Aonach Mor

          "Can't see much snow", Hector said.

          We stood at the carriage-end as the train rattled across Rannoch Moor, peering out at a dreich morning.

"I can’t see any snow”, I said, articulating something that had been nagging at me since Crianlarich. 

A heavy blanket of gloom settled on my shoulders. I'd persuaded Hector to come to Scotland with a mildly sensationalised account of the time I'd had with Alison the previous winter. He'd borrowed an ice-axe, and was looking forward to having a go at winter climbing, if wary of my over-enthusiasm. And now this.

The weather wasn't entirely unexpected. In London it'd been a very mild winter, and the papers carried reports of ski-stations across Europe snowless and deserted. All the same it was a bitter disappointment, the first of many winter climbing disappointments, to look out upon what might have been a miserable October day, with rain patterning the windows.

At Tulloch the train stood chugging in the station for ten minutes. Briefly the clouds parted and there was a gleam of lighter sky. In between sodden fields the river Spean ran in spate, and the trees that in drier times lined its banks now stood yards out into the current.

Beyond Spean Bridge we gathered our things together. The weather was closing in again. At Fort William a vigorous wind pursued the two of us along the platform, and a characteristic highland mizzle was falling. We got into a taxi on the station forecourt and drove up Glen Nevis to the Youth Hostel.

The driver was appalled to think we were still going up the hill.

"If you've come all this way” I said, “It's a lot better than sitting inside watching the weather."

Brave words, if untrue.

Hector seemed game, or at least not actively against the idea. At the Hostel we dumped our belongings while the driver waited, then got back in the cab and set off back down the valley. 

In the presence of Hector’s massive financial solidity there was no limit to the number of cabs I was prepared to order.

Aonach Mor was a Munro, so I'd have tried to climb it sometime anyway, but I'd read in The Guardian a month or so earlier that a restaurant and ski-tow was to be built on the northern slope of the mountain. Perhaps irrationally, I wanted to beat the bulldozers to it. The article, in the paper's skiing pages, was silent as to the possibility that the development, only a couple of valleys away from Ben Nevis, might actually not be a very good thing. Personally I was horrified.

Work was to begin immediately, and as we drove up the road from Torlundy signs of activity were already visible. At the road end, in the yard of what seemed to be a sawmill, we paid off the taxi. The driver asked if we'd want picking up again later, but Hector told him we were walking off the other side of the mountain, down into Glen Nevis.

We set out in a downpour. Nearby a bulldozer was flattening ground only recently cleared of trees.

"Probably for a Visitor Centre with Car Park and Picnic Area”, Hector said disdainfully. “Looks like those old pictures of the Somme. Only wants a dead horse stuck up in a dead tree."

We squelched upwards through the mud. Ahead, the uninspiring looking northern slope of Aonach Mor; behind, when we'd raised enough height to warrant a look, a landscape of if anything even more profound dreariness: mile upon mile of conifer plantation, more graveyard than forest, around whose soiled perimeter yellow bulldozers crawled like stupified yellow beetles.

Casting about for the branch of the Allt an t-Sneachda which would lead us up to the summit plateau of the mountain, we scrabbled underneath some spruce trees which had escaped the carnage, emerging wet and frustrated on the lower rim of the slope. A fearsomely strong wind blew most of the stream back uphill. Getting to the top was going to be disagreeable and unrewarding, but all the same we began plodding up the right bank of the burn. Going somewhere elsewhere couldn't be any worse than staying here.

A boggy treadmill now rose in front, not really steep but unmistakeably up. The angle and character of the slope hardly varied; we walked in the shelter of the shallow cutting made by the burn, seeing ahead nothing but the hillside receding into the mist above. Soon the beat of the weather about us made conversation tiresome. I pulled my hood up and plodded on, nothing to look at ahead but a few yards of grass and mosses. I thought petulantly, The skiers are welcome to this; and then a few seconds later, Don't really mean that.

On the train Hector had refused breakfast, saying he felt sick. Now he began to flag a little, and every couple of hundred yards I stopped for him to catch up. We were in thick cloud and it was blowing hard. I wasn't particularly enjoying myself, but the wildness of the day had begun to work on my spirits and I was prone to racing away.

We'd walk for ten minutes or so, then stop and huddle together.

"What d'you reckon?"

"I suppose we just keep on", Hector said.

After an hour a subtle change came over the ground: less bog and more fine scree. Patches of turf and creeping moss replaced the coarse grasses. To our right, the stream had dwindled to a trickle. At last we came upon a solitary patch of snow.

"Thawing", I said, kicking it.

A little higher up the stream disappeared altogether, and at once the wind dropped to a murmur; when we stopped to listen we could hear it roaring away in the coire to the west. We got out the map and compass.

"Can't be more than a couple of hundred feet of the top", I said. "If we go south east we should avoid walking over this bloody huge great bit of cliff here on the other side", prodding the map with a gloved finger.

We set off in the strange near-silence up what was now a gentle slope, and soon came out onto level ground. The wind hit us again with a rush, blattering our hoods against our faces. We reeled along, sometimes staggering with the force of the blast, stopping every few minutes to look at the compass. Visibility was about twenty yards. Not a snowflake in sight.

Presently we came to the lip of the eastern coire, and turned south again along the narrow summit plateau.

"We're never going to find the top in this."

"Got to keep going this way anyhow", I said. "To get down to Glen Nevis".

We staggered onwards into the south-westerly wind, teetering sideways on the damp stones and scrabbling our feet to stay upright.

"Feels like we're going to take off."

We had to raise our voices now.

"It might be better if we held hands", I shouted, trying to make it sound diffident.

Risking the stares of anyone else on the mountain, not that we'd seen anyone else, we therefore clasped hands and, bracing ourselves each against the other, made more solid progress along the ridge, straining our eyes into the mist for the summit cairn.

Surprisingly enough it soon loomed out of the obscurity. At the least windy side we put on more clothing.

"How are you feeling?"

"Pretty ropy", Hector said.

"You should have eaten some breakfast”, I said sanctimoniously. “Want a bacon sandwich?"

A more thoughtful person might have seen that cold bacon was likely to make him feel worse rather than better. 

Hector mimed what would have been a copious vomit.

"I don't think we should really try and go on to Aonach Beg as well. It's a bloody awful day, and you're not feeling well."

To my disappointment, he nodded. I been hoping he’d rally, and insist that there was nothing he’d like better than to stagger on to the next Munro.  But no.

When we'd had a look at the map we set off again, south down the hill, keeping to the west edge of the plateau. I was thinking of Ben Alder, and our miserable navigation there. This was much more serious: much colder and the wind much stronger. We'd better get it right.

Hector was counting steps. If we could only find it, a steep but negotiable ridge led down west to the bealach between Carn Mor Dearg and Aonach Mor. After ten minutes we came upon a little cairn above a likely enough looking descent.

"If it's not here, it must be somewhere very near here", he said. "We're only fifty paces out.”

We turned off the plateau and began picking our way down. Almost immediately the wind dropped, and soon we thought we'd found traces of a path. The mist began to clear, and there to my enormous relief was the bealach below us, and further away to the left a wild glacier-ground coire whose walls were streaming white with water.

At the bealach a quarter of an hour later it became apparent that Hector really wasn't well.

“I feel weak", he said. "And sick. Can’t eat anything.”

"I'll carry your rucksack if you like", I said.

"Alright. Thanks."

We went slowly down Coire Guibhsachan, across water-streaked slabs and squelching bog. Somewhere up in the mist on the right was the Carn Mor Dearg arete.

After a while I said, "If we climb up a bit to the right just down here, we can get over a shoulder and cut off the last mile or so down to the road end. What d'you reckon?"

Hector was looking pretty grey.

"I'll have a go”, he said.

We crossed the coire floor and laboured up to a narrow bealach which divided the main bulk of Ben Nevis from an outlier, Meall Cumhainn. It was purgatory for both of us, and a vicious wind whistled through the gap; but at the top there was suddenly a view of Glen Nevis stretching out before us a thousand feet below, looking as though you could throw a stone down into it.

The last twenty minutes to the road were trying. The ground was very steep and running with water.  I found that the weight of both rucksacks had done something strange to frictioning capacity of my boots: time and again my legs disappeared from under me and I'd come down with a jolt on my backside. Hector offered to take his rucksack back, but I was rather enjoying this minor opportunity for heroism and selflessness.

In the end we got down to the car park. It was deserted, which was a pity, because the Hostel was at least another hour and a half away down the valley and a lift would have been a Godsend. Hector lay down on a flat rock and closed his eyes. A light rain pattered down onto his waterproof. He appeared to have gone to sleep. I stood there eating a jam sandwich and wondering whether to be worried or not. Should I call an ambulance? If so, how? There was no phone nearer than the Hostel.

With a visible effort he pulled himself up. "Come on then”, he said. “Can't hang around all day." 

We trudged off along the road. After half a mile or so a car passed in the opposite direction heading for the car park. Shortly before Achriabhach we heard it coming back down the road behind us. We thumbed furiously and it stopped. The occupants were a young English couple, also climbers. We sat gratefully on their back seat as they whisked us down the glen, shedding water like wet dogs and bemoaning the weather. At the Hostel there were hot showers, and we sat in the common room looking at the map. It'd been a vile day, but it was amazing how brave and hardy you felt once you were back in the warm with a mug of hot tea in your hand.

From such a low point, the weather had nowhere to go but up; however in the morning it was evidently in no hurry to get there: curtains of rain were sheeting in from the west, and there was no sign of Sgurr a'Mhaim or Stob Ban from the kitchen window. At 9.30, having failed to spin breakfast out any longer, we went back to the dormitory, still uncertain what to do. Here I discovered that my compass was broken: I'd had it hanging from the rucksack on the way off the hill, and it must have smashed in one of my falls.

          Just the excuse we needed. Clearly we couldn't go climbing without a compass. Hector hadn't got one; the Hostel didn't sell them, and although the assistant warden offered to lend us his, we'd obviously have to buy one today otherwise we wouldn't be able to go up the hill on Sunday.

Outside, maddeningly, the rain had stopped. We walked into Fort William and bought a compass each in Nevisport. There was nothing much else to do after that, so we walked back to the Hostel, chatting desultorily away. Hector's wife, Wendy, was pregnant. No doubt I failed to accord this transformational event in his life the significance it deserved. My landlord had decided he could get more money if someone else was living in the flat, and was suing Martin and I for possession. Martin was still in Devon with Frances. Helen still had Mucus the shipping lawyer living with her just up the road, and there rumours that they were getting married. She and I weren't speaking, and I’d mentally consigned our relationship to the dustbin. All sorts of strange and absorbing things were happening in the world. Hector and I had both read interesting books. There was always plenty to talk about.

On the way back up Glen Nevis the rain began again, and it rained with what, if it'd been a bit warmer, you would have said was tropical intensity; but this was Lochaber in February. After half an hour's downpour a couple of inches of water had run down into the pockets of my waterproof. Our jeans were soaked.

We arrived back at the Hostel in low spirits, which immediately got lower. The door was locked. We looked at each other in dismay. A sign said "Please do not disturb the warden in closing hours." Another read "Shut between 11 and 2." It was now 12.30.

I said, "I'm sorry this has been such a bloody disaster."

"Never mind, Sim."

In the evening the weather forecast was for more of the same. I heard an English bloke say, "I'm off home tomorrow. More chance of snow in Guildford."

We decided that if Sunday was miserable we'd walk up Glen Nevis, over the Lairig Leacach and catch the night train from Spean Bridge. This wouldn't take us all day, but it was better than loafing around in Fort William, and there was bound to be a bar in Spean Bridge where we could wait for the train.

Later on we lay on our bunks drinking Old Farm out of the bottle. Old Muckspreader, Hector called it. Not the greatest whisky in the world.

Two young lads from Wimbledon came in, and said they were walking out to Spean Bridge too.

"Is there a bothy on the way?", one of them wanted to know.

"One at Luibeilt, here, and one further down", I said, showing them on the map.

We left them discussing plans for an overnight stop.

In morning I was bursting to climb something, no matter what. Waiting in the kitchen for the porridge to boil, I stared up the valley at the lower slopes of Sgurr a'Mhaim and Stob Ban. It looked a dull day, but the cloud was lifting and for half a minute a weak morning sun stained the freshly covered skirts of the hills a faint pink - snow.

Hector wasn't quite so keen.

"Forecast wasn't very good, was it? I don't fancy it much if it's going to be like Friday all over again."

I was working out a way of overcoming these objections when rain began to lash at the windows of the common room; and when we went to wash up, the hills were swathed in cloud again. It was no use. Climbing was out.

We set off to Spean Bridge at about 10.00 a.m. carrying all our weekend's baggage. The two Wimbledon lads were waiting to see if the weather would clear. They only had to go as far as Luibeilt. It wasn't actually raining now, but the mountains had gone as if for good, and grey louring clouds hung low over the valley. A brisk wind lashed the tree tops on our right as we plodded up the road.

Shortly before Achriabhach, a spur of Sgurr a'Mhaim appeared briefly beneath the murk, shrouded in a night's snowfall. I looked at Hector to see if he might agree to a late change of plan, but he resolutely refused to meet my eye. At the bridge we stopped briefly to look down into the depths, where the Nevis swirled yeasty and brown. Beyond, Landrovers of the Lochaber Mountain Rescue were drawn up beside the road, and various members of the Old Bill fiddled with their walkie-talkies.

At the car park by the road-head we paused again to put on waterproofs. It had begun to spit. The southern slope of Nevis ran white with streams. Members of the public sat huddled in cars. Where the path starts a sign said "Corrour 15 miles".

At the top of the Nevis gorge we came out onto the Steall flats, a marvellous camping place with the mare's tail waterfall dropping down from An Garbhanach on the far side of the river. Here the wind hit us for the first time, funnelling up the valley and pushing us stumbling forwards, spattering rain onto our backs.

After Steall we met two climbers coming the other way. They had plastic Koflach boots on, and looked very well equipped and experienced, but said they'd turned back half way up Aonach Beg because of the weather. Suitably discouraged, we went on anyway.

The valley now opened up, with the slopes of the Grey Coires on our left, and the Mamores on the right disappearing into cloud at about 500 metres. In front of us lay a drab and cheerless landscape, the river some way off to the south across acres of lifeless bog. The path meandered wetly between peat hags, and we squelched along it up towards the watershed, the wind buffeting us furiously from behind.

At the head of the valley we took shelter on the far side of Tom an Eite, a little hillock which rose unaccountably from the surrounding moor. Getting the map out proved to be major undertaking. It was wet through already, and I had visions of it bursting in the wind like a paper sail. We huddled protectively round and peered at it intently together.

Several burns radiated from this moorland hub: the Nevis we’d just walked up, another which drained the Mamore forest to the south, and a third which came from high up in the Grey Coires to the north and then swung east not far from where we stood, dropping down to Loch Treig five or six miles away. The idea was to walk down this last one, the Abhainn Rath, to the bothy at Lubeilt, where we'd cross the bridge and head north over the Lairig Leacach to the railway at Spean Bridge.

From where we stood shivering by Tom an Eite it wasn’t immediately clear which valley was which. The spurs of the mountains thrust down like the feet of giant pillars, between which moorland undulated into the squall-filled distance.

"We just go east till we get to the burn", I said, "Then go downstream."

"Looks like it".

I dug out my compass, which after Friday's mishap was hanging from a string round my neck, almost inaccessible beneath many layers of clothing. We took a bearing and went forth from the lee of Tom an Eite, picking a circuitous course between flooded bog-holes. In five minutes we arrived on the bank of the stream.

To my relief it was flowing in the expected direction. I say relief because although we were three thousand feet below the tops, it was wild enough even here. Perfectly safe in theory, we were wet through from the waist down, a long way from habitation and a gale was blowing; I had a slightly worried feeling.

It was well on in the day, but neither of us had the heart to stop and eat. When you stopped it was too cold. We promised ourselves we'd eat at Luibeilt bothy, which I reckoned we'd reach at about 3. It couldn't be more than a couple of miles away.

We'd not gone a hundred yards however when the first obstacle appeared. The stream draining the eastern Mamores can’t be much more than a trickle in summer: a pace back, a good jump and you're over. Now it was a foot deep, running yards wide, strong and brown over big stones. Hector's feet were dry. Mine were damp, but not soaking. We cast upstream for a crossing, but quickly realised we'd just have wade through. Gritting our teeth against the shock of the water, we splashed across to the other side.

After that there seemed to be a stream every hundred yards. It was a miserable business. The water in our boots never had time to warm up, and by the third or fourth one we waded directly in without bothering to look for a crossing, resigned to the cold.

After a mile or so of this, a figure appeared coming in the opposite direction. Looking out from under the hoods of our waterproofs - bad manners somehow, I thought - we greeted one another enthusiastically as fellow subjects of the storm. He'd come from Creaguaineach Lodge at the head of Loch Treig. He had gaiters on and said his feet were dry. We squelched ours to show that they weren't.

“Did you see whether there was a bridge over the burn at Luibeilt?”, I asked as we were parting. It’s only marked on the two and a half inch map. Not the other one”.

The Abhainn Rath was growing with the addition of each side stream, and looked as if it might be tricky to cross.

“Can't remember positively”, he said. “But I think so.”

We thanked him and pressed on. Luibeilt wasn’t far away now. The valley here was broad and shallow with drab hillsides showing below the snowline. I knew we'd have to climb up the slopes on the far side once we were across the river and looked there as we walked for traces of a path. The wind was if anything stronger than ever here, and blasted from the south west across the moor.

Coming round a low shoulder of land we found ourselves on a level flat piece of ground with a big burn running off the north east slope of what was probably Sgurr Eilde Mor, the biggest we’d so far tried to cross. Here for the first time since the first burn we stopped on the bank and looked at the racing water. A torrent. Quite narrow, and deep.

“D’you think we could stand up in it?”, Hector said.

I didn’t think so at all. We decided to cast about upstream. Sure enough after a few hundred yards the current divided and ran more evenly over a stony bed. We splashed our way out to a grassy island on the edge of the main flow.

I'd been trying to remember some advice given to me by Stefan, the pony man at Corrour.

“You’re supposed to cross with your hands on each other's shoulders”, I said. “Either side on to the current, or with one person facing upstream, the other downstream.”

“Which was it?”

I thought for a moment.

“Can’t remember.”

Hector gave me a disparaging look. We stood eyeing the current.

“Actually, must be one person upstream the other downstream”, I said. “Because I remember, the heavier one’s supposed to go one way and the lighter the other way.”

“Don’t suppose you can remember which?”, he said, laughing.

“Of course not.”

“I’m heavier than you. I’ll go downstream.”

We arranged ourselves into an arch, as if for some bizarre aquatic country dance, and stepped into the water.

Immediately you could feel the river pressing determinedly at your legs, nudging your feet downstream in the shingle, each sideways step requiring a conscious push back against the current. But it was OK and we were across in half a minute.  I hoped there wouldn’t be any bigger burns than this one.

By now we’d been going for about five hours, and were pretty wet. My waterproof trousers were more or less useless, and from the hem of my coat to the tips of my toes I got wetter and wetter as the day went on. At my throat and along the zip of my jacket water had entered insidiously and spread sideways. Still, there'd be shelter at Luibeilt, and there was plenty of time before dark to cross over into the Lairig Leacach. On the north side of the Grey Coires the wind should be easier, and there was a Land Rover track all the way.

With these comforting thoughts in mind we squelched through the bog to the little huddle of buildings at Luibeilt.

They were all either derelict or locked. There was no bothy.

As I remember there was a kind of pre-fab shed with a padlock on the door, a cottage that you could see at a hundred yards had no roof, and the remains of a house, which at a distance looked quite promising, but on closer inspection had a large tree growing into one end. Rain was pouring through broken slates.

We looked at each other.

"Hang on”, I said, “There's another building a couple of hundred yards away on the other side of the river: that must be it."

We walked round the house to the bridge. Or to where the bridge should have been. There was no bridge either.

This came as a bit of a blow. Not because we'd be benighted: it was immediately obvious that we'd have to walk out to Corrour and catch the train there; not even because it would have been pleasant to sit down out of reach of the gale. What preyed on my mind was the Wimbledon lads. I had visions of the them arriving at Luibeilt with darkness falling only to find, as we'd done, that the only dry place was round the front of the house, the remains of some kind of porch into which were huddled half a dozen sheep. We chased them out, and stood emptying our boots and wringing rivers of water from our socks.

"I hope they'll be alright", I said uselessly. "You could die in this kind of weather."

"They’ll be OK”, Hector said.

There was nothing I could do about it, so I stamped my feet to keep warm and ate some lunch. They certainly couldn't have got across the river to the bothy, if the other building was the bothy. What had looked an amiable enough burn two miles previously, running shrunken in a stony bed, had swollen with the addition of each side stream to an ugly race. It can't have been much more than fifteen yards wide, but there was no telling how deep it was. All the surface rocks had disappeared, and you could only tell where they were by the bulging current. As we stood and looked, not too near the edge, it raced from left to right with a grey and menacing gleam.

Hector said, “You wouldn’t get one step from the bank.”

When we left Luibeilt it must have been about 3.45. Immediately we were on a Land Rover track which, as one of our rare adventures with the map showed, was of little use since it immediately turned south west towards Kinlochleven. However it did get us over the next stream with dry feet. Turning east again we were back in bog and heather. There was no path to speak of.

“So long as we get to Loch Treig head before dark we'll be OK”, I said.

At one point the rain stopped for about ten minutes. You could take your hood down and survey the scenery. It was very windy, but when not mixed with rain the wind was exhilarating and not too cold.

"I wouldn't be anywhere else for the world", I said, shaking the water out of my hair.

"Not even in a hot bath?"

There was nothing in the drab landscape to catch the eye, but walking along the flats by the river was a wonder. Now we'd decided not to attempt a crossing, its raging progress could be viewed dispassionately. Every twenty yards there was some new manifestation of waterpower, and nearing Staoineag it spread itself in a magnificent white cascade before reassembling in a swift and sullen brown channel.

Rain had started to fall again, and the light, a baleful grey even at noon, was fading. By the time we reached Creaguaineach Lodge the world was bent on resuming the darkness which for three days had seemed its natural condition. From the bridge which spans the Abhainn Rath, the white water in the gorge far below glowed in the dusk with an unnatural luminescence.

“It makes me feel nervous just standing here looking at it”, I said, peering over the parapet.

At last now we were on a good track, and it was just a matter of plodding round to Corrour. Hector found a couple of mints in his waterproof, and their sweetness seemed to flood its revitalising way into our inner corners.

This however proved to be the worst part of the journey. The first mile or so was easy enough, since it was mostly flat and we were sheltered from the wind to some extent by the high ground to the south. But when we crossed the bridge over the Allt a' Chamabhreac and turned up towards the railway line hard times began in earnest.

I suppose that since we'd only done one fairly modest piece of mountaineering, and that 48 hours previously, we had no excuse for finding a fairly gentle incline difficult. But we'd walked the thick end of twenty miles already with heavy packs, in conditions so bad it had taken us nearly eight hours to get this far; and the wind, which had been at our backs or at least from the side all day, was now blowing more or less directly in our faces. It was therefore a pair of weary men who toiled that mile in near darkness up the slope.

Near the top something very bizarre happened.

Immersed as we were in our world of rain and wind, we were astonished to hear what sounded like the noise of an engine approaching, something mechanised and therefore human. This absurd idea had just sufficient time to register when first one brightly lit railway carriage, then another, swung into view not twenty yards from where we stood, gaping. There were people looking out of the windows.

Of course it's only to be expected that where there is a railway, trains will from time to time run along it, but in the face of this apparition I couldn't have been more surprised if we'd come across, say, a fruit and veg stall.

Soon the track ran under the railway line in the direction of Loch Ossian, so we stayed on the west side, where a footpath could just be traced, chiefly because its flooded ruts reflected the faint glimmer in the sky. This wasn't much better than the uphill slog. It was flat, but impossible underfoot. We had a torch, but lacked entirely the will to stop and fish it out. Tired of stumbling in the dark, we scrambled up the embankment onto the railway.

The mile or so to Corrour station was a long and bitter struggle. To progress against the wind mere walking wasn’t enough. You had to lean forward into it at the same time in a sort of stumbling plod, over an arrangement of concrete sleepers exactly calculated to the distance least suited for the human pace. God knows how Hector found it with his long legs. I kept thinking, A train could come and we’d never see it, but staggered onwards anyway, too tired to do anything but look at the ground. And to think I'd ambled along this very same piece of track in the other direction the previous summer to climb Beinn na Lap.

At length a light appeared in the distance which could only be Corrour. New strength flooded into my legs. Presently, and with gratitude, we arrived at that bleak place.

The first thing was to find shelter. I had a feeling that there was a shed which served as a waiting room on one of the platforms. We soon found it and crowded into its narrow confines. Somewhere right in the bottom of our sacks we had dry clothes, so we took off all our wet ones and put them on.

“There’s some Old Muckspreader left”, Hector said. “Want some?”

“Christ. Give it here. Quick.”

Outside the weather battered at the hut. Leaning down by the window to put something in my rucksack, I was surprised to feel spray on my face.

“Bloody hell, Hec. Come here a minute.”

Spray was being forced through the tiny gap between glass and putty with sufficient strength to carry eighteen inches into the room.  It was some storm.  

Hector now volunteered to go out and try to discover what time the various trains were. The man who lived in the house nearby might no longer be the station master, but he'd surely know, and perhaps wouldn't mind being asked. If there was another train northbound, we might still get a drink in Spean Bridge before the London train came along.

The side of the hut facing the house was in the lee of the wind, so I went outside and stood close against the wall as Hector went off up the platform. It would be wrong to say the wind merely blew. It roared. And it roared not because it had something to blow through, a tree for example. It roared on its own account. I had the impression that, rather than disparate currents of air darting north east, all the air in the sky had decided to go as one, and what you could hear was the whole sky moving as a block.

Standing there in the dark with this absolute wind roaring by was a moving experience. Yet in one of those striking juxtapositions between the profoundly mysterious and the utterly banal which give life its appealing flavour, looking out from the my shelter to the light which shone from the bedroom window of the house opposite, I could see that its occupant had put up a poster of the pop group "Bros". Difficult to know what response to make to this evidence of trash culture's ability to penetrate so far into the Scottish hinterland.

Ten minutes later Hector came back.

"No one came out at first", he said. "Then a girl came. Perhaps it's her picture in the window. We went into the living room where this old bloke - "

"That'd be the ex-station master".

"- and his wife were sitting. The woman said what time the train was, but the bloke just sat there. Didn't look up. She said, 'I told you I thought I heard someone knocking'. It was very strange. Like something out of a Scottish Eugene O’Neill."

"What a life for the girl, out here".

Another northbound train was due in twenty minutes, but the appointed time came and went with us sometimes out on the platform, and sometimes pacing up and down in the hut to keep warm, but with no sign of a train; and it hardly seemed reasonable to expect one given the weather. I began to wonder what we'd do if the train didn't come at all.

Then once when we were in the hut, Hector said, "What does this do?"

A telephone hung on the wall, and a sign said LIFT RECEIVER. In a fit of skittishness he picked it up.

"Oh hello", he said, and at first I thought he was winding me up; but it turned out that the telephone was connected to the signalman at Rannoch ten miles away down the line.

“The train’s running late", Hector said, putting the phone down. "It’s just left Rannoch and’ll be here soon. Apparently.”

By now there wasn't enough time to refuel at Spean Bridge, but it'd be warmer on the train, and less windy in the valley than at Corrour, so we took our rucksacks out onto the platform and waited.

The night was impenetrably dark, and for a long time nothing happened. We strained our eyes to the south east. Then it was as if a minor but powerful sun had risen on the horizon, for along the line in the direction of Rannoch a semicircle of light grew from the ground, shooting twin gleams like meteorites towards us along the tracks. The train.

Moreover when it drew into the station it proved to be a modern two carriage affair with push button doors, so that when these had swished shut behind us we were cocooned in that air-conditioned ease I'd so envied two hours previously toiling up from Loch Treig. As if the contrast from the climate outside wasn't disorientating enough, we now had the peculiar feeling of passing down the same line and looking out - of course you couldn't see anything - just as we'd previously looked in. There wasn't the slightest sensation in the gentle rocking motion of the train that beyond the confines of its metal and glass the elements had come off their hinges.

When we got back to London I scoured the papers for news of the Wimbledon boys. Nothing.  They probably survived. The same weekend a railway bridge at Inverness was washed away, cutting off the entire northern network to Wick and Kyle.

CONIVAL

BEN MORE ASSYNT

Wednesday 17th August 1988

BEINN BHEOIL

Sunday 21st August 1988

BEINN NA LAP

Monday 22nd August 1988

In July, at a lunchtime concert in St John's Smith Square, the Playgroup, a chamber ensemble I'd helped to found at College, played its last concert.  We did the Stravinsky Octet in front of three American tourists and a dog.  I knew even then it was going to be the last conducting I did for a long time.  More than anything else I wanted to compose, and though it was enormous fun, exciting, gratifying to the ego and much harder than it looked, conducting would have to go.

The Octet’s a hard piece to do, but the only thing I was nervous about beforehand was whether Ruth, the vicar's daughter, was going to turn up. 

To avoid hurting Alison's feelings, our relationship had been clandestine.  The night we did the performance of Il Matrimonio Segreto I had the strange experience of standing within six feet of Ruth, Alison and Ellen in the downstairs bar of The Angel, Marylebone High Street.  Ruth knew about them, but they hadn't a clue about her.  Secretly I was rather pleased by this gathering.  For perhaps the only time in my life I felt like a genuine Lothario.  I told Ruth that everything would be different after term ended; and in a way it was.

A few days later Alison left for France and her job on my brother's campsite.  I went round to see her off.  We stood in the street outside her flat and said goodbye.  Al was deeply upset.      "Do you think you'll ever go out with me again?", she asked.

I didn’t have the courage to give her the honest answer she deserved.  She went off carrying her enormous blue rucksack, tears streaming down her face.

When term ended, Ruth began to be difficult to get hold of on the phone.  I never really found out what changed for her.  Perhaps seeing Helen in the flesh brought home the stubbornness of our attachment, even if it was off rather than on at the moment.  She didn't want to be part of any triangle.  I saw her a few days before the St John's concert, and she'd said she'd come.  But when we all took a bow at the end of the piece, the audience was small enough for me to see she wasn't there. 

I went home on the tube thinking, That's it.  College is over.  Ruth's over too. 

After the concert there were a few days to kill before going up to Assynt with my parents.  Not enough time to look for work.  Anyway I had an interview in a fortnight for the post of Assistant Orchestra Manager at the Guildhall School of Music.  This job would save me, if I got it: I'd be working somewhere music was being made, and I'd have the holidays to compose in.

Ruth didn't answer my calls, and I was too proud to persist for long.  But not too proud to write her a letter instead.  The gist of it was that I loved her, which might have been true, and that I didn't want to see her if she was going to mess me about.

Which probably wasn’t, pathetically enough.

I posted it a few days before going on holiday, and every time the phone rang I hoped it was her.  But it never was.

Another train journey from hell.  It was a Friday night, and the open carriage was full.  I couldn't afford a sleeper.  Across the aisle were two Scots boys, working on building sites in London during the week and going home to Inverness at weekends.  Chancellor Lawson's eponymous boom had reached its peak, and the housing market had gone through the roof.  People were buying cupboards for crazy money, and the building trade was drawing in labour from far and wide.

The two lads had a carrier bag bursting with cans of lager.  Eighteen of them.  I counted.  They played cards and drank until far into the night, when the tide of beer overcame them and they slumped down on the table amidst a mess of slops and dog ends.  They were decent blokes, and I looked at them fondly as they snored, feeling a certain detachment at being the last one awake.  By now I thought myself something of a veteran of the night train.

Next morning as we were pulling out of Aviemore one of them offered me the last can.  I drank it gratefully.  Beer for breakfast couldn't possibly make me feel any worse.

Although my Dad loved mountains, I think his passion was sailing.  In July he and Mum spent a week aboard the boat Martin had worked on cruising round the Western Isles.  When they met me off the train at Lairg they were brown as berries already, and full of their various adventures.  Mart was still working in Devon but the owner had skippered, and Ed, a friend of Martin's, had cooked.  They'd seen a sea eagle, and Dad had climbed part of the way up Hallival on Rhum at night to see the shearwaters at their nests.

In Assynt they'd rented a house by the sea.  There were always birds to look at in the bay, and it was enough just to sit there by the front window reading and sometimes reaching for the binoculars.  Dad had retired now, and it suited him.  He'd always hated having to work.  He hadn't quite given up mountaineering, but at 65 there wasn't much left in him.

Although we got on well, it didn't do any harm to spend some time apart.  One day I climbed Quinag from end to end, something I'd always wanted to do; another day I went fishing a long way up into the hills, and returned after dark having caught twenty-two trout, all on the fly.  Time passed quietly.

The previous year Mum had found a rare plant, Diapensia Lapponica, on a hill top near Inchnadamph.  She'd written to the British Museum, and they'd told her to go back again and take a photograph of it.  On the Wednesday we decided that I'd climb Ben More Assynt and they'd go and look for Diapensia again.

They dropped me at the Inchnadamph Hotel in mid-morning.  I walked up a Land Rover track, past a big house on the left and various estate workers cottages where dogs barked.  A peculiar day, overcast and still; the weather seemed to be coming from the east.

The valley ahead was rich in associations.  When we first went to Assynt in the sixties there’d been more than one expedition to visit its caves and swallow holes, and once a picnic by the stream, with blue dragonflies darting about.  My brother and I were coming to the end of the stage where we were bought identical clothes, but that day we both wore reddish shirts with a criss-cross pattern that close-to resembled diced carrots.  I had an arm in plaster, broken playing football, and Mum cautioned me for scrambling about on the rocks.  Coming back down, Rory, who was ahead, peered over a rocky lip and saw, or said he saw, The Biggest Fish Ever in the pool below; but by the time we arrived it had gone.  His feet always hurt him, and at the end of the day he hobbled along the path in the late afternoon sun, face contorted with misery and bad temper.

A mile up the path a mile a stream came down from the left, and ran under the track in three stone culverts.  I leant down and drank from cupped hands.  Another time, six years before, I'd fished the lochs which were the source of this stream high on the moor, realising in the evening that I’d left my knife behind up there.  The following day I had been due to pick Helen up from Lairg.  Dad lent me the car, and on the way south I stopped to retrieve the knife.  I was twenty four then, and remember few occasions of physical effort so easy and joyful as that morning's jog, three miles up and three miles back.

On the far side of the stream a shoulder lifted steadily east, splitting the side and main valleys.  I left the track, climbed a fence, and in five minutes was forging upwards through thick heather and bog-myrtle.  A faint drizzle came and went.  After a few hundred feet the rising moorland gave way to a waste of big stones, limestone I thought, across which I picked a way, perspiring.  It was the kind of place you might see a fox.  In three quarters of an hour I came up a steep rocky slope to a plateau.  On the far side Conival stood up like a slice of cake gone wrong, its twisted layers exposed, as if the cook had opened the oven door once too often.

I soon came to the lip of a shallow coire, a strange green place amongst all those stones, where a minute stream idled among grass and mosses.  I felt exuberantly fit, and scorning the lost height, headed straight across the coire for the foot of the summit ridge, rising from the far side half a mile distant.

Seen from the main road, Conival looks as if it must be a massive mountain, throwing down a steep western front to the moor; but from the bealach to the north it's a slender hill, and I remember the top as narrow and almost sensational, with a steep drop down to the southwest.  A strange hill geographically: some of it must be limestone, but the last few hundred feet were almost sandy underfoot, rather like the top of Ben More Coigeach.  I'd heard of the Moine Thrust, but knew no more than the name, and if I'd known that Conival sits in the middle of the so-called Assynt Window, where the surface rocks have been pushed back to reveal the strata underneath, I might have looked about with more understanding.  As it was I just knew that it was peculiar. 

From the top there was a spectacular and curious view.  To the south Quinag and the Coigeach hills stood out sharply, but appearing at a remove as if seen through a gauze veil: the weather looking somehow as if it had been recycled, had been across once and was now coming back again, mangled slightly, the sky sheeted across with curiously twisted grey clouds.  Behind Canisp, the sugar loaf end of Suilven poked out.  In between the mountains lay a vast acreage of empty moorland, cut by the great sheet of Loch Assynt and dotted with tiny lochans.  Over twenty years of holidays I'd fished nearly every piece of water visible, and knew this tract of land almost intimately.  I sought out the hill where my parents were looking for their plant, but though I stared till my eyes watered I couldn't see them.

            The other side was mostly new country.  In the distance lay the Loch Merkland road: a few days earlier I'd stood by the roadside, head buzzing from a sleepless night on the train and the breakfast beer, astonished by the depth of the silence and blood roaring in my ears.  On this side of the road the eye withdrew across another waste of peat bog and water to the long limestone ridge at whose centre I stood, rearing up in a ten mile twisting crest, thrusting steep crags out at the scarp face and beetling over narrow coires and green tarns. 

From Conival a high spur ran east to Ben More Assynt.  I looked at this mountain with interest: it was invisible from the Assynt road because Conival was in the way, and although it was the biggest hill in the area I'd never seen it before.  In all the years we'd come to Assynt, we'd never thought to climb it.  Too far for boyish legs perhaps.  It was a three cornered mountain, almost elegant, up whose southern arm cotton wool clouds were creeping.  I couldn't account for this: there wasn't a breath of wind.

Eyeing the progress of these clouds I shouldered the rucksack and set off down the ridge, still chewing the last bits of my lunch.  Ben More would be in mist before long, and I'd better hurry.

At the stony bealach I met two Scotsmen coming the other way.

"Are you the person who's arranged to meet someone on top", one said, nodding at the summit of Ben More, where a figure was just visible by the cairn.

I shook my head.

"He's arranged to meet someone on top of Ben More, but at no particular time."

This was strange, we agreed.  When I arrived panting at the cairn ten minutes later the man had gone.  There were in fact two cairns, so I went to both just to be on the safe side.

The elegant thing now would be to walk down the long southern ridge, and out to the road by Loch Ailsh; I wished I'd thought of it before I set out.  My parents wouldn’t have minded the detour to pick me up.  As it was I’d have to climb back over the shoulder of Conival.  Scraps of mist blew over the rocky summit.  I went back down to the bealach and then struggled up almost to the top of Conival again before bearing left and then down the south ridge.

This looked fairly steep on the map.  Later, when I was better at judging these things, I'd probably have persevered with it a bit longer; but some sections of the ridge were awkward and a way around them had to be found; I started to find the uncertainty a bit irksome.  Perhaps it’d be easier to come off the side.  The coire between Ben More and Conival was filling with mist, but the Traligill flank was still clear, and soon an obvious gully presented itself.  I started to go precariously down.

This wasn't much better; in fact it was soon a lot worse.  The gully was full of scree, and wavered about between shattered ramparts of rotting and vegetated stone.  You couldn't see from above how broken the ground was, and once I reached a dead end and had to climb back uphill to look for another gully to the right.  A light drizzle began to fall, and I sweated under my waterproof. 

In this second gully an astonishing plant grew out of the scree, an erect fleshy green prong close on a foot high.  Rare plants being on my mind that day, I wondered whether I'd made some fabulous discovery, and looked at it more closely than usual.  Mum would know what it was. 

After that things became a little easier.  I came down to flattish ground by the watershed, and set off west down the upper Traligill valley.  The rain stopped.  I went across the flat table of moorland to where the Gillaroo loch path came in from the left.  This was a loch I hadn’t fished.  Apparently the margins were so weedy it wasn't worth poaching: you really had to hire the boat.  There were supposed to be big trout in it though.  I could imagine sitting there on the water of a summer evening, beating off the midges, with monster fish sucking gnats from the surface of a glassy calm.

Where the path crossed the river, just upstream of where it went underground, an iron sign stood by the streamside, warning perhaps of the hazards of venturing indiscriminately into the caves and sink holes nearby.  I stood for a moment contemplating this sign.  It had been there when we first went up the Traligill all those years ago.  Although I'd been coming back to Assynt year after year, I hadn't been up here for a long time; and it occurred to me now that in the intervening period a line had been crossed between childhood and adulthood: the sign had acquired a nostalgic patina.  Aged twenty nine this realisation was perhaps overdue.  Nevertheless I stood there a while, thinking.  Ruth, Helen, music, work, life.  The usual things.

I walked back down the track, past the point where I'd struck up onto the moor in the morning.  The air had a damp autumnal feel.  It was after all nearly September. 

At Inchnadamph Mum and Dad were waiting for me.  I put my rucksack in the back of the car, and sat forward between the front seats as we drove home, telling them about my day and hearing about theirs.  They hadn't found Diapensia.  They'd been to the same spot, and quartered the ground and still not found it.  Someone had built a cairn up there.

This reminded me of my plant.  After some suitable commiseration, their failure requiring a decent period of mourning, I did what I could to describe its exotic splendour.

"Oh, it's probably rose root", Mum said.  "Fairly common."

We looked at the book when we got back, and she was right.  Practically a weed, in fact. 

They dropped me off at Dalwhinnie on their way south the following Saturday.  I had a rucksack stuffed with food and clothing for my expedition, and a suitcase with various extraneous things in it which would have to be dumped somewhere. We stopped outside a decrepit looking Hotel called the Caledonian or some such, built in a kind of 1930s Scots municipal style.  I went into the lobby, which was filled with the smell of bad cooking.  The man behind the desk kindly agreed to take my suitcase.  I said I'd be back for it next Thursday. 

A coach was arriving as I walked out across the forecourt, full of elderly tourists.  The look on their faces at the sight of the peeling facade was both funny and pitiable.  A brochure somewhere had trumpeted plus, lunch at the Caledonian Hotel, and this was all it was.  Hard not to feel sorry for them.

We parted company at the station, where the track to Loch Ericht began.  My parents looked as concerned about me as I was about them.  Each time you say goodbye to someone you love it's a small pre-figuration of your final separation.  Most times you hardly think about it.  As my parents got older I found myself thinking about it more and more.  When they drove off I stood for a while and watched the car, with the white dinghy trailing behind, until it was out of sight.

I crossed the railway line and walked along a Land Rover track, measuring the weight of the rucksack with my thumbs under the straps.  Presently Loch Ericht came into view, striped with sunshine and squalls, lying narrow between steep hills.  The track ran a little back from the shore, and sometimes quite high above it.  After the first mile or so there was a fence with a plantation beyond, and from then on there were always trees on the left or right, or both.

I put my head down and went briskly along, anxious about the bothy.  By now the stalking season was well under way, and it might be locked, or in use by the estate.  I'd tried repeatedly to phone the Estate Office from the phone box on the seafront, but no one ever answered.  If I couldn't stay there I should just have enough daylight to reach another hut marked on the map further down the River Pattack.

An hour later the view across the loch had begun to get monotonous, interminable bare hillsides dotted here and there with a few sheep and an occasional clump of scrub.  By the time a car went by, presumably going to Ben Alder Lodge, I was fed up and wished I could have had a lift.

About 3 o'clock the track forked at last, and I went uphill away from the loch.  The Lodge stood amongst trees by the water's edge below, a substantial-looking building with smoke rising from the chimneys.  It all looked very homely, and I wished I was staying there instead.

Shortly after that rain began to fall, and once I came out on to the open moor the wind caught it and sent it slashing into my face.  Ahead Loch Pattack gleamed dully under low cloud.  To the southwest stretched a bleak vista of bog, hemmed in on the far side by drab hillsides; the tops were hidden in the mist.  The bothy was over there somewhere.

The last few miles were trying.  The wind was blowing directly against me, and I pulled my hood up to keep out the rain, stumbling along head bent, eyeing the next few yards of wet bog.  Mum had lent me her waterproof trousers, but they were much too short, and after a while water began running down into my boots.  I tugged them down to half mast, which was drier, but brought the crotch to somewhere near my knees.  This required a revised gait, and I walked along like a man overtaken by the sudden onset of diahoerrea.

It was about 4 p.m. when I arrived.  In the big room I took off my wet things and hung them up over the fireplace.  Then I went round the other rooms.  No sign of anyone else. Nightfall seemed a long way away.  I got out The Brothers Karamazov.  Not a cheerful read at the best of times, and lying on a moth eaten mattress in a remote bothy while a gale batters the walls not the ideal place to enjoy it either.  There was nothing else to do though, and I made myself read until six, when it seemed OK to eat my sandwiches. 

       

After that I went to the doorway and looked out at the wet world.  Up the hill behind the hut a scattered herd of deer fed quietly: they seemed to have ignored my arrival, or perhaps not even noticed it.

I decided that I'd rattle around in the big room, and took all my stuff into one of the smaller ones at the side.  There I tried to get a fire going with an old oak stump and some heather roots someone had left.  I had about twenty matches.  I spent them carefully at first, then with increasing desperation and profligacy as the damp wood failed to light; for a brief minute a blaze flickered, and I imagined a different sort of evening altogether, firelit and warm; then it died again, and with the last few matches, eked grudgingly out, I never managed as much as a glimmer. 

Eventually the light began to fail, and at 9 p.m. I thought I could justifiably go to bed.  I unrolled my sleeping bag and laid it out on the floor with the head under the solitary window.  This was a piece of foolishness: the light from the window might keep me awake, but I also thought that if the window was invisible from my bed, I'd be less prone to imagine ghoulies peering in at me.

Some hope.

Sleep was impossible.  I was cold, and the floor was hard and unyielding; but it was the noises that kept me awake.

The wind slammed into the walls of the hut, howling in the chimney and setting the door flapping and squeaking on its hinges; after half an hour I got up and put a loose brick against it.  Rain spattered the window.  In the intervals when there was a lull in the wind, I found I could hear other minor noises, rustlings and scratchings which sounded furtively from all around.

Frankly, I was afraid; though not too afraid to lie there in the half-dark, thinking about my fear.  Of course it was irrational: I didn't suppose for a moment that some dreadful monster was going to come bursting through the door.  Hard to put my finger on it, but scared I was.  It's like the soundtrack of a low-budget horror movie, I thought; but this thought, an ironic late twentieth-century sort of thought, didn't make matters any better.  I also thought, If I lie here terrified for long enough I'm bound to get bored and go to sleep.  But I didn't.  I lay there for a very long time shivering in my sleeping bag, and it was quite dark when the rustlings and scratchings became too much for me, and I reached carefully out for the torch.

I’d put my food bag on an old chair by the window, and every minute or so a particularly violent commotion was going on there.  I eased myself up on one elbow, and waited for the noise to come again.  It came.  I swallowed hard, and switched on the beam.

A mouse.  A black-eyed mouse sitting quite unconcerned by the light, whiskers twitching.

Of course I knew it was probably mice.  The place must have been infested with them.  I got up and hung the bag from a nail, feeling a bit better.  At least it wasn't rats; or if it was, I hadn't seen them.

That I now had an explanation for the noises I could hear was some comfort, and even though I'd still have paid a large sum of money to have been transported to a warm bed in a familiar house, in the end I must have relaxed enough to sleep because I remember waking to find that it was 6.30 a.m., daylight outside, and thought, Thank God it's morning; now I can get out of this fucking hell-hole.  I didn't have to get dressed, because I was already wearing the majority of my clothes.  I packed up, ate a piece of Christmas cake and an apple, then set out with a feeling of profound relief.

Somewhat surprisingly it had the makings of a fine day.  Clouds were blowing off Beinn Bheoil and Ben Alder, and the Lancet Edge was clear.  I'd hardly taken all this in when I realised that the deer I'd seen the previous night had come down the hillside and were feeding all around the hut; they sprang up now from peat-hags and hollows and bounded away across the bog.  A great sight to emerge into the middle of the herd, the nearest animals only yards away.

On the far side of the burn I followed the path upstream for a mile, and then up the gently rising ground towards the foot of Beinn Bheoil.  I'd mentally left open the option of walking directly to Loch Ossian over the Bealach Dubh, but my legs didn't feel so bad, and the weather was clearing all the time.  It took me an hour to walk up into the coire between Beinn Bheoil and Ben Alder, a deep hanging valley a mile or so wide with a beautiful narrow loch in the bottom.  I left the rucksack by the lochside, and plodded up the steep bank to the bealach between Beinn Bheoil and Sron Choire na-h Iolaire. 

From the stony plateau at the top of the hill there was a tremendous view down to Loch Ericht and across to Rannoch.  On the far shore were some buildings which must be Coire Bhachdaidh Lodge, a very remote place.  On the west side you looked over into the Garbh Coire of Ben Alder, where there was still snow, and to the right the Leachas and the Lancet Edge stood clearly marked in sunshine and shadow.  I must have lingered on the summit because it was 10.30 before I started back down again.

Here began a rather long plod.  First I toiled up the back of the coire to the Ben Alder bealach.  This part of my map had been eroded on the expedition with Hector the previous spring and was no use, but I knew that to get to Loch Ossian I'd have to cross the Bealach Cumhann, three or four miles away round Ben Alder's massive southern flank.  This way went across a steep hillside seamed with gullies, wearying to the ankles.  Once I saw a large herd of deer, running, way above on the edge of the summit plateau.  There was no sign of any stalkers.

By 1 o'clock I’d reached the Bealach Cumhainn and dropped down into to the Labhair glen beyond.  The burn was full, and I wasn’t going to get across dry shod.  I stood weighing up the options.  Wet boots.  Wet trainers.  Or wet feet.  Wet trainers would be best now, but I’d need something to wear round the Youth Hostel.  It’d have to be wet feet.  This was a painful mistake.  The stream was icy cold and the stones agonisingly sharp underfoot, all the more so under the weight of a heavy sack.  I sat on the far bank eating more Christmas cake and nursing my lacerations.

Later on at the Hostel there were blisters to count too.  But the sheer luxury of a bed to lie on and the urban reassurance of other people coming and going were antidote enough after last night's terrors.  After dinner I read The Brothers until my head drooped over the page, and hobbled away to bed.

The Hostel was a wooden building surrounded by pine trees on a small promontory at the head of Loch Ossian.  At one time it had been a boat house.  There was a common room and kitchen, off which led the men's dormitory; the women's was on the other side of a small entrance hall.  Above a wood-burning stove in the centre of the common room hung an ingenious arrangement of pulleys, ropes and bars for drying wet clothes.  Although it was nominally summer, the stove seemed to be burning most of the time, so what with the rows of wet socks hanging down from the rack, the temperature and humidity wouldn't have disgraced the Palm House at Kew.

In the morning I went round to the warden’s hut to pay.  He was a short, rather taciturn man in his fifties with a dry, pleasant Yorkshire accent.  I'd been worried about the stalking, and asked him which hills would be OK to climb.  He said I could try Beinn na Lap.  He wasn't overly forthcoming.

I put a minimum of belongings in the rucksack and set out across the moor towards the house at Lubnaclach, actually in the opposite direction to Beinn na Lap; however if I went straight for the hill I'd be down by lunchtime with nothing to do for the rest of the day.  On the path I passed three people coming the other way.  Lubnaclach, built to house the supervisor of the railway construction the best part of a century ago, stood a couple of hundred yards away from the line, and looked firmly shuttered. 

At the railway I turned north and walked along the track towards Corrour, stepping from sleeper to sleeper with my eyes on the ground.  Beinn na Lap was a long inclined hill about four miles away.  The day was warm and I fell into a sort of torpor, thinking about Ruth and Helen.  I had no idea whether I loved either of them.  Had Ruth have replied to my letter yet?  Once a horn sounded loud behind me and a track laying vehicle passed.  I sat down on a rail and ate a sandwich.  Midges ate me.           

At the station there was no sign of life other than the dull thudding of the generator.  A little way beyond, I left the railway line and crossed a tiresome section of bog to the foot of Beinn na Lap.  Although not steep, the slope was a struggle for tired legs.  I looked round and contemplated the vista more than usual.  Not an inspiring hill to climb, I thought.  And not for the first time found myself wondering whether the Munros weren't a complete waste of time.  It was a beautiful day, and out of all the dozens of wonderful mountains in Scotland, here I was plodding up this dreary slab of moor.  Was there even the slightest element of enjoyment involved?

I got to the top about lunchtime, and felt ashamed of my doubts.  There was a thin and broken layer of cloud at about five thousand feet, beneath which literally hundreds of mountains stood in sunshine.  I'd brought up a camera, and took seven photographs in an arc of almost 360 degrees.  It wasn't a terribly good camera, but even if it had been a photograph could never have done justice to the view.  In fact even looking couldn't do it justice, human vision being narrow as it is: birds eyes were wanted, eyes on the side of your head to see forwards and backwards and all around.

Beyond the immediate ring of hills, Ben Alder and its satellites, the Grey Coires and Leum Uilleam, you could see quite clearly the Bridge of Orchy hills and the Black Mount, with the Buchaille poking its head above the col between Leum Uilleam and Beinn a'Bhric, and the other Glen Coe giants beside; and looking along the Loch Treig trench, what I thought afterwards might be the South Glen Shiel ridge, way off in the distance.  Amongst all these hills lay mile upon mile of moor and water, brown and gleaming brightly in the afternoon sun.  I thought again, Scotland's a huge place. 

The conclusion seemed inescapable.  I'd never have seen all this if I hadn't bothered to climb Beinn na Lap, and I wouldn't have done that if it hadn't been a Munro.  Maybe there was something to be said for Munrosis after all.

When I'd looked at all this for a while I sat down on a rock and ate my lunch.  I hadn't carried any water up with me, and thought the stagnant looking pool just by the cairn worth risking.  After I'd had a drink I lay down and sunbathed; and might have dozed off altogether but for the enormous cleg perched on a stone a few feet away.  I've always hated clegs - much more irritating than midges - and it was only too easy to imagine that if I dropped off, this beast, and he was a monster an inch long, would lurch into the air, settle on some tender part of my anatomy and drink deep.  The thought of being preyed on whilst asleep was more than I could bear.

I contemplated trying to kill it, or going elsewhere; but peace had departed.  I went back down the hill, trotting down the southern slopes to the end of Loch Ossian and so back to the Hostel.

There were many Germans at Loch Ossian, amongst them now the three people I'd seen coming along from Lubnaclach in the morning.  We struck up a conversation.  It seemed that the Hostel was famous in Germany.  They'd come the previous day only to find it full, and the warden had directed them to an unlocked outhouse at Lubnaclach, where they'd spent the night.

In the evening one of the Germans ran in, and amidst an excited torrent of words I thought I heard him say mink.  We rushed outside.

One of his friends had been catching small trout on a worm fished from the bank.  This girl was now gutting the fish, and a mink had come to eat the offcuts.  It was a small creature, not much larger than a weasel, dark brown, somewhat mangy looking, with a myopic but distinctly vicious expression.  Having taken a morsel, it would dash off furtively, only to reappear a minute or so later for more. 

The warden had come out to watch.  The mink lived on an islet fifty yards offshore, he said, and it often came to the Hostel.

"It's a much maligned animal.  It plays quite happily with my cat."

He seemed genuinely pleased we'd seen it.

The plate finished, the mink advanced on the girl and sniffed calculatingly at her fingers.  Rather her than me.  The mink thought better of it, and ran off accompanied by much clicking of cameras.

Next day I wanted to do anything but climb.  My feet had holes in them and my legs were beyond strenuous effort.  I went to the warden for plasters, hoping that stalking on the hills would mean a day doing nothing.

"Stop the stalker's Land Rover when it comes along from the Lodge", he said.  "Ask them where you can go."

On cue the Land Rover appeared.  The driver, a mournful looking man in a fore and aft hat, said that only Beinn na Lap and the hills south of Ossian would be safe.  I'd climbed all these and was secretly rather relieved.

But when I went back inside the warden said, "Why don't you go and ask the pony man if you can watch the stalking?"

The Land Rover had gone now, leaving only a young man with John Lennon glasses and fair hair tied in a short pony tail rattling a bucket of nuts in front of a thuggish-looking white horse.  He said I could come with him.  I rushed back to get my things.

We walked up the track to the station together.  It was a colder and more blustery day than Monday.  Once the pony man, Stefan, stopped and picked up a tiny lizard that lay on the path.  It looked absolutely lifeless, but he said it just needed warming up.  Sure enough it lay in his hand for a minute, then flickered into motion.  He put it into the heather, where it would be out of the wind. 

At the station the Land Rover stood empty.  We negotiated the railway line and crossed the moor beyond to the lower slopes of Beinn a'Bhric.  Stefan said that the pony, Chiarain, named after the loch on the other side of the mountain, could get up the steep ridge on the left of the coire, but not down it with a beast on its back.  We plodded up the other ridge.

"You can put your rucksack on the horse if you like", Stefan said.

I shook my head.

"Doesn't seem fair."

Stefan had worked at Corrour Lodge for the past six summers.  At other times of the year he signed on, or, when he could get the work, taught canoeing and nordic skiing.  His father was a Pole who had come to Scotland during the war and married a Scotswoman.  I found him a fascinating bloke to talk to.  He was full of lore about Scotland's Polish connections.  I hadn't known that Bonnie Prince Charlie's mother was a Polish countess, nor that there were Poles among the Victorian tailors responsible for reinventing the tartans.  It was evident that he had extensive climbing experience in Scotland and abroad, at a daunting standard.  Despite this he was actually rather shy: there was no sense at all in which he seemed to be showing off or talking too much.

Near the summit of Beinn a'Bhric we stopped in a small hollow and Stefan tied the pony to a boulder.

"We have to wait until we hear the shot", he said.  "They'll be in the coire on the Blackwater side.  Then we take the pony down to fetch the beast."

We sat for a while and drank tea from his flask, while mist swirled around us and Chiaran tried to drag his boulder within reach of our sandwiches.  I thought, This is a great adventure.

At 1 p.m. Stefan said, "We'll go for a spy."

Beneath the mist we could see down into a rounded coire seamed with peat hags, which ran down to the Blackwater reservoir.  Rannoch Moor lay stretched out before us to the west, and the cone of the Buchaille, rearing out from behind an intervening hill, looked only a mile or two away.  A magnificent sight; but Stefan had his binoculars pointing down into the coire.  It was full of feeding deer, but there was no sign of the stalkers so we went back up the hill.

Shortly afterwards there were several shots. 

Stefan said, "Grouse shooting on the Blackwater flats."

We were discussing the intricacies of lute-making, about which he knew a surprising amount, when one of the other men who had been in the Land Rover appeared.  They'd shot a beast about twenty minutes previously; we hadn't heard it.  We went down into the coire with the pony, where there was a scene of almost pagan simplicity and brutality.

There were four people round the stag, which already looked very dead, its eyes glazing over as if it had rather lost interest in events.  The stalker Derek - an incongruously English name, I thought - had gralloched it, and the innards, surprisingly white and bloodless, lay at a distance in the heather.  The man who had shot it, aged about fifty, with an inbred face and startlingly pale eyes, was being congratulated by a middle aged woman, presumably his wife, every inch the South Kensington type in Barbour jacket, wellies and headscarf.  A girl with a guileless expression and bad acne, apparently the cook, stood a little further off.  These last two had been onlookers from the bealach with the man who had alerted Stefan and myself, a younger man who wore the ubiquitous Barbour and looked out sternly from beneath a tweed cap.  They were the kind of people who said hice instead of house.

I say gararge rather than garidge myself, but nevertheless I hated them on sight.

Feeling somewhat surplus to requirements, I hovered round the fringes of this group, taking photographs as much of the people as of the beast, and feeling irrationally as if the whole thing was so sordid and almost criminal that they must surely turn on me and tear the film from the camera.  To give credit where due, the sides of the coire looked absolutely bare, and how they'd got down without disturbing the deer I've no idea.

Getting the stag on to the pony proved a complex operation.  Chiarain had once been pricked accidentally by antlers and was afraid of them, so Derek took off his jacket and put it over the horse's head.  Then Stefan held Chiarain while Derek and the elder South Ken type lifted the stag onto the horse.  There was then much fastening of straps and buckles.  It was like something out of a bestial Sadian nightmare.  A great stream of gore loosened from some internal reservoir cascaded out of the stag's slit belly.  Not a particularly pleasant sight.

Stefan and I took the pony back up to the bealach.  She seemed to go faster with the load than without.  We returned down the gentle slope of Beinn a'Bhric, looking along the great rift of Loch Treig.  As we came down to the station we heard another shot close by in the coire above.          

Stefan swore. 

"We'll have to go back", he said.

We left the stag by the Land Rover and went, in my case rather stiffly, up the path again.  At the lip of the coire we met the others.  Derek said the second stag was right at the back of the coire.  There was a brief consultation, then it was decided to fetch the beast next morning using a little all-terrain vehicle they apparently had.  We retraced our steps.

At the Land Rover the elder South Ken man shook my hand and said, "Thenks for your help".

This was kind, or at least polite, but mystifying too.  All I'd done was watch.  Stefan had offered to let me sleep on his floor on the way out to Dalwhinnie, so I said I'd probably bring my stuff round in the morning and then go off climbing somewhere.  I went back to the Hostel.  The others got in the Land Rover and drove off in the direction of the Lodge, four miles away at the other end of the loch.

Stefan appeared in trainers and shorts and ran after them.  He'd said he was a fitness fanatic, but my jaw dropped just the same.

The following morning there was a flurry of excitement because two Swiss lads had set out for Ben Alder Cottage the previous afternoon and hadn't come back.  The consensus was that they'd probably set out with no sleeping bags or cooking stuff, and were inadequately equipped even for walking.  The warden had somehow summoned the RAF and after breakfast a massive yellow helicopter appeared chugging along the loch towards the Hostel.  We all piled out of the Hut to watch, and while it hovered a few feet above the bog a man in a flying suit and 1940s-vintage moustache - fortunately my Dad had got rid of his long ago - jumped down to confer with the warden, who gestured vigorously in the direction of Ben Alder.  Presently the man got back in and the helicopter flew off.

In the hut I deliberated what to do.  What with the state of my feet and the tiredness in my legs, climbing was definitely out.  Besides, all the hills within reasonable walking distance were either out of bounds because of the stalking, or ones I'd climbed already. 

Why then even contemplate going on the warden's run?  Perhaps I felt that because of recent strenuous days I'd be super-fit; whereas actually I was just super-tired.  Perhaps it was just the old Adam rearing up at the sight of a challenge.  At any rate, in training shoes my feet didn't hurt and it'd be a change to go from A to B in comfort rather than in pain.

The run was a circuit of the loch seven and a half miles long.  If you did it in less than an hour you were allowed to write your name on the roll of honour by the sink in the common room.  Some 400-odd people from all over the world had done so.  In the "Comments" column runners had written things like "first Australian", "first left-handed Belgian", and so on.

We set off at 10 o'clock.  I'd given my camera to a girl for a commemorative finishing photograph.  Four of us ran - a tall German boy aged about 20, a lanky Dutchman in his mid-thirties who had done the run before, the warden and myself.  He'd done the run so many times he knew how fast to go, and all you had to do to beat the hour was stay ahead of him.

We ran along the southern side.  Fairly shortly the Dutchman and German pulled away, and once we were into the trees disappeared from view.  Nearing the other end I found the warden's pace too slow and began to leave him behind.  By the time I reached the lodge I might as well have been running on my own.

Whatever my physical shortcomings, I found the mental effort required to keep going even harder.  Part of my mind kept saying, It's only a run; there's no point in doing it if you don't enjoy it; give up. And when I resisted that it said, Well at least stop for a bit.  To counter this I imagined that Ruth was at the finish willing me to make it round in time, an idea that required suspension of disbelief, but seemed to have the desired effect. 

On the far side of the loch I met the woman from Corrour station delivering the post.  She'd presumably called at the Lodge already, and was coming back along the northern shore.  As she held the gate open for me I thought, You could ask her for a lift; what more stylish way to arrive at the Hostel?  But I'd got to the point where it seemed more effort to stop than carry on.  I called out Hello and kept running.

Soon I came out of the trees and the Hostel came into sight on the opposite shore, the other two runners visible half a mile ahead.  This was the worst part: I'd drawn level with the Hostel, which now seemed only a stone's throw away, but still had to run round the end of the loch to get there.  To make matters worse I was wearing my watch and knew that the minutes were ticking away.  Keeping going was agony.

However everything comes to an end, and invigorated by the sight of the finish and the girl with the camera I fairly raced up the last hundred yards to the Hostel.  I'd done it in 58 minutes.  The warden came in with 30 seconds to spare, and the other two had finished in 52 and 56 minutes respectively.  When we'd finished puffing and blowing we wrote our names at the foot of the list.  I could think of nothing pertinent to say in the comments column, so wrote "First Nick Simpson", although since I didn't check whether there'd been a previous Nick Simpson this may not have been true.

After lunch I was at a loose end.  The day had brightened up a bit and I began to wonder how the stalkers had got on on Beinn a'Bhric.  Someone had given me some artificial skin, a liquid that was supposed to set into a solid, flexible membrane.  Do not use where skin is broken, read the bottle, which seemed to me to miss the point rather.  If your skin wasn’t broken, you wouldn’t be needing the stuff at all.  Gritting my teeth, I put some on my heels, where in fact there was no skin at all. 

The most dreadful and intense pain I've ever experienced.

I covered the bad bits with plasters donated by the warden, and with a feeling of resigned trepidation donned socks and boots.  I went up the path to the station, and then the same way as the previous day up the shoulder of Beinn a'Bhric, walking slowly out of caution, discomfort and fatigue.

There was no one in the near coire, and no deer either.  Towards the summit the mist came down and I couldn't find the exact hollow where I'd sat with Stefan and the pony.  I thought that if he'd been up there I'd have stumbled across him though, and that they must all have gone round to the Blackwater flats.  This was too far for me in my current state, so at about 5 p.m. I started back down the long ridge. 

It was the first time I'd ever climbed a mountain twice in consecutive days, and strolling circumspectly downhill I had a fine proprietorial feeling, as if it was my mountain.  Once under the mist you could look out at the whale-backed hills either side of Loch Ossian, at the loch itself, gunmetal grey, and at the dim grey outline of Ben Alder standing over the high cup of the Bealach Dubh.  I'd be walking out that way tomorrow.  A squall came, driving sheets of rain over the summit behind me.  I pulled my hood up and stood in the lee of a big boulder till it passed.  Then the sun came out, and as I went down the last few hundred feet above the station a rainbow arched across the eastern sky.  Strange to think I'd be home next day.

At the Hostel I packed up my things, said my goodbyes and left.  I walked along the side of the loch where the four of us had run that morning, boots dangling heavily from my rucksack and trainers easy on my feet.  In the wood before Corrour Lodge a blackbird sang.  The wind had dropped altogether and the air had a damp warm feeling.

I made several false starts at the Lodge before finding Stefan's quarters.  They were off a small courtyard in what had once presumably been stables, a rather gloomy series of rooms shared with the other gillies.  Stefan had just been canoeing on the loch and was almost unrecognisable in a blue tracksuit.

In the kitchen, Derek and three other gillies were just sitting down to eat.  Beer cans, bottles and glasses in various stages of emptiness littered the table.  I was introduced, contemplated and then found to be of only slight interest.  After dinner the gillies went away to get changed and washed, leaving Stefan, myself and another pony man, Ken. 

It emerged that Ken lived in a log cabin by the side of Loch Treig.  The estate had let him build it there.  He was explaining exactly where it was when suddenly a memory lit up in my mind.

I interrupted him.

"A couple of years ago, 1986 I think, I went back to London on the train, November, at night, and I remember looking out of the window and seeing a fire burning.  Might that have been you?"

"That was me", said Ken, surprised and smiling.  "I was building the cabin about then.  It was bloody cold."

There was something inscrutable about this, seeing those flames flickering - for five seconds? - as the train rattled by in the darkness, and then two years later meeting the man who lit them in a seedy kitchen at Corrour Lodge.

Ken was, he said, a mountain man.  He was from Derby originally, and had a broad midlands accent.  In the summer he worked for the estate, and at other times he signed on, though getting money out of the D.S.S. was hard.  He showed us photographs of his cabin, which looked amazingly well done. 

In the same film he had pictures of some remote lochans where he'd been camping.            "Bet you don't know where this is", he said.

I recognised them immediately as the lochs at the foot of Sgurr an Fhidleir in Wester Ross; I'd fished them myself. 

I saw he was disappointed that I'd known, and regretted showing off.

Stefan topped this by saying that in his wild youth he'd climbed Cul Mor, Cul Beg and Stac Pollaidh in one day.  I thought this was quite something, but couldn't quite see why anyone would want to do it.  But then there hadn't been much point in running round the loch either.

Stefan made dinner, a dish of onions, courgettes, noodles and kidney beans  which tasted wonderful after my recent dried meals.  The three of us drank beer and chatted.  The stalkers were all alcoholics, they said; unless you were really careful at Corrour there was nothing to do but drink.  The nearest bar was at the Kinlochrannoch Hotel, where Hector and I had been after we walked across the Moor, and Ken said in the evenings the gillies regularly drove to Corrour and caught the southbound train to Rannoch where they could get forty minutes' drinking in before the northbound train came along.  The warden went with them too.

"The warden was tried for murder once", said Stefan.

I was amazed.  Apparently he and a friend had been drinking, and there was an argument over a woman.  The friend had walked out and was never seen again.  This was in the middle of winter.  When the spring thaw came, the ice which shrouded the old pier melted, and the friend's body was discovered in the water.  The warden was tried and acquitted.

I said to Stefan, "D'you think he did it?"

"No", he said.  "Not capable of it.  The bloke was drunk and fell in the loch."

Then we turned to the ex-station master, who still lived in the house up at Corrour, even though the station wasn't manned any more.  Ken said that this man was at daggers drawn with the warden because of some argument or other.  I remembered now that whenever the station master came instead of his wife to deliver the post, the warden went inside his hut.

It seemed bizarre to me that two people living a mile apart in such a remote area, each the other's nearest neighbour, should have formed such a violent mutual dislike.

"In London you hardly ever speak to your neighbours", I said, unsure whether this was a good thing or not.  "I've barely exchanged a dozen words with the girl who lives in the flat beneath me.  Someone living a mile away might as well be on the moon."

Then we talked of mountains and our experiences on them.  Stefan told how one night he and a friend had been camping by Loch A'an high in the Cairngorms, when they'd been woken by what sounded like a woman singing, clear and calm.  Outside the tent was a bright light.  They lay in their sleeping bags too petrified to move.  Then the light faded and the singing stopped.  Stefan had no explanation.  My night at Culra seemed insignificant beside this, but I told them anyway; and from that it was a short step to the Loch Ericht bothy and the quite spurious story of how McCook, the former occupant, had hung himself.  This reminded me of the Swiss boys who were missing.  I told Stefan and Ken how the helicopter had come to look for them, and that at lunchtime they'd turned up looking shamefaced and bedraggled.  When they'd realised it was too late to walk back to Loch Ossian in daylight, they walked out instead to Rannoch, which I'd have thought was harder, and spent a miserable night shivering on the station platform until the first train of the day came along.

At 11 I said I'd like to go to bed, and kipped down on an old mattress in Stefan and Ken's room, a damp and distinctly grotty den which made me think there must be better ways of earning bad wages.  A generator throbbed next door, and I thought, I'm not going be able to get to sleep; but that was the last thought I remember.

The alarm went off at 6.  I tried not to wake the others, but Stefan got up too and saw me off.  We exchanged addresses.  I walked down through the trees, over the bridge where the River Ossian comes out of the loch, and then headed up the track by the Uisge Labhair.

There'd been heavy rain overnight, and crossing the flat ground before the first slope, where the river bounds down in a series of steps, I had to dance heavily about the bog to avoid a bootful.  The river was in spate and some of the side burns were difficult to cross.  I'd worked out that I should get to the Bealach Dubh about 9 a.m.  At the head of the valley I crossed the river and ploughed up a steep heathery slope to the stalker's path from the Bealach Cumhainn.  My last piece of climbing for a while, I thought.  Sad, but at the same time, Thank God.  From the Bealach Dubh it was an hour down to to the mouse-infested bothy, which looked just as desolate as it had the previous Saturday.

The stretch across the Pattack flats was dreary and took longer than I'd expected.  There were good views up the valley to Ben Alder and Sgor Iutharn, but I was walking away from them and after a while I stopped looking back.  I got down to Loch Ericht at 11, and threw myself down under a tree by the Land Rover track.  My feet were killing me, and I swapped boots for trainers.  I'd nearly finished all the food, but there was one piece of flapjack left, and I ate it sprawled on the grass, oblivious to the wetness seeping up into my breeches.

A mile short of the railway I overtook two other walkers in what was by now a steady drizzle.  Ahead you could see houses, and big lorries going north on the A9. 

I left the rucksack in the waiting room at the station.  A local youth sat staring morosely at the graffitti'd wall.  At the Caledonian Hotel I retrieved my suitcase and changed out of my smelly clothes in the lavatory of the Public Bar.  Then, feeling like a different person altogether, I bought a pint of lager, ordered fish and chips, and sat watching England bowl out Sri Lanka on the TV.  The place was deserted apart from myself and a young Glaswegian barman who offered me a cigarette and kept saying Nae Bother.  At 1.30, after the news, he switched over to Neighbours.

The train arrived just before 2 p.m.  Waiting at Stirling for the Edinburgh train, I saw the actor who plays the bloke with no teeth in Gregory's Girl.  He must have been doing something at the Festival.  Edinburgh was full of it, not surprisingly, and the station was heaving; in the crush I almost got on an Aberdeen train by mistake.  The London train left at 5.30, chock full as far as Berwick with people standing in the aisles, slightly emptier after that.  We arrived at King's Cross at 10.45 and I was home in half an hour.  Hard to believe I'd woken that morning at Corrour.

There was no letter from Ruth.  I hadn't really thought there would be; but you always wonder.

The following day I went for my interview at the Guildhall School of Music.  I did badly.  I got off to a bad start by making a joke about the College being difficult to find.  It was, and notoriously so, being buried in the bowels of the Barbican; but they must have been fed up with those kind of jokes.  They asked me what I'd do to discipline students who didn't turn up for rehearsals.  I had no idea.

I didn't get the job.  I went out and signed up with a temp agency instead.

A few days later my brother rang me. 

"I've given Alison the sack", he announced.  "She was useless.  She wouldn't wear the uniform.  She kept being late.  And after about ten minutes she was shacked up with another lad who's working for me."

I found that I minded this last piece of news much less than expected.  It made me feel less responsible for Alison's unhappiness.  And perhaps she wasn't that unhappy after all.