overwhelming urge to climb them all. I probably thought it was stupid to do things just because they were on a list; at any rate I often thought so later. I grew up, did A Levels, went to Nottingham University to do law, and then moved to London with my girlfriend. Dad and I went hill walking quite often, but I went partly to please him and didn't get the bug for it until I was nearly thirty.
In a way it all started because of Martin; but that's to simplify things and unfair to Hector, who ended up being a much bigger part of it.
Although we'd been at the same university at more or less the same time, Hector and I hadn't met until two years afterwards, when we shared a rented house in Balham, South London with some other people.
It was a nickname. "You know, as in Hector's House", said his girlfriend Wendy when I asked for an explanation. "Because he's so bloody Hectorish and sensible."
However harsh, there was an element of truth in this. Hector, a tall young man with thick dark hair and deep-set eyes, invested pension funds for a living, and no one ever had their money in safer hands.
The prospect of going out to work myself was horrifying. Why must student life be over so soon? After one term of law I'd sworn never to become a solicitor. I was going to be a classical composer instead, the next Sibelius or Stravinsky. I’d been writing music on and off since I was seven, and had managed to get a place at Trinity College of Music starting the end of the following year.
Having proper jobs and proper money, Hector and Wendy swiftly moved out of our Balham squalor to buy a flat. It was the beginning of the '80s property boom, and I was being left behind. Did it matter? Contemptuous of the property-owning classes, I was nevertheless beginning to realise that being poor wasn't much fun.
Hec and I would probably have kept in touch anyway, but what sealed it was that he was a rock-climber. I'd always wanted to have a go, and in the spring of 1985 managed to persuade him to take me to the Lakes. It was cold and wet, and we didn't get much done. This was OK because I was terrified. Middlefell Buttress in Langdale wasn't too bad, though I nearly fell off, but round the corner on Holly Tree Traverse I swore that if I ever got down it'd be the last climb I ever did. Thankfully next morning was miserable, and I got my revenge by dragging him up Crinkle Crags and Bowfell in the snow. It had rained so much that we had to dig a trench round the tent with Dad's ice axe. On the last day he took me to Shepherd's Crag in Borrowdale, and we did Little Chamonix, still one of my favourite climbs anywhere. By the time I hauled myself trembling on to the Belvedere I was just beginning to see that climbing might have some appeal.
Nevertheless I still much preferred hillwalking, and when we thought about going away for the weekend in the spring of 1986, I wanted to take him somewhere really remote, preferably in Scotland, to show him what it was like. This was why I hit on the idea of going to climb Ben Alder, a mountain which seemed to be in the middle of nowhere but was accessible from the train. It had nothing to do with the Munros. I was just struck with the idea of getting on the sleeper at Euston and waking up next morning in Scotland.
Our plan was ruined by the incompetence of some power station engineers at a place in Russia called Chernobyl. A nuclear reactor caught fire, and for several days fall-out poured into the atmosphere. In the following week wind carried swathes of radioactive rain across the country. Reluctant to get irradiated we called the trip off. I spent the entire weekend indoors, only coming out to buy milk at the shop across the road (if this seems an over-reaction, nearly thirty years later the UK government is still testing for caesium residues in Cumbrian sheep).
Despite this failure a seed had been sown in my mind. You could get out of London and go to Scotland. There was an escape hatch.
It's hard to know why we didn't arrange to go again later that summer. Both of us were busy perhaps. Hector was married now, and I was living with my girlfriend Ellen in a rented flat in Notting Hill. At Music College I luxuriated in the deep satisfaction that doing something you're good at imparts. There'd always be next year. At that age life stretches away in front of you in an inexhaustible supply.
Ellen and I were looking round ourselves for a flat to buy. I'd started my third year at Trinity and had virtually no money, but she was training to become a solicitor with a big City firm and between us we could just about manage the mortgage. There was something of a clash of lifestyles. Naturally she thought I was a self-indulgent layabout. She on the other hand was a money-grubbing wage-slave. We were probably both right, up to a point. We'd been together for nearly five years, a delicate time in relationships: by that stage things have generally declined from their joyful beginnings to a point where you either accept that it isn't ever going be like that again, or split up. In June, perhaps as a gesture of commitment, we bought a one-bedroom flat just up the road.
That autumn Martin invited us up to Scotland. He'd been at Exeter University with Ellen, but I didn't know him very well. A wiry bloke in his late twenties, with thinning blond hair and a reddish beard, he was the best-looking bald man I've ever known. Most balding men look like less attractive versions of their former selves, but hair-loss suited Mart. Strikingly, his eyebrows were of different colours, one dark and the other fair.
Neither of us knew his girlfriend Frances at all, and for that matter Martin hardly knew her either. He'd spent the summer working as mate on a converted trawler which did sailing cruises round the Western Isles, and Frances had done a week's stint as ship's cook. One thing had led to another. Martin must have been quite keen to put this relationship on a firmer footing because he'd borrowed a keeper's cottage at Polnish on Loch Ailort in the western Highlands for a week, and asked us to come with him for moral support.
Ellen was quite keen to go at first; but then she found out that the cottage had no heating, running water or sanitation. To me these things at the time made the idea more rather than less attractive. At the last minute she cried off. I thought about not going, but not for long. One day in November I caught the Glasgow train from Euston, wondering just how much of a gooseberry I was going to be.
The bothy stood a hundred or so yards back from the shoreline amidst rowan trees alive with wintering redwings. It was primitive. The sitting room was habitable enough, but the kitchen was basic and the cuisine in the following week bas rather than haute. The weather was dismal too. On the best day there were only two hailstorms, and at other times there were showers when it wasn't actually raining continuously. The house had no lavatory and instead we went outside with a spade, a roll of bog paper and an umbrella, looking for ground that didn't seem to have recently been dug up.
It was enjoyable enough all the same. Martin and Frances seemed to be getting on fine, and were understandably in no hurry to get up in the mornings. Most days we went for walks, returning wet and hungry at dusk. At night the three of us sat for long hours in the sitting room before a blazing fire, drinking whisky and reading. At about ten o'clock Martin would yawn ostentatiously and, taking the hint, I'd retire to the moth-eaten divan bed in the kitchen.
I liked Frances enormously. She was small and dark, with a soft voice and slightly feline charm; not unlike a dark-haired version of Elaine in fact. Martin was lucky. Her car, an ancient Renault 5, had less to recommend it. On the steeper hills Mart and I would get out and push; we didn't dare drive far with three of us aboard. Towards the end of the week Frances wanted to visit a friend at Strontian, and since the Renault evidently wasn’t going to get us all that far, she suggested dropping us off to go and climb a mountain while she went down to Ardgour.
It’s hard for me now, given that within a very few years mountaineering had become a central preoccupation, obsession even, to think back to how I felt then. I'd brought my boots with me, and my climbing breeches, a tatty tweed pair originally bought for fishing. I must have had a waterproof of some sort. But I don't remember during that week anything like the same furious impatience I'd have experienced not long afterwards at the days ticking by without our having gone out and climbed something.
Still, I was keen enough even then, and Martin had some ambitions as a Munroist. Though I must have known about the Tables before, and known that people climbed them, this was the first time I'd given the idea much thought. He'd been up the nearest two, Sgurr nan Coireachain and Sgurr Thuilm above Glenfinnan, and wanted to climb something else. We looked on the map, and right on the eastern edge was the rather ugly-named Gaor Bheinn, or Gulvain, to put it the anglicised way. Frances said she'd walk part of the way up the valley with us. She didn't mind not coming. She'd been brought up in Fort William with a Dad who insisted they climb Ben Nevis every New Year's day. Climbing was nothing to her.
We set out from the foot of Gleann Fionn-Lighe sometime in mid-morning. There was a Land Rover track undulating along the east side of a wooded valley. It wasn't actually raining, but the top of Gulvain was in cloud as the mountain came into view round a bend in the glen, and the day was damp and cold. Just short of the farm, Wauchan, there was a bridge over the burn. We stood looking down into its mossy depths. Touching scenes of farewell took place between Martin and Frances, for whom at that stage six hours separation must have seemed a long time. Car permitting, we’d meet back at the road at 5.30.
Beyond Wauchan, a muddy yard slotted with sheep prints, the track deteriorated and there were stretches of bog to negotiate. We were in a steep-sided open valley, with Gulvain's southern shoulder rearing up at the head. Most of my hill-walking had been done in summer, and the hills had an unprepossessing autumnal dead-grass colour I'd rarely seen before. There was no sign of any snow. After an hour or so we crossed a footbridge where the burn bifurcated, and squelched up gently rising ground to the hill proper.
Maps are not entirely trustworthy. They may not lie, but they allow you to be deceived. On the O/S map the fifty metre contours are here so close together that some of the ten metre ones have been missed out. If you use your wits you aren't taken in by the apparently moderate steepness of the slope. As Martin and I didn't, it came as an unpleasant surprise to find that this way up Gulvain you climb two thousand feet in about a mile. And so much of my mountain experience had been gathered on the lower Sutherland hills and in the Lake District, where you rarely start a walk below five hundred feet, that climbing a big hill more or less from sea level was a new sort of effort altogether.
Martin can't have walked great distances aboard the boat, but he was miles fitter than my sedentary London life had made me. We slogged up an infinite grassy bank, about the inclination of a railway cutting side, never seeing more than fifty yards or so in front and rewarded only partly by the extending view of a gloomy landscape behind, soon lost altogether in mizzling cloud. I hadn't learned then that the way to get up a hill like that, for the terminally unfit anyway, is to do a hundred steps, then rest, over and over again; but even if I had I'd no doubt have been shamed into keeping pace with Martin's remorseless advance up that knee-cracking slope. He showed not the slightest sign of wanting to rest, and I was determined not to give in either. The only way I could stop honourably was to pause for something to eat or, when the drizzle and wind became too much, to dig my anorak from the depths of the rucksack. I can't often have suffered so much for the sake of pride.
Finally, when it seemed that my calves would split from the effort, we reached the top; the first top anyway, a broad grassy dome with patches of snow lying in the hollows. A cold wind rattled the map, and setting off again north to the summit it had us teetering sideways like drunks. We went up slowly rising ground and in ten minutes had come to a Trig point.
Nothing in the driving mist suggested that this wasn't the top. Off the edge of the map - Gulvain is half an inch from the eastern margin - another top was marked, but the trig point would be at the summit, and we only explored a little further, not to be outdone in the cloud by an eccentricity in the ground. To the north the ridge fell smoothly away and we retraced our steps, glad to have found the top and to be descending at last.
Beneath the cloud, the valley lay spread out below in the dim light of the November afternoon. Martin was well up on sea shanties and other rousing songs, and he sang away while I joined in with the easy bits, like Will ye go, lassie go?, or It's not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me. The half hour or so descending to the valley floor was the best part of the day, but once off the hill proper the bogs were just as boggy as in the morning, and Martin, with an eye on our rendezvous, set off across them at a trot.
Later he developed a myth to the effect that when we went climbing together I was always cracking on at a furious pace, and it was all he could do to keep up; in fact this was the first of many occasions on which he almost walked me into the ground. Once I pretended my bootlace had come undone, squatting down over it for a long minute like a floored boxer making the most of the count.
Presently it began to rain in earnest. By the time we reached the road I was very wet and very tired; and very pleased to see the headlights of Frances' waiting car. We’d been sitting for a long time in the Hotel bar at Lochailort, boots and socks steaming before the fire, before I began to feel properly warm.
Two postscripts.
The following day I caught the afternoon train to Glasgow, and from there the night bus to London. It arrived at Victoria Coach Station early, and I let myself into the flat not long after 7 a.m.
Ellen wasn't there. Moreover the bed hadn't been slept in.
This struck me at the very least as peculiar, but I fought down the rising tide of suspicion: there could be a dozen explanations. Shortly I heard her key in the door. She said she'd come to the bus station but had got there too late. I didn't know whether to believe her or not. The idea that she might have got up at dawn to come and meet me was improbable enough. That she'd have made the bed before leaving struck me as downright impossible. Tempting to think she'd spent the night somewhere else, and hadn't quite got up early enough to be at home when I got back. But I didn't put this to her. I'd no way of making her tell me the truth if she hadn't done so already, and until you find out for certain that someone's cheating on you there isn't much you can do except keep watching.
And when that person immediately suggests you come back to the beautifully made bed for an hour before she goes to work, you're usually prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt.
That evening I got out the old road map. Bidean a'Ghlas Thuill, the bit of An Teallach Dad and I'd climbed all those years ago, was over three thousand feet. So I'd done two Munros now.
Then I turned to the page with Gulvain on.
Martin and I had made a mistake. The true summit was the one off the edge of the map. The trig point we'd got to wasn't the top at all.
Only one Munro then.
I decided there and then that something so frustrating and laborious as climbing them all must be worth doing, and have been wondering if I was right ever since.
Approaching the top, the mist grew lighter overhead and then parted briefly, revealing to the south-west a glimpse of Lord Berkeley's Seat and Corrag Bhuidhe, jagged summits further along the ridge. Dad took a photograph, and later in his dark-room superimposed another of me taken the same day, attempting in a pre-pubescent way to look mean and moody. Droplets of mist had settled on his extravagant handlebar moustache, a growth which made any public outing with him an embarrassing trial. Fortunately there was no one else about.
The main top, Bidean a'Ghlas Thuill, is a Munro, although neither of us knew that at the time. At some point on the ridge leading to or from it we crossed a narrow gap where there was a definite change in the colour of the rock, from pink Torridon sandstone to grey something else. Further on, something strange and wonderful: sunshine pouring through a rift in the clouds projected our shadows onto the mist below, surrounding each silhouette by a circle of rainbows. Dad said it was a Brocken spectre, the phenomenon which had so unnerved the Taugwalders after the Matterhorn first-ascent disaster. By the time we'd got the camera out it had gone.
Beyond Bidean a'Ghlas Thuill the mist lifted and dispersed. In the coire below our tent made a tiny orange triangle by the lochan shore. Through rents in the cloud there were glimpses of unknown mountains and valleys beyond. I thought, Scotland’s a huge place.
Dad decided we'd better come down. Bitter disappointment: now we were on the ridge I wanted to go all the way round. But perhaps we were short of time. Scrambling down a steep grassy gully, the sun came out. We packed up the tent and walked down Coir' a'Ghiubhsachain towards the Dundonnell valley. The cloud had broken up and it was a bright day. At one of our stops I left my balaclava behind for good, the first of many such losses.
Coming abruptly on an S-bend in the stream we found ourselves overlooking a sun-filled pool, in which a dozen small trout scattered.
Dad was forty eight and I was eleven. Although the family had summer holidays in Sutherland for another decade and more, I didn't find out what a Munro was for another fifteen years and Bidein a'Ghlas Thuill was the only one I ever climbed with him. The discovery awoke in me no overwhelming urge to climb them all. I probably thought it was stupid to do things just because they were on a list; at any rate I often thought so later. I grew up, did A Levels, went to Nottingham University to do law, and then moved to London with my girlfriend. Dad and I went hill walking quite often, but I went partly to please him and didn't get the bug for it until I was nearly thirty.
In a way it all started because of Martin; but that's to simplify things and unfair to Hector, who ended up being a much bigger part of it.
Although we'd been at the same university at more or less the same time, Hector and I hadn't met until two years afterwards, when we shared a rented house in Balham, South London with some other people.
It was a nickname. "You know, as in Hector's House", said his girlfriend Wendy when I asked for an explanation. "Because he's so bloody Hectorish and sensible."
However harsh, there was an element of truth in this. Hector, a tall young man with thick dark hair and deep-set eyes, invested pension funds for a living, and no one ever had their money in safer hands.
The prospect of going out to work myself was horrifying. Why must student life be over so soon? After one term of law I'd sworn never to become a solicitor. I was going to be a classical composer instead, the next Sibelius or Stravinsky. I’d been writing music on and off since I was seven, and had managed to get a place at Trinity College of Music starting the end of the following year.
Having proper jobs and proper money, Hector and Wendy swiftly moved out of our Balham squalor to buy a flat. It was the beginning of the '80s property boom, and I was being left behind. Did it matter? Contemptuous of the property-owning classes, I was nevertheless beginning to realise that being poor wasn't much fun.
Hec and I would probably have kept in touch anyway, but what sealed it was that he was a rock-climber. I'd always wanted to have a go, and in the spring of 1985 managed to persuade him to take me to the Lakes. It was cold and wet, and we didn't get much done. This was OK because I was terrified. Middlefell Buttress in Langdale wasn't too bad, though I nearly fell off, but round the corner on Holly Tree Traverse I swore that if I ever got down it'd be the last climb I ever did. Thankfully next morning was miserable, and I got my revenge by dragging him up Crinkle Crags and Bowfell in the snow. It had rained so much that we had to dig a trench round the tent with Dad's ice axe. On the last day he took me to Shepherd's Crag in Borrowdale, and we did Little Chamonix, still one of my favourite climbs anywhere. By the time I hauled myself trembling on to the Belvedere I was just beginning to see that climbing might have some appeal.
Nevertheless I still much preferred hillwalking, and when we thought about going away for the weekend in the spring of 1986, I wanted to take him somewhere really remote, preferably in Scotland, to show him what it was like. This was why I hit on the idea of going to climb Ben Alder, a mountain which seemed to be in the middle of nowhere but was accessible from the train. It had nothing to do with the Munros. I was just struck with the idea of getting on the sleeper at Euston and waking up next morning in Scotland.
Our plan was ruined by the incompetence of some power station engineers at a place in Russia called Chernobyl. A nuclear reactor caught fire, and for several days fall-out poured into the atmosphere. In the following week wind carried swathes of radioactive rain across the country. Reluctant to get irradiated we called the trip off. I spent the entire weekend indoors, only coming out to buy milk at the shop across the road (if this seems an over-reaction, nearly thirty years later the UK government is still testing for caesium residues in Cumbrian sheep).
Despite this failure a seed had been sown in my mind. You could get out of London and go to Scotland. There was an escape hatch.
It's hard to know why we didn't arrange to go again later that summer. Both of us were busy perhaps. Hector was married now, and I was living with my girlfriend Ellen in a rented flat in Notting Hill. At Music College I luxuriated in the deep satisfaction that doing something you're good at imparts. There'd always be next year. At that age life stretches away in front of you in an inexhaustible supply.
Ellen and I were looking round ourselves for a flat to buy. I'd started my third year at Trinity and had virtually no money, but she was training to become a solicitor with a big City firm and between us we could just about manage the mortgage. There was something of a clash of lifestyles. Naturally she thought I was a self-indulgent layabout. She on the other hand was a money-grubbing wage-slave. We were probably both right, up to a point. We'd been together for nearly five years, a delicate time in relationships: by that stage things have generally declined from their joyful beginnings to a point where you either accept that it isn't ever going be like that again, or split up. In June, perhaps as a gesture of commitment, we bought a one-bedroom flat just up the road.
That autumn Martin invited us up to Scotland. He'd been at Exeter University with Ellen, but I didn't know him very well. A wiry bloke in his late twenties, with thinning blond hair and a reddish beard, he was the best-looking bald man I've ever known. Most balding men look like less attractive versions of their former selves, but hair-loss suited Mart. Strikingly, his eyebrows were of different colours, one dark and the other fair.
Neither of us knew his girlfriend Frances at all, and for that matter Martin hardly knew her either. He'd spent the summer working as mate on a converted trawler which did sailing cruises round the Western Isles, and Frances had done a week's stint as ship's cook. One thing had led to another. Martin must have been quite keen to put this relationship on a firmer footing because he'd borrowed a keeper's cottage at Polnish on Loch Ailort in the western Highlands for a week, and asked us to come with him for moral support.
Ellen was quite keen to go at first; but then she found out that the cottage had no heating, running water or sanitation. To me these things at the time made the idea more rather than less attractive. At the last minute she cried off. I thought about not going, but not for long. One day in November I caught the Glasgow train from Euston, wondering just how much of a gooseberry I was going to be.
The bothy stood a hundred or so yards back from the shoreline amidst rowan trees alive with wintering redwings. It was primitive. The sitting room was habitable enough, but the kitchen was basic and the cuisine in the following week bas rather than haute. The weather was dismal too. On the best day there were only two hailstorms, and at other times there were showers when it wasn't actually raining continuously. The house had no lavatory and instead we went outside with a spade, a roll of bog paper and an umbrella, looking for ground that didn't seem to have recently been dug up.
It was enjoyable enough all the same. Martin and Frances seemed to be getting on fine, and were understandably in no hurry to get up in the mornings. Most days we went for walks, returning wet and hungry at dusk. At night the three of us sat for long hours in the sitting room before a blazing fire, drinking whisky and reading. At about ten o'clock Martin would yawn ostentatiously and, taking the hint, I'd retire to the moth-eaten divan bed in the kitchen.
I liked Frances enormously. She was small and dark, with a soft voice and slightly feline charm; not unlike a dark-haired version of Elaine in fact. Martin was lucky. Her car, an ancient Renault 5, had less to recommend it. On the steeper hills Mart and I would get out and push; we didn't dare drive far with three of us aboard. Towards the end of the week Frances wanted to visit a friend at Strontian, and since the Renault evidently wasn’t going to get us all that far, she suggested dropping us off to go and climb a mountain while she went down to Ardgour.
It’s hard for me now, given that within a very few years mountaineering had become a central preoccupation, obsession even, to think back to how I felt then. I'd brought my boots with me, and my climbing breeches, a tatty tweed pair originally bought for fishing. I must have had a waterproof of some sort. But I don't remember during that week anything like the same furious impatience I'd have experienced not long afterwards at the days ticking by without our having gone out and climbed something.
Still, I was keen enough even then, and Martin had some ambitions as a Munroist. Though I must have known about the Tables before, and known that people climbed them, this was the first time I'd given the idea much thought. He'd been up the nearest two, Sgurr nan Coireachain and Sgurr Thuilm above Glenfinnan, and wanted to climb something else. We looked on the map, and right on the eastern edge was the rather ugly-named Gaor Bheinn, or Gulvain, to put it the anglicised way. Frances said she'd walk part of the way up the valley with us. She didn't mind not coming. She'd been brought up in Fort William with a Dad who insisted they climb Ben Nevis every New Year's day. Climbing was nothing to her.
We set out from the foot of Gleann Fionn-Lighe sometime in mid-morning. There was a Land Rover track undulating along the east side of a wooded valley. It wasn't actually raining, but the top of Gulvain was in cloud as the mountain came into view round a bend in the glen, and the day was damp and cold. Just short of the farm, Wauchan, there was a bridge over the burn. We stood looking down into its mossy depths. Touching scenes of farewell took place between Martin and Frances, for whom at that stage six hours separation must have seemed a long time. Car permitting, we’d meet back at the road at 5.30.
Beyond Wauchan, a muddy yard slotted with sheep prints, the track deteriorated and there were stretches of bog to negotiate. We were in a steep-sided open valley, with Gulvain's southern shoulder rearing up at the head. Most of my hill-walking had been done in summer, and the hills had an unprepossessing autumnal dead-grass colour I'd rarely seen before. There was no sign of any snow. After an hour or so we crossed a footbridge where the burn bifurcated, and squelched up gently rising ground to the hill proper.
Maps are not entirely trustworthy. They may not lie, but they allow you to be deceived. On the O/S map the fifty metre contours are here so close together that some of the ten metre ones have been missed out. If you use your wits you aren't taken in by the apparently moderate steepness of the slope. As Martin and I didn't, it came as an unpleasant surprise to find that this way up Gulvain you climb two thousand feet in about a mile. And so much of my mountain experience had been gathered on the lower Sutherland hills and in the Lake District, where you rarely start a walk below five hundred feet, that climbing a big hill more or less from sea level was a new sort of effort altogether.
Martin can't have walked great distances aboard the boat, but he was miles fitter than my sedentary London life had made me. We slogged up an infinite grassy bank, about the inclination of a railway cutting side, never seeing more than fifty yards or so in front and rewarded only partly by the extending view of a gloomy landscape behind, soon lost altogether in mizzling cloud. I hadn't learned then that the way to get up a hill like that, for the terminally unfit anyway, is to do a hundred steps, then rest, over and over again; but even if I had I'd no doubt have been shamed into keeping pace with Martin's remorseless advance up that knee-cracking slope. He showed not the slightest sign of wanting to rest, and I was determined not to give in either. The only way I could stop honourably was to pause for something to eat or, when the drizzle and wind became too much, to dig my anorak from the depths of the rucksack. I can't often have suffered so much for the sake of pride.
Finally, when it seemed that my calves would split from the effort, we reached the top; the first top anyway, a broad grassy dome with patches of snow lying in the hollows. A cold wind rattled the map, and setting off again north to the summit it had us teetering sideways like drunks. We went up slowly rising ground and in ten minutes had come to a Trig point.
Nothing in the driving mist suggested that this wasn't the top. Off the edge of the map - Gulvain is half an inch from the eastern margin - another top was marked, but the trig point would be at the summit, and we only explored a little further, not to be outdone in the cloud by an eccentricity in the ground. To the north the ridge fell smoothly away and we retraced our steps, glad to have found the top and to be descending at last.
Beneath the cloud, the valley lay spread out below in the dim light of the November afternoon. Martin was well up on sea shanties and other rousing songs, and he sang away while I joined in with the easy bits, like Will ye go, lassie go?, or It's not the leaving of Liverpool that grieves me. The half hour or so descending to the valley floor was the best part of the day, but once off the hill proper the bogs were just as boggy as in the morning, and Martin, with an eye on our rendezvous, set off across them at a trot.
Later he developed a myth to the effect that when we went climbing together I was always cracking on at a furious pace, and it was all he could do to keep up; in fact this was the first of many occasions on which he almost walked me into the ground. Once I pretended my bootlace had come undone, squatting down over it for a long minute like a floored boxer making the most of the count.
Presently it began to rain in earnest. By the time we reached the road I was very wet and very tired; and very pleased to see the headlights of Frances' waiting car. We’d been sitting for a long time in the Hotel bar at Lochailort, boots and socks steaming before the fire, before I began to feel properly warm.
Two postscripts.
The following day I caught the afternoon train to Glasgow, and from there the night bus to London. It arrived at Victoria Coach Station early, and I let myself into the flat not long after 7 a.m.
Ellen wasn't there. Moreover the bed hadn't been slept in.
This struck me at the very least as peculiar, but I fought down the rising tide of suspicion: there could be a dozen explanations. Shortly I heard her key in the door. She said she'd come to the bus station but had got there too late. I didn't know whether to believe her or not. The idea that she might have got up at dawn to come and meet me was improbable enough. That she'd have made the bed before leaving struck me as downright impossible. Tempting to think she'd spent the night somewhere else, and hadn't quite got up early enough to be at home when I got back. But I didn't put this to her. I'd no way of making her tell me the truth if she hadn't done so already, and until you find out for certain that someone's cheating on you there isn't much you can do except keep watching.
And when that person immediately suggests you come back to the beautifully made bed for an hour before she goes to work, you're usually prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt.
That evening I got out the old road map. Bidean a'Ghlas Thuill, the bit of An Teallach Dad and I'd climbed all those years ago, was over three thousand feet. So I'd done two Munros now.
Then I turned to the page with Gulvain on.
Martin and I had made a mistake. The true summit was the one off the edge of the map. The trig point we'd got to wasn't the top at all.
Only one Munro then.
I decided there and then that something so frustrating and laborious as climbing them all must be worth doing, and have been wondering if I was right ever since.
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