Great Gable is great, just like the guidebook said it would be. But up at the top of it there’s a waft of fluffy white cloud, just like they get up there on Everest. Inside the cloud it’s all clammy and romantic, rocks and boulders looming like sleepy trolls, rainwater dripping off all the little overhangs. And it’s easy! You just follow your nose past some little cairns, and here’s the top of Great Gable with its little rocky outcrop and its plaque commemorating the fellwalkers of the First World War.

You’re heading for the route down towards Beck Head. So now you turn half-right, that’s what the map tells you to do. The stony plateau doesn’t show any paths. But look, you’re passing a cairn. But then you notice another cairn a few metres away on the left. And another one on the right… Great Gable has cairns everywhere, which is just as helpful as having no cairns at all.

So you go back to the summit and start again, and this time you use the compass to get the correct direction. A few minutes later you’re at the corner of the plateau. The stones and rocks are a bit trodden on, so this does look like the right way. And the mapping on your phone thinks so too.

You work your way downhill, on the rather slippery rocks. And somehow – it’s actually a rule of Nature – the cloud on this side of the hill goes down a lot lower than it did when you were coming up...

Eventually, with greater experience, finding the way on hills gets to be almost instinctive. A couple of decades back, I headed onto the Glyder range in Snowdonia on a damp summer day. Cloud on the top, but many years of map-and-compass mean I can cope with that.

From Glyder Fawr, the big Glyder, the next bit is a little bit tricky. The stony plateau doesn’t show the path, and the continuing ridgeline is wide and flat. Expecting this, I already set the arrow on my compass into the necessary direction, just north of east. And sure enough I reached the familiar pile of huge, rounded boulders that’s the summit of Glyder Fach, the smaller Glyder.2

The next stage was going to need a little attention. Fortunately, the top of Glyder Fach is a place I’ve been many times before. I clamber off the rockpile and continue northeast, the compass bearing already set in advance. A couple of minutes, and the Cantilever rockpile emerges from the grey mist ahead. The Cantilever is a narrow rock suspended at one end like a diving board. And like a diving board, it usually has three or four people bouncing up and down on the unsuspended end. I pass to its left, following the tops of the steep drops leading down into grey cloud. Cloud which I know is obscuring a fabulous view down onto the A5. And in another couple of minutes, the next familiar landmark: the cluster of splintery rocks that’s the top of the Bristly Ridge.

The rocks of Bristly Ridge descend to the wide and important saddle at the base of Tryfan. The rock Bristly Ridge is sound and rough, and there are plenty of handholds and footholds. But in rain and wind I wasn’t fancying those airy moments. I headed to the easier way, the wide gully running down beside the ridge on its right. There’s a big, zigzag path, or rather multiple paths, their top marked by a sprawling cairn.

The cairn is slightly down from the top of the slope, and in the mist I passed above it without seeing it. Once I realised this, I turned left, down the slope, to meet the zigzaggy path now somewhere below me. At once I found a small sheep trod, and followed it down for a while. But the main path down here is a big, eroded one, all loose stones and gravel. As I still hadn’t found that main path I started slanting left towards it.

The slope was quite steep, but not steep enough to be worrying. The downhill direction was a bit wrong, more northwest than northeast, maybe I needed to head back to the left a bit more. It was raining, and my hands were cold, I really didn’t want to get out my map, and my glasses, and put on my glasses, and verify this stuff which I knew anyway. So I carried on downhill.

I still didn’t find the big zigzag path.

I could head back up and find the sprawling cairn and start again from there. But I’d been going downhill for quarter of an hour, and I really didn’t want to go back up. I carried on downhill.

“Not all who wander are lost,” says Tolkien. However, it remains the case that some of us are. I still didn’t find the big zigzag path.

I did have an early GPS device. I carried it to record grid references for the readers of my guidebooks. As a competent map-and-compass man, I certainly didn’t need to use the thing for finding my own way with.

I took out my GPS device. I asked it for my current grid reference. I took out my map, and my spectacles, and worked out where the grid reference was at. Just as I got it figured out, the cloud rose enough to save me the trouble.

When I’d passed the instantly recognisable rocks at the top of Bristly Ridge? Well – I hadn’t. I’d passed some other rocks instead. When I’d failed to see the sprawling cairn at the top of the path because it was just down the slope in the mist – I’d actually failed to see it because it wasn’t there. I’d turned downhill on the nearer, left-hand side of Bristly Ridge instead of the further, right-hand side.

It wasn’t too serious. I just needed to contour to the right below the foot of Bristly, to the wide saddle I’d been aiming for and Tryfan rising behind it. Not great, for a guidebook writer: but I was the only one who’d ever know. It wasn’t as if I’d be writing it down in a book, for all the world to see. I mean, that would be embarrassing, wouldn’t it?3

The Hillwalking Bible: contents, etc

I just rebuilt the web page!

so do take a look...

I will clamber through the Clouds and exist.
John Keats, letter to Tom Keats 1818

In which category might Ben Nevis be winning any Nobel Prize? Peace, perhaps – there is that Peace Cairn at the top, an untidy intrusion it is too. But then, the Ben is celebrated in the history of climbing, from the Victorians up the long rock ridges of its great North Face to the likes of Tom Patey poking their iceaxes into the rime ice – despite its small size, Nevis is one of Europe’s hotspots for winter climbing. Or Literature – for it has the only SMC1 area guidebook devoted to a single hill, not to mention a summit sonnet by John Keats who climbed it in 1818.

No, it wasn’t any of these. Indeed, they haven’t so far even come up with a Nobel Prize in climbing. The prize turns out to be the one awarded in 1927 for Physics – shared with the mountain’s human collaborator, Mr. CTR Wilson, for their joint work developing the Wilson Cloud Chamber.

The thing that links Keats with CTR Wilson as well as with all that fabulous rime ice is of course the weather. The sea brings damp warm air, and damp warm air rises up the great North Face, cools, and condenses into cloud. Except that sometimes, unpredictably, it doesn’t cloud up at all – which, ten paragraphs further down, is going to be the whole point of the story.

Sixty-five years after Keats’s climb, those earnest Victorians thought they’d build a weather observatory up there. For 20 years and 4 months it was manned (never of course womanned) in summer and winter. The present-day ‘Mountain Trail’ was its Pony Path bringing up building materials. The adjacent Gardyloo Gully, where the observers tipped their trash, is from ‘Gardez l’eau’, the traditional cry of Edinburgh householders before emptying the pisspot out of the window.

The inmates measured the wind and the rain and amused themselves with games of Who Can Find the Deepest Snowdrift. In the autumn of 1894, CTR Wilson, a Scotsman from the heart of the Pentland Hills, arrived for a fortnight – he was standing in for one of the regular weather guys.

Looking at clouds isn’t so boring as you might suppose. Not if you’re Keats, putting together some fun rhymes and a thumping moral (sonnet in the footnotes2). Meanwhile Mr Wilson spotted a Brocken spectre. Well that’s what the stories say but I bet what he was really interested in was the glory, the glowing circles of coloured light which form around the head of your cloud shadow if the water droplets happen to be small enough and of uniform size – and which can only be explained by sophisticated application of Maxwell’s four equations of electromagnetism.

A fortnight, it turned out, wasn’t nearly enough. Back in Cambridge – and Cambridge is the most mountain-deprived place in the entire UK3 – he decided to build his own Nevis North Face, desktop size, right there at the Cavendish Laboratory.

In summer, the moist Atlantic air sweeps into Coire Leis, whose name translates as the Bowl of Dreams. It condenses into cloud, and then rain. Each droplet forms around a ‘nucleation centre’ such as a speck of dust or ice. Perfectly clean air can become super-saturated: it has more than enough moisture, at a chilly enough temperature to form clouds, but it can’t because no specks to condense around.

When moist air rises up Ben Nevis it expands due to the drop in pressure. As it expands it cools, eventually allowing the water droplets to appear. In Wilson’s cloud chamber, the pressure drop is achieved with a bicycle pump working backwards.

Imagine his surprise (actually those guys in the Cavendish are only slightly surprised when they come up with a fundamental breakthrough in physics…) when he saw straight-line streaks of condensation, randomly through his home-made cloudscape. The streaks looked exactly like the trails of very tiny jet aeroplanes, or would have done if only aeroplanes existed back then.

What he was seeing was, in fact, the trails left by the newly discovered Roentgen ‘rays’. Alpha particles, which are actually helium nuclei (two protons two neutrons), and beta particles, which are just electrons.

High-speed ‘cosmic ray’ particles given off by the sun zip down through the air. As they pass they knock electrons out of our gas molecules, and leave them electrically charged. These charged molecules form the condensation centres for visible droplets to immediately form.

It’s roughly the same process as a high-altitude aeroplane leaving a vapour trail rather larger than itself – with one difference. The scaling up factor is enormous. From electron to visible vapour, it’s as if a standard Boeing 747 left a vapour trail wider than the orbit of the Earth and visible, with a really good pair of binoculars, from another star.

And yes, you can do this at home. You’ll need a fish tank, some dry ice, a small amount of 90% isopropyl alcohol and a flashlight. “Use some heavy gloves” they suggest at Snolab Canada, as the dry ice is at –78° C. Also, “if you’re a youngish kind of person, have your parents buy and handle the isopropyl alcohol for you.”

Put the whole thing inside a strong magnetic field, and any particle with an electric charge on it will start going round in circles (strictly speaking, in helixes. Even more strictly speaking, in helices).

In 1937, but sadly not on the summit of Ben Nevis as the observatory had crumbled to ruin long before, a Mr Carl Anderson of Caltech on 2 August 1932 (the exact 114th anniversary of Keats’s ascent of Ben Nevis) spotted an electron going round in circles in the wrong direction. He’d discovered the plus-sign anti-electron, the ‘positron’. Theoretical physicists of the more adventurous sort (well, Paul Dirac) had said there jolly well ought to be an anti-electron – the kind of statement you can sometimes get away with on the basis that there’s no way anyone’s ever going to detect one.

For this he (Anderson, not Keats) won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1936; the muon (an exotic heavy electron) revealed itself the following year.

The successor to the cloud chamber was devised while gazing into a glass of beer. Donald Glaser got himself a Nobel Prize for his bubble chamber in 1960. It’s a slight stretch to argue that beer drinking is a branch of hillwalking… But in 2014 a second hillwalking Nobel went to Prof. Peter Higgs of Edinburgh. It’s well known that he came up with his Higgs Boson while up in the Cairngorms.

I met with Professor Higgs after a lecture at the Royal Scottish Academy – we were both heading towards the tram stop in Princes Street. Naturally I wanted to know which specific mountain it was that gave birth to his boson.

Disappointingly, this well known fact about the Higgs boson turns out to not be true. “I keep taking that down off Wikipedia,” the professor told me, “and Wikipedia keeps putting it up again.” Apparently saying ‘I know this about Professor Peter Higgs because I am Professor Peter Higgs’ is considered as merely anecdotal evidence.

Next hill-based Nobel? Economist Elinor Ostrom got her one in 2009 for studying the mountain village of Törbel, altitude 1502m, just off the Tour of Monte Rosa high-level hike. Scottish alpinist J. Michael Kosterlitz climbed the horribly misnamed Via degli Inglesi4 on Piz Badile, and perhaps its unstable weather and convolved route-finding led him towards the 2016 Prize in Physics for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions.5

Meanwhile Britisher Tom Thwaites gained a 2016 Ig-Nobel Prize for living as a goat among goats with a special set of prosthetic goat legs, on the high pastures of the Alps.

But the original and best, as well as biggest, is the cloud chamber formed by the great northern hollow below Ben Nevis.

See it swirl like daemonic porridge in the hollows of Coire Leis. Watch climbers suddenly silhouetted against the vapours as they top out on the Great Tower. Arrive at dawn, and behold the Brocken Spectre stalking across the top of Gardyloo Gully. Or be there overnight, sheltering in the rather smelly ruins of the observatory, and see the cloud backlit in bright orange by the lights of Fort William.

Happily, both for science and for lovers of grey and shady scenery, the top of Ben Nevis is cloudy almost all the time. It’s misty: it’s mysterious: and it certainly deserves its Nobel Prize. Discover the damp and soggy version of Heaven, as Keats did, on the cloud-chamber side of Ben Nevis.

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And note, I do not refer to the “English” Lake District. The RAF is the original air force; Royal Mail is the first ever postal service and doesn’t need the UK's name on it. And the country of Cumberland is the original and only Lake District, of which all the rest are Johnny-come-lately imitations.

It’s hard to believe that, a mere quarter-millennium ago, people looked at all this and didn't like it. Indeed, they were disgusted by the useless and ugly precipices, the scruffy oakwoods. Either that or they were scared it was all going to fall down on their heads. It was here in Lakeland, around the year 1780, that it suddenly became cool to stand around in the rain, looking at scenery that included some stones and rocks.

Today, 30 million visitors a year agree with this proposition. And the Lake District, 450 million years old in its rocks and stones, age 14,000 in its glaciates shapes, and 250 in its status as a cultural artefact, on Saturday celebrates its 75th birthday as a designated national park.

On Her First Ascent to Helvellyn

Inmate of a mountain-dwelling,
Thou hast clomb aloft, and gazed
From the watch-towers of Helvellyn;
Awed, delighted, and amazed!

Potent was the spell that bound thee
Not unwilling to obey;
For blue Ether’s arms, flung round thee,
Stilled the pantings of dismay.

Lo! the dwindled woods and meadows;
What a vast abyss is there!
Lo! the clouds, the solemn shadows,
And the glistenings – heavenly fair!

And a record of commotion
Which a thousand ridges yield;
Ridge, and gulf, and distant ocean
Gleaming like a silver shield!

For the power of hills is on thee,
As was witnessed through thine eye
Then, when old Helvellyn won thee
To confess their majesty!

William Wordsworth addresses his sister Dorothy in 1816

Am I
To see in the Lake District, then,
Another bourgeois invention like the piano?
Well, I won’t. How can I, when
I wish I stood now on a platform at Penrith,
Zurich, or any junction at which you leave the express
For a local that swerves off soon into a cutting? Soon
Tunnels begin, red farms disappear,
Hedges turn to walls,
Cows become sheep, you smell peat or pinewood, you hear
Your first waterfalls.

And what looked like a wall turns out to be a world
With measurements of its own …

WH Auden: from ‘Mountains’ (1954)

Then, because his wound was deep,
The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,
And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land:
On one side lay the Ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

So saying, from the ruin’d shrine he stept,
And in the moon athwart the place of tombs,
Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men,
Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang
Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down
By zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock,
Came on the shining levels of the lake.

Tennyson, ‘The Passing of Arthur” composed while staying at Mirehouse on the shore of Bassenthwaite Lake

There must be something in this rope business, or people wouldn’t carry them about. If I fell, I could only fall thirty feet. It was absurd to suppose that I should then break in half… no, I should simply dangle for a little, assure Ken’s anxious head that all the blood he saw everywhere was only where I had hit myself on the way down, and then climb gaily up the rope to safety. Oh, well…

It was delightful to sit on top of the Needle and dangle our legs, and think ‘We’ve done it’. About once every ten years it comes back to me that, in addition to all the things I can’t do and haven’t done, I have climbed the Napes Needle.

A A Milne, climbing in 1901, from It’s Too Late Now.

Dorothy Wordsworth: Sunday 31st January 1802

We amused ourselves for a long time in watching the breezes, some as if they came from the bottom of the lake, spread in a circle, brushing along the surface of the water, and growing more delicate as it were thinner, and of a paler colour till they died away. Others spread out like a peacock’s tail, and some went right forward this way and that in all directions. The lake was still where these breezes were not, but they made it all alive. I found a strawberry blossom in a rock.

from the Grasmere Journal

As I lie in bed I walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton grass where my old legs shall never take me again.

Beatrix Potter writing at the end of her life

Sometimes, we looked into tremendous chasms, where the torrent, heard roaring long before it was seen, had worked itself a deep channel, and fell from ledge to ledge, foaming and shining amidst the dark rock. These streams are sublime from the length and precipitancy of their course, which, hurrying the sight with them into the abyss, act, as it were, in sympathy upon the nerves, and, to save ourselves from following, we recoil from the view with involuntary horror…

The air now became very thin, and the steeps still more difficult of ascent; but it was often delightful to look down into the green hollows of the mountain, among pastoral scenes, that wanted only some mixture of wood to render them enchanting.

About a mile from the summit, the way was, indeed, dreadfully sublime, laying, for nearly half a mile, along the ledge of a precipice, that passed, with a swift descent, for probably near a mile, into a glen within the heart of Skiddaw; and not a bush, or a hillock interrupted its vast length, or, by offering a mid-way check in the descent, diminished the fear it inspired.

Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe climbs Skiddaw, the last recorded person to suffer altitude sickness on 920m Skiddaw (from ‘A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794’)

Lakeland rain

“If today is anything to go by, I’m not surprised this place is full of lakes!” Kurt Diemberger, trying to film an ice climb in Lakeland (from Clouds on Both Sides, Julie Tullis)

It was rain of a relentless, determined, soaking, penetrating kind. No other rain anywhere, at least in the British Isles (which has a prerogative of many sorts of rain), falls with so determined a fanatic obstinacy as does this rain. It is not that the sky in any deliberate mood decides to empty itself. It is rain that has but little connection either with earth or sky, but rather has a life of its own, stern, remorseless and kindly. It falls in sheets of steely straightness, and through it is the rhythm of the beating hammer.

Rain in Borrowdale, from ‘Rogue Herries’ Hugh Walpole 1930

Haweswater rain

The rain comes as if out of nowhere. Suddenly it is fat and fast, warm in the air. A strong breeze the only warning of the impending torrent. Then the sky is gone above cloud, and a fractured column of water rests between the hills. Anything living in the valley heads for the nearest place of shelter. Sheep into wall corners, rabbits back into the maze of warrens within ground, and the villagers, if they are out, find the cover of trees or neighbours’ houses. The summer cuckoo at the far end of the dale lets up. Everything sentient is moving, except for the half-wild fell ponies, which stand absolutely still in the rain. Pure to it. They stand in the meadow’s long grass, afraid to move, or perhaps contented in the downpour. Six or seven white animals, static, steaming with heat, the sweet odour of their rough coats trapped in the mist of water now filling the valley. A small swish of a coarse tail. Nothing more. Beads of water collecting in their beards, and on their backs, shining.

Sarah Hall ‘Haweswater’

Sea to the West

When the sea’s to the west
The evenings are one dazzle –
You can find no sign of water.
Sun upflows the horizon;
Waves of shine
Heave, crest, fracture,
Explode on the shore;
The wide day burns
In the incandescent mantle of the air….

The sea to the west,
The land darkening –
Let my eyes at the last be blinded
Not by the dark
But by the dazzle.

Norman Nicholson (who’s from Millom at the SW corner of the Lake District)

Scafell Pike

“Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on
The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton.”

WH Auden

A thought suggested by a view of Saddleback in Cumberland

On stern Blencartha’s perilous height
The winds are tyrannous and strong;
And flashing forth unsteady light
From stern Blencartha’s skiey height,
As loud the torrents throng!
Beneath the moon, in gentle weather,
They bind the earth and sky together.
But oh! the sky and all its forms, how quiet!
The things that seek the earth, how full of noise and riot!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1810s (Saddleback is an alternative name for Blencathra)

Great Gable

It’s you I should be seeing tonight
I know it’s getting late
so I’m calling to state
that I’m really not able
cos it’s just so great up here on Great Gable
in the evening light, it’s alright.

I know it was the plan
but I don’t know if I can
as the sun goes down like a circus clown behind the Isle of Man

I’m missing the kissing and I really ought to go
there’s the crimson glow
and the sunset light
the moonbeams like a nightie cross the bosoms of the night

So I should be dashing
for an evening of passion
and a night of practical porn
but these lighting effects
are better than sex
and I’m not coming down till dawn1

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To save embarrassment, I’m not naming the book – and I’ve even gone to the length of misquoting it from memory rather than actually looking it up. Because, of course, it’s quite, quite wrong.

Okay, that’s right about the cumbersome stuff and the heavy tripod. But given climbing the Grépon, say, or Scafell Crag, is silly and difficult in the first place: yes, there were one or two silly and difficult people taking those heavy tripods and 8 x 10 inch glass plates up there as well.

And when I say one or two – I’m aware of at least five of them, with their tripods and glass plates, up there in the high mountains before anyone ever thought of the lightweight Leica.

Because when you’ve been up there on the Grépon or Scafell or Everest: why wouldn’t you want the pictures of it afterwards?

The first ‘photographers’, even before the coming of the camera, were artists and engravers. The likes of M. Gabriel Loppé, with perhaps a somewhat lighter easel but a large and awkward drawing pad, up there on Mont Blanc with his gloves on and his feet freezing, trying to capture the sunset before the water froze in his little water jug.

Or Edward Whymper, financing his assaults on the Matterhorn with his pencil and sketchbook, following up with engravings in copper or steel to hit the mass market via the Illustrated London News. His engraving of the fatal first ascent, and of the mystic fogbow and brocken spectre the survivors saw on the way down: they do seem to be made from memory and the imagination. But this one of the little tent on the Col du Lion, at the base of the Italian Ridge, looks to be authentically taken from life.

And then, when the camera did come along, Whymper was back up the Matterhorn, taking pictures of the precursor of the Hörnli Hut and so becoming the first of the glass plate guys on the high hills.1

But at almost the same time, another action photographer was at it among the Chamonix Aiguilles. Technically not the most perfect photos: but then, Miss Lily Bristow was climbing at the edge of what was possible, on only the third-ever ascent of the technically tricky Grépon.2

Full frame glass-plate photography: that size eight-inch-by-ten is the glass plate itself, which is a whole lot bigger than your 35mm film. Given a suitably rock-solid tripod, and scrupulous attention to eliminating stray light, and the skill to compose a photo while looking at it upside down and very faint with your head under a black hood- cloth: all this while at the same time perching on a pinnacle or clinging to some rocks: impossible, of course, to produce anything worth looking at under those conditions. Well, it is unless your name happens to be Abraham… Almost a century before John Cleare, and with equipment weighing about ten times as much, they were dangling from ropes while photographing early climbs on Great Gable and even Scafell Crag.

They didn’t know how to spell Scafell: but they could certainly take a picture of it.

And finally, two years before that vest-pocket Leica, the last person to take glass-plate pictures on mountains on the basis that glass plates was what there was to take pictures with: George Mallory himself. Not that he was a serious photographer: the first pictures he took he had the glass plate in the wrong way around, so those ones never even happened. And okay, the mules and the yaks carried the heavy tripod for most of the march in from Darjeeling.

Still, Mallory himeself had to haul the kit up to around 20,000 feet to take the picture s of Everest from high above the Rongbuk Glacier.

Three years later, the advent of the Vest Pocket Leica put an end to all that glass-plate action and made mountain photography possible when previously it really wasn’t.

But still, some of them were up there and at it anyway.

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‘What religion have you?’ Ali asked. ‘Christian?’

‘I haven’t got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other God.’

Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia

Moses Trod: it’s an ancient pathway around the high slopes at the back of Great Gable. The Moses who trod up from Wasdale Head and passed below the summit crags was Moses Rigg, whisky-smuggler and stealer of plumbago. But the original Moses trod up Mount Sinai, and at the top he met God.

The prophet Elijah met Him on a different hill, Mount Horeb1. First there came a rushing mighty whirlwind, making it hard even to crawl to the cairn, inducing adrenalin surges and the thrill of mountain adventure. But the whirlwind was not God.

Then there came an earthquake, and various spectacular lighting effects described as fire in Heaven. But the earthquake and the fire were not God.

Finally there came a still, small voice out of the heart of the whirlwind. And the still, small voice was God.

Outdoor instructor Colin Mortlock has written a whole book (Beyond Adventure, Cicerone Press 2001) about his discovery of ‘an ultimate truth or essence that links everything in Nature into an infinite unity.’ Cicerone published six of my walking guidebooks but hasn’t been known for devotional literature. Even so, the discoveries in Mortlock’s book are religious ones. “Everything in Nature is alive in its own way … the rocks and the clouds, the rivers and the stars.” His experience in the mountains has also revealed that “those closest of friends, who had died in my early years, in an essential sense were and always would be still around.”

The moment in Great Hell Gate that convinces you that God exists in every pebble and that there is, indeed, life after death: this is, to the one who experiences it, totally convincing. Much more convincing than any normal everyday evidence or argument. To anyone else, so long as we haven’t yet met the ghost of rock-climber Siegfried Herford who supposedly lurks at the foot of Scafell Crag, it’s not convincing at all.

Colin Mortlock writes almost apologetically: mystical religion is not part of the normal stock-in-trade of outdoor instructors. But he has not been the first to find God in the great outdoors. The seventeenth-century poet Thomas Traherne, whose climbing ground was Calver Hill, north-west of Hereford, wrote in Centuries of Meditation:

I was entertained like an Angel with the works of God in their splendour and glory. All time was an eternity, and a perpetual Sabbath. The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold. The green trees when I saw them first ravished and transported me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things.

For Wordsworth, as for Mortlock, these transcendent moments were found particularly on the high fells. As direct input from the Infinite to the ordinary walker, they can’t be communicated in cold type: but they can be expressed, as it were in-between the words, in verse.

A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought
And rolls through all things.

Scottish mountain man Bill Murray, captured by a German tank crew in the western desert and stuck in a prisoner-of-war camp, kept himself going in two conncected ways. The first was writing up his mountain memories, with a stub of pencil, on scraps of toilet paper. The second was mystical religion: a direct apprehension of a monotheistic One, vaguely Islamic, maybe a bit of fifth-century neoplatonism. And so, on the top of Tower Ridge of Ben Nevis, in the dark, after a tough climb in dodgy winter conditions:

We seemed to tread air rather than crusted snow; we were light of foot; we walked like demigods in joyous serenity. The intensity of our exaltation seems peculiar to the following of a great rock-climb to a climax of supreme beauty… In the quiet I felt something of the limitation of personality fall away as desires were stilled; and as I died to self and became more absorbed in the hills and sky, the more their beauty entered into me, until they seemed one with me and I with them.

When we walked across the plateau, it became very clear to me that only the true self, which transcends the personal, lays claim to immortality.

Sitting beside a waterfall or on a mountain top was recognised in medieval China, and later in Japan, as a valid way of attaining enlightenment. Everythingness is not that different from nothingness; what cannot be expressed in words is best spoken of with extreme simplicity. So, the experience of Heaven in Great Hell Gate finds itself in the koan of Dogen:

In me is no mind;
when I hear rain from the roof,
the raindrop is me.

And on Great Gable, between two footfalls on the scree of Great Hell Gate, one becomes a pebble and the entire Universe.

Maybe it is merely an aesthetic reaction to the Moderately Big. Maybe it’s the ancient hunter-gather brain, rewarding itself for spotting some great leaping-out spots and escape routes. Maybe it’s an exercise-induced flood of endorphin chemicals. But from time to time—at Westmoreland’s Cairn at dawn, running down Green Gable in the cloud, stepping on the top block of Napes Needle—comes an encounter with the Beyond. And what we get on Great Gable feels like the reason for being here at all.

Such feelings cannot be communicated or explained: not even by Wordsworth. There is, after all, no reason for being here. The moment of stillness at Westmoreland’s Cairn has no meaning, outside that particular moment, at that particular time and place.

There is, almost certainly, no God. But there is Great Gable.

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more posts LAKE DISTRICT

This has been adapted from the final chapter of ‘The Riddle of Sphinx Rock’, a small nicely produced hardback which is out of print but available second hand. For the first lucky clicker of this link there’s a copy on Abebooks at £12 including postage.

The Night-Hag, when call’d
In secret, riding through the Air she comes
Lur’d with the smell of infant blood, to dance
With Lapland Witches …

Milton, Paradise Lost Book 2

If you’re travelling north up the western side of Scotland, then you’re going to come to the peaty swamps of Rannoch Moor.1

The motorway swoops through Glasgow like a concrete seagull, the poetry of its motion read off the blue signs above it: Springhill, Baillieston; Easterhouse, Barlanock. Through groves of street furniture and tarmac deserts (Garthamlock, Queenslie) – pizza boxes and empty cans blossom like wildflowers (Riddrie, Stepps) along the verge. The city’s edge is a place of prisons and sewage treatment works, undeveloped land a tangle of bindweed, hogweed and Himalayan balsam. Along the dirty banks of the Clyde, off white fronds of Russian vine dangle above the waterline – the garden plant that grows 30 metres in a year. destroying fences and garden sheds like a green-and-grey forest fire.

The Erskine Bridge lifts you above all this, 45 metres over the tidal river, looking upstream to the dreaming skyscrapers, downstream over Dumbarton Rock towards the open sea. So as not to distract the driver, newly placed opaque barriers on either side guard against this view. Down again on the north bank, the back of Dumbarton is cheerful with traffic lights and the fibreglass canopies of petrol stations.

To mark the entry to the Highlands, a circling flight of aluminium geese on the Balloch roundabout, twice life size, a substitute for the blocked out landscape. They were removed in 2021 as a safety hazard: even aluminium wildlife being too distracting.

After Tarbet, though, the landscape forces itself upon you. Well, not so much the landscape as the lake. Loch Lomond splashes against the steep, steep side of Ben Vorlich, squeezing the roadway into tight narrow bends. Any Citylink coach or timber lorry coming south spreads well over the white line, and if it meets a Citylink coach coming north there’ll be a two-minute gridlock.2

Forty minutes on, and you dive through the long concrete bridge over the Water of Tulla and up a long hairpin bend to where there’s no more roadsigns. Water, heather, black peat: they start at the scruffy verge and stretch out of sight. This is indeed one of those liminal zones, the places where you shouldn’t be, you should just be passing through. Places like pedestrian subways. Shower rooms at motorway services. Midnight railway stations. Multi-story car parks. The Moor of Rannoch.

Yes, these are the liminal spaces, from the Latin word limen for the threshold stone across your doorway. To ‘eliminate’ some interloper is to kick them out of your house.

Liminal: it’s like a wasp at the picnic, the buzzword that just keeps buzzing…

Liminal places cause unease and disquiet – but they can also be a spur to creativity. Empty, dislocated places between where you have been and where you hope, eventually, to arrive.

In our world of straight lines and squared off boundaries, Rannoch Moor is the opposite of all that. There are no boundaries here. Everything flows into something else. The land is half water, and the water is half land; every patch of ground has its small lake or lochan, and in each lake a scatter of small islands.

And on those islands, time too is discontinuous. Surrounded by grey water, tall pine trees grow. They are patches of memory, minimal extracts from the forest that covered this land: discs cut from ten centuries ago like the clippings from a hole-punched document scattered across the office floor.

On their trunks, and on the rocks of the shoreline, the lichens are the tartan colours of the MacDonald cattle-raiders who crossed the land in the pine trees’ early youth. Tartans dyed from natural camouflage – lichens out of the bog itself, its rocks and dead treetrunks.

If you’re a mathematician (which you aren’t, the use of that sociologists’ buzzword right in the article header has surely driven you away already…)

But if you were one, you’d understand entirely where we are now. The way the boundary between brown bog and peat-stained water, what should be the shoreline: well, there’s this thing called the Hilbert Curve. Which demonstrates, entirely rigorous and mathematical, that a line – an infinite line, we grant you, stretching without end in either direction – can pass through every point of the 30 square kilometres of Rannoch Moor.

The video3 shows the first five stages. The process never ends, but the mathematical concept of a limit lets us (well, lets analytical algebraists) determine the final position that each point of the ever-wiggling line is tending towards.

Limit, from Latin Limes, 3rd declension masculine, plural limetes, a boundary, particularly the edge of the Roman Empire.

As against Liminal, from Latin Limen, 3rd declension neuter, plural limina: a doorstep or threshold.

And when it comes to Rannoch Moor, and the shoreline where its sodden ground meets its black peaty waters: the boundary – the limes – is everywhere.

Which may explain this graph, produced by Google, showing that within the next 20 years the word ‘liminal’ will appear in every single published book; and sometime in 2055, will become every word in each of those books. We shall have to look to the somewhat less voguish US for books with some remaining other words in them.

But for now, you’re in the middle of Rannoch Moor, in that strange, and strangely trendy, in-between state, that liminal zone between green and cosy Argyll and the bright shopping streets of Fort William…

No way would you want to stutter to a stop with a nasty smell of rubber, in a snowstorm, with no signal on your phone. On the other hand this inbetween zone that’s neither here nor there also represents, at last, a straight and level bit of roadway to overtake that caravan... (Psychologists have shown that as car drivers we are even insulated from our own humanity. Inside our steel and aluminium exoskeleton we become solitary insects, every other tin box a rival for our roadspace.)

After failing to overtake the caravan, I turn off along the northern corner of the moor into the shadow of the mountain, on the single-track spur road to the White Corries. it’s just after daybreak on a May morning, towards the end of a six-week drought. A ski station, empty at the start of summer: it’s another of those uneasy liminal spots. Alone in the beaten earth of the car park, I change into my boots and haul out my rucksack.

But soon the car is out of sight. And for the next two days until tomorrow evening I’ll be in this strange, unsettling, inbetween world of Rannoch Moor.

I May, I Might, I Must

If you tell me why the fen
appears impassable, I then
will tell you why I think that I
can get across it, if I try.

Marianne Moore, 1909

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more posts on BOGS and SWAMPS

Geology is destiny, and a place built out of its own bedrock is a place at peace with itself.

My village in Dumfriesshire1 is built out of reddish-brown sandstone, in the spaces of the original ground level between six large sandstone quarries. A hundred and fifty years ago, this place was noisy with the crash of steam hammers, falling silent just twice a day before the sharp bang of the gunpowder blasting. The twenty-house settlement had a pub, and a shop, and a school, and an industrial accident rate running at a death every couple of years.

Two railway branch lines reached us, at slightly different levels. The southern one arrives on an embankment at the back of my garden. The house I live in belonged to one of the quarry masters, with its back door opening towards the two workings.

The nearer quarry is a hollow of trees falling to a black pool. There’s no inflow, the water seeps away through broken stones from the nearby river. Far below the sunlight, it’s seasoned in summer with green pondweed; underwater are shadows of slowly rotting branches and even slower rotting consumer whiteware. Tangled around the quarry top are remains of iron lifting gear, winches with cables five centimetres thick. Half-circle plinths, carved for some town hall or bank, lie in damp leaves, locked to the ground by a century of tree roots.

The ground beyond the quarry is broken bits of stone. This would damage the ankles of any grazing cow, so it’s been fenced off and left as an informal nature reserve. Leave a pile of stones for a hundred years in southern Scotland: what you get’s a wood of silver birch. Here and there, the darker trunks of oak or beech indicate the climax woodland that’ll take over in another couple of centuries.

In late summer the woodland is waist high with male-fern, so that you walk feeling with your feet around the broken stones below. There is a small path I made with a hammer, but only knowing the individual treetrunks will tell you where it is below the fronds.

Flecks of greenish light show between the trees. Behind the birch trunks is a mossed wall of red-brown rock. Tracing the rock wall around its curve reveals that this is the second of the quarries. Tree roots are writhing down the rock face, trying to find some soil: one ancient pine root is thicker than I am. A field drain up above has been leaking for half a century, and the rockface here is bright mosses into which you can sink your hand up to the wrist. In autumn this becomes a small waterfall, and in winter a wall of icicles gleaming between the trees.

Scotland south of the Lowland Valley is shaped by the 400-million-year old collision that joined Scotland and England onto the same bit of continental crust. Compressed and folded sea-floor makes for hilly country, quite unsuitable for canals. But the breakup of the Pangaea supercontinent pulled open the forerunner of Nithsdale as a north-south rift valley.

The rift valley, as rift valleys do, filled up with sand. The sand was there anyway, formed from the crumbling of one of Pangaea’s great mountain ranges. The rock that formed out of the wide-spreading detritus is the New Red Sandstone, so called because of being a mere 280 million years old.2

Three hundred million years later, smoothed and widened by the glacier that’s only just stopped coming down it, the valley made a natural line for the railway. And so from 1849 stone out of my back garden could travel north to Glasgow, and from Glasgow to the world.

When we buy the house (the 10% drop due to the flooded quarry brings it just within our price range) a joke gets handed down by the seller. A geological joke.

From Glasgow, some of our stone crossed to New York as ballast on returning ships. Once there, it was used on the famous brownstone town houses of Brooklyn and Manhattan, alongside local sandstone brought in barges from Connecticut and New Jersey. Today, it’s hard to tell the difference – because there isn’t any. With the opening of the Atlantic, the New Red Sandstone of Scotland was carried away from the New Red Sandstone of America at a rate of 7mm every year. At the end of 50 million years, it was loaded into ships and carried all the way back again.

How many owners does this anecdote go back? The house dates back nearly two centuries, but the joke can’t be any older than the 1950s. That was when sensitive magnetic detectors, used in World War Two for hunting submarines, were turned downwards onto the ocean floor – there to detect the pattern of magnetism locked in the rocks, and so to disclose the sea-floor spreading on either side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Which is what went to confirm that the continents really do bounce around the world like supersize dodgem cars.

But in Plato’s Ideal World, where jokes like mathematical theorems exist independent of merely human understanding, the story goes back 280 million years.

Over a couple of centuries, broken stones and leafmould built up around the former quarry offices. Soon after moving in we summoned a mechanical digger to excavate this back for us, and over the first winter I built a new retaining wall.

In the uplands, I’d been used to building dykes – dry stone field walls – with the chunky greywacke. It’s a challenging sort of stone. You can break it with a sledgehammer, but you have to hit it hard and in the right place. And if you hit it in the right place, it’ll break to some usable shape, even if it isn’t the shape you were aiming for. The fracture is usually concave, giving decisive contact with the next stone you place it up against. There’s a momentary sharp whiff of brimstone; this hammer blow, when it works, is as satisfying as a sneeze. And the fragments give a selection of useful slips and wedges.

The red sandstone of the valley floor is quite different. With a lump hammer and a wide blade chisel you can open it into flat blocks along the bedding planes. The opened surface is pink like faded rose petals, sandy under the hand. Sometimes it sparkles in the sun with tiny mica crystals. Then if you want to shape the front face, you carve a groove around it with the wide chisel, and a few sharp blows with the hammer will usually break it along the line you wanted.

It’s this amenable behaviour that makes it so suitable for gravestones and town halls. The Georgian and Victorian houses of Dumfries, Annan and Thornhill are built square and plain, letting the warm colour of the stone do its work – but with a decorative lintel at the main doorway, and perhaps a pair of pillars. It’s the gravestones that are over the top. Older ones are carved with skulls and bones, hourglasses, and angels in long stone nightgowns. Two centuries on, and the wealthy burgesses who share Rabbie Burns’s graveyard in Dumfries have monuments like the end of a shed, carved over with all their ancestors, descendants and achievements – it’s the nineteenth-century equivalent of a Facebook page.

Handsome houses, over-decorated graves – but for drystone walling, it’s boring. The flat chunks pile up like bricks. Most of the work consists of sorting the blocks into matching heights. There’s no making up the levels with thin slips, as anything under a centimetre is going to get crushed by the weight of the stones on top.

For my small wall, there’s plenty of stone to work with. The ground around the two quarries is made of broken stones, needing only the moss lifting off them. A ruined lean-to gives up its nicely dressed stone, useful for wall ends and corners. Here and there is one of the quite different greywacke stones, brought downstream by the nearby river. I ought to put these at the base, to take advantage of their strength in compression. Instead I put the grey stones half way up the wall, for show.

But it’s the various fallen walls around the back yard that are the most interesting to work with. They’re not just recycled, but re-recycled. Some have remains of whitewash on their inner faces, and some have been scored for mortar: they’ve been reused once already, from some vanished building. And then I lift out one wide, flat slab to find its underside carved with two lower-case alphabets. They’re in the satisfying style of the early 19th century, with neat serifs at the corners of the strokes – the serifs, pointed corners, of fonts like Garamond and Times New Roman are originally the tidy way to do it when carving into stone.

The carver has signed his work – John Jardine, a common Dumfriesshire name. But the first alphabet breaks off after two tries at the letter t. Mr Jardine was presumably a quarryman – practising his carving in the moments before the bang of the gunpowder marked the start of the day’s heavy lifting.

These right-sized wall stones: how many times, over 300 years, have they been built into a wall, tumbled down, and then been rebuilt into a different wall – as the quarry traffic shifted from sleds to wheeled carts and then to the railway? Then shifted again during the last hundred years of motor cars and decorative garden features. And how many times to be built again, into the future, before being crushed down for hardcore and lost for ever under some concrete paving?

But this recycling of back garden stones over a few short centuries is just a short-term simile for the recycling of the stone itself. Sandstone (the clue is in the name) is made of sand. And sand, most of it anyway, is made of sandstone. “No vestige of a beginning—, no prospect of an end:” in the timeless words of long-ago Scottish geologist James Hutton.

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more on rocks and geology

Except that it isn't correspondingly; for all of these features are on Sca Fell. In England we've had the Ordnance Survey for nearly two hundred years, and in England the highest is the outlier on the side of Sca Fell known originally as The Pikes of Scaw Fell, or currently as Scafell Pike.

Scafell Pike has the wide stony path from Langdale and the wide bulldozed one from Wasdale Head. The rock-climbing on Scafell Pike is the jolly little Pikes Crag all covered in bilberries. It's Sca Fell, not the Pike, that deserves to be the highest. But it's the Pike that is. It's quite clearly marked even on my grandfather's map of 1905. Sca Fell 3162 feet: Scafell Pikes (as they then were) 3210.

But is that map accurate? With the increasing number of fellwalkers deploying route-finding software on our phones, including the ‘OS Maps’ app itself, it’s become ever more apparent that the height readings just don’t add up. And that, in fact, it is Sca Fell, rather than its outlier Scafell Pike, that is the true high-point of England.

I’ve contributed to an article on this anomaly to the country’s main hillwalking magazine, the online UKhillwalking.com. Here, I shall discuss the events leading up to, eventually, this week’s discreetly managed revision of the National Park Authority’s website, and hence the official recognition of England’s new top top.

Full article on UK Hillwalking

I first started having my doubts about the spot-heights marked on my map one summer evening in 2004, when I stood at the top of the West Wall on Sca Fell, looking across at the busy cairn on Scafell Pike. Looking across and – as it appeared to me on that afternoon – across and down at Scafell Pike. But my walk that day had started at Great Langdale, and needed to get back there before nightfall. I stopped thinking about the height of the Pike and started thinking instead about the best way down into upper Eskdale.

And then, two years later, I was chatting to one of our eminent mountaineers, a man whose father was on Everest in 1922. (And did Mallory and Irvine really get to the top in their Norfolk jackets and hobnailed boots?) The eminent mountaineer had met a woman on the Corridor Path who explained it all.

On any summer weekend, a thousand people climb Scafell Pike. Some of them are doing their lifetime’s only mountain, and doing it in unsuitable shoes. What if the thousand needed to do Scafell instead? There are already plenty of accidents on Broad Stand. So the Ordnance Survey and the Mountain Rescue got together with the National Park Authority and decided that, for safety reasons, Scafell Pike has to be the highest point of England.

Most of us, when our eyes don’t agree with the Ordnance Survey, tend to go with the OS. And so matters stood, until the arrival of hand-portable GPS readers, and more recently of navigation software for the mobile phone. For almost a century, this slight adjustment to maps has diverted hill walkers away from the high-risk Sca Fell onto the more appropriate slopes of England’s second highest, Scafell Pike. But with the use of such technology becoming ever more widespread, the time has finally come for the relative altitudes to be reallocated.

For several months now, the Lakeland National Park Authority (LPNA) has been preparing for the change, with pictures of Sca Fell being inserted onto pages nominally dedicated to Scafell Pike.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter) the LNPA explains the change of policy. “With the widespread use of GPS by hillwalkers, and the 75th anniversary of the Lakeland National Park coming up this year, it seemed the appropriate moment to set the record straight. In fact it’s long been our policy, on safety pages connected with Scafell Pike, to replace it with pictures of Sca Fell. Sca Fell just looks so convincingly scary doesn’t it?”

“The ascent of Scafell Pike has historic significance going back to Dorothy Wordsworth’s ascent of 1818, as described in later editions of her brother William’s ‘Guide to the Lakes’. It is also the traditional English component of the celebrated ‘Three Peaks plus the M6’ walk. So we confidently expect the majority of walkers and mountaineers, as well as the ‘three-peakers’, to continue to set their sights on Scafell Pike rather than its very slightly higher neighbour.”

With the discontinuance of the adjustment to maps, it has become necessary to find alternative ways of protecting the hillwalking public. Funding has been made available for a pair of enclosed ladders (one each for ascent and descent) running the full height of Lord’s Rake and Deep Ghyll, these placed on a firm concrete base to eliminate the danger from stones in these notoriously loose gullies. A similar, shorter pair are scheduled for the rock climb of Broad Stand above Mickledore. Meanwhile, acknowledging the concerns of those who advocate for ‘rewilding’, the route by Foxes Tarn is to be retained in its ‘semi-natural’ state, though with the current informal access via the narrow and exposed ‘Climbers Traverse’ blocked off with landscape-appropriate chainlink fencing.

All these measures should be in place by the late summer of 2027. In the meantime, any mountaineers attempting Sca Fell should employ a qualified mountain guide, who will be versed in the safety requirements for this serious climb.

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“I do like to be beside the seaside”1 – rock pools and paddling, sandwiches with real sand in them, striped towels and a big yellow umbrella to keep off the sea breezes and summer showers. It's a peculiarly British form of fun, which foreigners might even misinterpret as suffering. But after greasing yourself with a mixture of suncream and grit, cleaning beach oil off your feet, and abandoning the attempt to read the latest Romantasy epic with a Force Six breeze turning the pages – look above you and around. What Britain is and where it came from, just what's been going on around here for the last 500 million years: all is revealed in a continuous slice around our seaside.

Here are giant tree ferns engulfed in volcanic lava. Here are caves, rock-arches and sea stacks; here are desert sand dunes emerging out of the ocean. Here are cliffs bent and crumpled by two continents crashing into each other; and bands of red-hot rock squeezed out by a volcano somewhere up in Scotland. And as you wander along the edge of the sand, gradually slowing your eye to the beach-holiday speed of looking at things, you see small creatures, seashells and corals from hundreds of millions of years ago. All along the Dorset coastline are curled ammonites as if someone tried to unravel the workings of the great pocket watch of Time and guess what – the little springs inside it came pinging out across the rocks.

Take a poet to the seaside and he tends not to have a jolly time. Matthew Arnold visited Dover Beach in autumn, with a big sea crashing up the flint shingle: its ‘melancholy slow withdrawing roar’ reminded him what a dreadful state England was in. (He didn't spot the fossil sea urchins.) For his visit, TS Eliot wore grey flannel trousers with their bottoms rolled, and failed to hear the mermaids calling. Thomas Hardy, on the Cornish coast, looked across the dark spaces of the sea and thought of a women lost forty years before. Tennyson too, on the cold grey shores of the Isle of Wight, the waves made him think about death.

We come to the edge of our busy land, so worked over with footpaths and fenceposts and bits of litter, and gaze over a vast emptiness. A couple of masonry corners stand against the sea; a fringe of stonework tops off 60 metres of vertical greywacke rock. I came down to Tintagel as the last sunlight was a brownish glow across the dead heather. The breeze whistled through the dry grass, and far below, the sea was whispering amongst the rock stacks. A kestrel hovered at clifftop level, obviously keeping an eye out for King Arthur.

The tremendous sea itself, when I could find sufficient pause to look at it, in the agitation of the blinding wind, the flying stones and sand, and the awful noise, confounded me. As the high watery walls came rolling in, and, at their highest, tumbled into surf, they looked as if the least would engulf the town. As the receding wave swept back with a hoarse roar, it seemed to scoop out deep caves in the beach, as if its purpose were to undermine the earth. When some white-headed billows thundered on, and dashed themselves to pieces before they reached the land, every fragment of the late whole seemed possessed by the full might of its wrath, rushing to be gathered to the composition of another monster. Undulating hills were changed to valleys, undulating valleys (with a solitary storm-bird sometimes skimming through them) were lifted up to hills; masses of water shivered and shook the beach with a booming sound; every shape tumultuously rolled on, as soon as made, to change its shape and place, and beat another shape and place away; the ideal shore on the horizon, with its towers and buildings, rose and fell; the clouds fell fast and thick; I seemed to see a rending and upheaving of all nature.

Yarmouth: David Copperfield (Charles Dickens) Chapter 55

The Smugglers’ Path

It was a sight to stagger any man, and when I looked upon the Zigzag, it seemed better to stay where we were and fall into the hands of the Posse than set foot on that awful way, and fall upon the rocks below. For the Zigzag started off as a fair enough chalk path, but in a few paces narrowed down till it was but a whiter thread against the grey-white cliff-face, and afterwards turned sharply back, crossing a hundred feet direct above our heads... I do not believe that there were half a dozen men in England who would have ventured up that path. The ledge was little more than a foot wide, and ever so little a lean of the body would dash me on the rocks below.

Moonfleet John Meade Falconer Chapter 10 (slightly shortened)

Lyme Regis

The Cobb itself, its old wonders and new improvements, with the very beautiful line of cliffs stretching out to the east of the town, are what the stranger’s eye will seek; and a very strange stranger it must be, who does not see charms in the immediate environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it better. The scenes in its neighbourhood, Charmouth, with its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more, its sweet, retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands, make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation; the woody varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme; and, above all, Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks.

That’s our Jane! From ‘Persuasion’ Chapter 11, Jane Austen getting about as landscape lyrical as she ever does.

St Ives Bay

So off they strolled down the garden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn, past the pampas grass, to that break in the thick hedge, guarded by red hot pokers like brasiers of clear burning coal, between which the blue waters of the bay looked bluer than ever. They came there regularly every evening drawn by some need. It was as if the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical relief. First, the pulse of colour flooded the bay with blue, and the heart expanded with it and the body swam, only the next instant to be checked and chilled by the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves. Then, up behind the great black rock, almost every evening spurted irregularly, so that one had to watch for it and it was a delight when it came, a fountain of white water; and then, while one waited for that, one watched, on the pale semicircular beach, wave after wave shedding again and again smoothly, a film of mother of pearl.

To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf) Chapter 4. Describing St Ives Bay (though in the book it’s transferred to the Isle of Skye)

What gave an added terror to its height was its blackness. And upon this dark face the beating of ten thousand west winds had formed a kind of bloom, which had a visual effect not unlike that of a Hambro’ grape. Moreover it seemed to float off into the atmosphere, and inspire terror through the lungs.

“This piece of quartz, supporting my feet, is on the very nose of the cliff,” said Knight, breaking the silence after his rigid stoical meditation….

Haggard cliffs, of every ugly altitude, are as common as sea-fowl along the line of coast between Exmoor and Land’s End; but this outflanked and encompassed specimen was the ugliest of them all. Not a blade, not an insect, which spoke of the present, was between him and the past. The inveterate antagonism of these black precipices to all strugglers for life is in no way more forcibly suggested than by the paucity of tufts of grass, lichens, or confervae on their outermost ledges.

By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense, opposite Knight’s eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death. It was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself had now.2

Beeny Cliff east of Tintagel: Thomas Hardy “A Pair of Blue Eyes” Chapters 21, 22

‘Llaregyb’ (Laugharne, Carmarthenshire shore)

First Voice: And Willy Nilly, rumbling, jockeys out again to the three-seated shack called the House of Commons in the back where the hens weep, and sees, in sudden Springshine,

Second Voice: herring gulls heckling down to the harbour where the fishermen spit and prop the morning up and eye the fishy sea smooth to the sea’s end as it lulls in blue. Green and gold money, tobacco, tinned salmon, hats with feathers, pots of fish-paste, warmth for the winter-to-be, weave and leap in it rich and slippery in the flash and shapes of fishes through the cold sea-streets. But with blue lazy eyes the fishermen gaze at that milkmaid whispering water with no nick or ripple as though it blew great guns and serpents and typhooned the town.

Dylan Thomas ‘Under Milk Wood’ (1954)

Morecambe Bay and the crossing of the Sands

Over the smooth sands
Of Leven’s ample estuary lay
My journey, and beneath a genial sun,
With distant prospect among gleams of sky
And clouds, and intermingling mountain tops,
In one inseparable glory clad,
Creatures of one ethereal substance met
In consistory, like a diadem
Or crown of burning seraphs as they sit
In the empyrean. Underneath that pomp
Celestial, lay unseen the pastoral vales
Among whose happy fields I had grown up
From childhood.

all the plain
Lay spotted with a variegated crowd
Of vehicles and travellers, horse and foot,
Wading beneath the conduct of their guide
In loose procession through the shallow stream
Of inland waters; the great sea meanwhile
Heaved at safe distance, far retired. I paused,
Longing for skill to paint a scene so bright
And cheerful, but the foremost of the band
As he approached, no salutation given
In the familiar language of the day,
Cried, “Robespierre is dead!”

Wordsworth ‘The Prelude’ Book X

The opening paragraphs are lifted from my coastal geology book ‘Sandstone and Sea Stacks’ (Frances Lincoln 2012, out of print, 2nd-hand hardback from around £9).

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more posts ENGLISH LITERATURE

The map of places passes
The reality of paper tears.
Land and water where they are
Are only where they were
When words read “here” and “here”
Before ships happened there.

I picked up the first four printed copies of my first printed book at the printworks in Berwick upon Tweed. I bagged them up in plastic, pushed them under the lid of the rucksack; and set out for my home on the other side of Scotland. I probably took an early supper in Wooler, then pressed on westwards until it got dark. I unrolled my bivvy bag in a convenient plantation and climbed into my minimal polyester sleeping bag still wearing my wet waterproofs. It was early November; and it was raining.

Yes, this was an experiment in austere and lightweight travel.

After 8 hours of lying down listening to tree drips, I spooned in some muesli, ready to set off as soon as the first daylight seeped between the trees. A seriously muddy path led up to the peat slop summit of the Cheviot. But from here, I knew, it was going to get easier; never mind the cloud because I was now on the plain and waymarked Pennine Way.

Well, I knew wrong. A high proportion of Pennine Wayfarers don’t make it as far along as the Cheviots and those that do don’t leave much of a trail. Waymarks, somehow, fail to appear, map and compass work with a wet map and cold fingers, up in the mist, gets gradually harder as you get more tired. But hey, I know how to do this stuff, and the ridgeline fence will lead me right up to the ancient Bronze Age cairn on Windy Gyle.

But somehow, the Bronze Age cairn ain’t there. This fence junction ought to be the summit. But either it isn’t or else it is the summit of somewhere else. Quite quickly getting colder – hill running clothes only really work so long as you’re running along on a hill – after a quarter hour of still not finding the Bronze Age cairn I gradually, and then quite suddenly, realise that up here in the rain and the mist, I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I’m going, and I can’t make any sense of my map.

Okay, just to save you any more suspense, I am in fact still alive. I knew enough that heading down south would get me to the remote little Coquet valley where I could follow the remote little Coquet valley road for miles and miles rather than the high level ridgeline of my intention. Twenty minutes down the slope of Windy Gyle I did in fact come across a waymark post with an arrow on it. Even better, it had seven arrows on it, pointing in four different directions...

All of which brings me to an austere American poet who nobody much seems to have heard of, but who I like very much. For here she is writing about that experience, familiar enough in the days of compasses and maps but still just about achievable in the age of GPS – all you need to do is neglect to download your map extract so that your little screen, as soon as you’re out of range of the phone mast in the valley, goes disconcertingly blank.

But in Laura Riding’s case, the map is also a metaphor. For Laura Riding, it’s not just a map that doesn’t mean anything. It’s everything.

Now on naked names feet stand,
No geographies in the hand,
And paper reads anciently,
And ships1 at sea
Turn round and round.
All is known, all is found.
Death meets itself everywhere.
Holes in maps look through to nowhere.

The firm world out there: we think we know it, but all we really know is the map of it we make inside our own mind. And when the map stops making sense and we don’t know where we are up here in the mist and the cold wind? Well, some people find this poem of Laura Riding’s somewhat mysterious and difficult. But any hill runner on Windy Gyle in the rain in November knows exactly what she is on about.

Phone screens go blank - in life as on the hilltop.
The compass, you left it behind in the hostel.
Holes in maps look through to nowhere.2

The poem ‘The Map of Places’ was published in 1927. Laura Riding (American, 1901–1991) we was also known as Laura (Riding) Jackson. If you need some biography with your poetry, here’s some.

‘Across Scotland on Foot’ long out of print but scruffy second-hand copies are available under £5. “Excellent book [four stars]. Whilst Ron Turnbull’s literary approach can get on your nerves the information is well worth it.” (Amazon review by Tim K)

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more posts on hill-relevant POETRY

If you haven’t ever been lost on a hill, or just want some insightful analysis of this poem anyway, Sally Thomas offers it on this poem-a-day Substack. She’s kindly unpaywalled this from their archive: but free subscribers to ‘Poems Ancient and Modern’ get a different poem and analysis every day of the week except Wednesday.

Poems Ancient and Modern

Today’s Poem: The Map of Places

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6 months ago · 39 likes · 14 comments · Sally Thomas

Julian Cooper could be the best person there is to answer this one. He’s been painting Lakeland since he was old enough to lift a brush. And longer than that, even, as he’s just the third generation to hang stuff on the walls of the Heaton Cooper Studio at Grasmere. Now in his late 70s, he’s just published the book of his life’s output, with an accompanying exhibition at the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick as well as a talk at the Words by the Water festival there on March 12th. The Exhibition then transfers to the Heaton Cooper Studio, Grasmere from 19th March to 31st May in the Archive Gallery behind the café (9am - 5.30pm).

And about 20 years ago, Julian was my companion on a longish walk around Derwent Water: tracking the ‘Viewing Stations’ of one of Lakeland’s earliest admirers, Father Thomas West, and at the same time assessing the looking-at-Lakeland-Scenery scene of the present day.

Just before sunrise, the top of Latrigg can be a chilly spot. Rounded clouds, yellowish-grey in colour, drifted briskly over the Dodds and across a sky of slightly lighter grey. Far down Derwent Water, first light in pale primrose yellow caught the distant cliffs of Scafell. Five minutes later it caught us too, as the sun rose like a lightly-poached egg above Clough Head.

Thomas West’s ‘Guide to the Lakes’ told the tourists of 1774 exactly what we should be doing here at his Station Number One. We would have arrived armed with a spyglass, a gadget called a plano-convex glass, and the appropriate emotions. Under West’s eye, Lakeland landscape rearranged itself in “picturesque” style. In particular, the picture style of the French painter Claude Lorraine, whose work the aristocratic Grand Tourers had been bringing back to hang in their castles.

Friar’s Crag was not one of the Stations in West’s book. For one thing, there’s no foreground at all. What there is, as you emerge from the trees, is a sudden hugeness. The water starts six feet below your toes, and spreads forward for what is actually two miles but in all appearance, infinity. It turns out that you don’t need the Pacific or even the Lake of Geneva. Two miles is enough. And at the end of the infinite water rise Grange Fell, and High Spy, and between them little Castle Crag wedged into the Jaws of Borrowdale.

“Better on a bad day,” said Julian of Friar’s Crag. “Borrowdale a great place for shafts of light.” Without being aware of it, he was agreeing with philosopher-painter John Ruskin on the Sublime. “The rolling heap of the thunder-cloud, divided by rents, and multiplied by wreaths, yet gathering them into its torrid zone, and its midnight darkness opposite; the scarcely less majestic heave of the mountain side, all torn and traversed by depth of defile and ridge of rock, yet never losing the unity of its illumined swell and shadowy decline...” Ruskin named Friar’s Crag as one of the three best views in Europe.1

“Ruskin’s great,” Julian agrees. “I’m not a Very Late Romantic; I’m a Modern Painter, I must be, I’m still alive. But you really should go to Coniston and see Ruskin’s watercolours.”

Onwards from Walla Crag, a contouring path looks down into Derwent Water, watches cloud-shadows in the hollows of Borrowdale, and then drops to Ashness Bridge. Or Biscuit-tin Bridge as it’s sometimes called because of its frequent appearance on the packaging of confectionery, not to mention calendars. “My father had to paint this a couple of times,” said the Painter, “and he hated it. Done to death.” Indeed, a worn patch on the ground indicates the exact correct Station from which to take the photograph for your Instagram.

“So is it still possible to paint Lakeland?”

“You have to ignore everywhere obvious. But that still leaves a lot. Here, for instance.”

We had wandered onto Grange Fell. The heathery bog of Joppelty Moss was interrupted by the sudden rock-knoll of Joppelty How. The same knobby shapes continued: presumably that was Pike of Stickle seen from somewhere it’s not normally seen from, and a corner of Bow Fell. “People want a picture where they can point to it, and say what its name is, and say they’ve been up it. You just have to ignore all that.”

Thomas West’s Station IV is Castle Crag: a particularly useful viewpoint as it allows you to compare the Beautiful (northwards) with the Sublime (in the South). Northwards, note the correct way in which Skiddaw ‘closes the prospect’; stand so the pines provide the proper framing. Check out the curly variety of the lakeshore, the serpentine windings of the river, the glimpses of Grange and of Crosthwaite Church, and those essential islands.

Now turn round. Southwards, all is Sublime: the Borrowdale Fells backlit by the afternoon sun, a massive composition in black and bright green. “This truly secreted spot is completely surrounded by the most horrid, romantic mountains that are in this region of wonders; and whoever omits this coup d’oeil, hath probably seen nothing equal to it.”

But beautiful be blowed. It’s in the oakwood below that Julian finds his preferred corner of Lakeland. And it’s not Horrid or Romantic or even particularly Picturesque. A quarry wall, splotched with greenish lichen, has a streak of ochre groundwater – a natural brushstroke from top to bottom.

And the final secret of being a Lakeland painter? It’s to paint other places as well. And so he combines the human-worked-over slate mine face of Honister Crag with the human-climbed-up North Face of the Eiger. And the 2007 ‘Earthly Powers’ exhibition, with those forgotten quarries of Castle Crag and Little Langdale, also included his five-day circumnavigation of the sacred Mount Kailash in the eastern Himalayas.

As night fell, we headed to the Dog and Partridge for a bar meal – a perfect end to a strenuous and educational day. Except that it wasn’t quite the end. Our two cars were still in the car park at the back of Latrigg.

And yes, heading up through the woodland, rather tired and with a pint of beer inside, we did get lost in the dark.2

You can see my review of Julian’s new book in he Great Outdoors magazine here.

And if your wallet, not to mention your wrists, aren’t quite up to the book itself (2.3kg; £40) then you can enjoy quite a lot of Julian’s work onscreen at his website . And don’t forget the retrospective exhibition at the Heaton Cooper Studio in Grasmere until the end of May…

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More LAKE DISTRICT posts

Director Emerald Fennell warns us right from the outset, with the scare quotes “Wuthering Heights” included in the film title.1 This 2016 version is a ‘sort-of’ Wuthering Heights. It takes one element of the original story, the doomed lovers, drops everything else (no older brother Hindley, no Mr Lockwood though we don’t mind losing him, the younger Cathy quite literally dies stillborn). And expands those doomed lovers to the max, over 2 hours and 16 minutes of high colour and a bit of high camp.

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Is this a okay way to do it? With 10 (count them!) previous versions to choose among, from Laurence Olivier by way of Ralph Fiennes to James Howson: yes, of course it is.

So what didn’t I like?

Compared with the original, and despite deploying some fine actors over more than two hours, the characters are pared down and simplified. Mr Earnshaw, Cathy’s father and foster-father of Heathcliff, becomes a drunken brute with spectacularly bad teeth. Edgar Linton turns into a moral strongpoint, losing the weakness Emily Brontë gave him. The observing servant Nellie Dean is transposed into a ‘Jane Eyre’ kind of paid companion, a sort of spiteful bestie for Cathy. In a quirky interpretation, Isobel Linton becomes a BDSM-type willing participant in her own degradation.

Nevertheless, it's Emily rather than Emerald who has Heathcliff digging up the grave and breaking into the coffin in order to snog Kathy's dead body.

One thing that did annoy me, though, was a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ type plot point. Heathcliff overhears ‘to marry Heathcliff would degrade me.’ At which point he storms off on his horse for the next five years without stopping for the rest of the sentence: ‘…. but I will love him for ever.’ That’s a plot device straight out of Harry Potter (okay, Romeo & Juliet also involves half heard messages).

So “Wuthering Heights” reduces complexity to spectacle. If you love Emily Brontë’s original, you’re in for an annoying two and a quarter hours. If you like spectacle, then you’re going to enjoy this film. Because the spectacle is spectacular.

But, you are asking: what about the all-important question of Jacob Elordi’s skin tone?

Emily Brontë’s various narrators describe Heathcliff as ‘black’ – which in the early 19th century, means dark-complexioned and black-haired. He resembles a gypsy, or a lascar (a seaman from south-east Asia). In the context of the novel, he seems to be Mr. Earnshaw’s previously unacknowledged son by someone who was gypsy or Romany.

In the 2011 ’Wuthering Heights’ by Andrea Arnold, he is played by two Black actors, Solomon Glave (as a boy) and James Howson. In a 21st-century context that is a very valid way of conveying Heathcliff’s otherness. Indeed, as a lover of Emily Brontë’s original, that one is my preferred film version (I’ve only seen 4 of the 11). But it is not compulsory: Arnold herself looked for an actor of Romany ethnicity for the part.

Heathcliff’s alienation is also to do with social class. This aspect Emerald Fennell amplifies up to the max, transforming Thrushcroft Grange into a extravagant mid-Victorian opera set.2

I’m very happy with Glave and Howson’s Black Heathcliff. But I’m equally happy with Ralph Feinnes’s or Jacob Elordi’s White one. And if anybody wants to cast Cathy and the Earnshaws as Asian against a White Heathcliff: that could work, I’d probably pay to watch that one.

So, to the two things I did like QQ about Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering”. First off, it wuthered. It really did wuther. Driving rain, blood-red sunsets, huge and overblown emotions: Emily would have enjoyed it (it’s a 15 Certificate, she wouldn’t have been too freaked out by the sex scenes). Great costumes – not authentic in any way, but great. Great facial hair on Heathcliff. Great teeth on Martin Clunes.

The other thing – well, you knew I was going to say this. The geology. It’s spot-on. Shot in Swaledale, gritstone cliffs and boulders like you’ve never seen them before. (Okay, some of them are made of fibreglass.) “My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary,” says Cathy in Emily Brontë’s book. And that rock is the Millstone Grit, the brown but rain-blackened harsh sandstone of the South Pennine moors.3

Accordingly, in the film’s (oversimplified) climax lines:

“I didn’t break your heart. You broke your own heart. And then you broke mine as well.”
“Kiss me again, and let us both be damned!”

These are played in close-up against a really nice piece of cross-bedded gritstone laid down in that mighty estuary delta that covered northern Yorkshire 320 million years ago.

Cross-bedded, gettit? When it comes to the rocks, Emerald Fennell has got it exactly right.

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more LITERATURE based posts

Drama! Conflict! Betrayal and treachery! All in pursuit of synthetic or indeed fake aims and motivations…. Who needs Reality TV when we’ve got real-life mountaineering?

Okay, so any proper mountain expedition already is a reality show. But now we can do it without getting the frostbite ourselves. And with the added excitement of some large cash prizes. So it’s hard to describe my excitement on learning that the already compelling ‘Traitors’ BBC format is now receiving a bandwagon-jumping ITV lookalike set on a fairly large mountain in the New Zealand Alps. It’s called ‘The Summit’, a format already a big hit in Australia; and it’s on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings as well as via ITV catchup.

One 8000ft mountain, 14 ordinary Brits, and a black-clad impresario called Ben. Brutal decisions to make, dangly bridges and intimidating ice slopes to overcome, £200,000 to win. All while being stalked by a sinister black helicopter against a fabulous backdrop of the New Zealand Alps. It’s Lord of the Rings, without the Orcs. (Well, we’re only on Episode 1. No Orcs – so far.)

Fourteen days, 100km, and 10 evenings in front of the TV, to reach the top. And if they don’t, nobody gets any of the cash. Meanwhile, every night around the convivial camp fire, someone gets voted off the team.

Trailer for the Australian version…

And straight away, the first big advantage of ITV – at least on the free catchup. Tune into the cultural zeitgeist by way of the advertising breaks.

Two little girls are wild camping in the forest and falling into rivers.
Daddy can we do this again next weekend?
Sure, says Daddy.
Thirty evocative seconds – shot for us on behalf of The Volkswagen Tiguan, for all life’s adventures.

Back to the format.

The overnight tents are set up ready; but the cash is to be carried in their backpacks. Two hundred grand in tenners weighs 16.5kg –­ not too bad, split among 14. But it’ll get heavier as the team shrinks. And if anyone wimps out, rather than getting metaphorically murdered by their mates, their share of the gold goes with them.

View Trailer 'The Summit'

Ben Shephard’s the ITV’s Claudia Winkleman equivalent. Luckily, he doesn’t have to dress up like a witch and explain the game rules in a slow voice with the words …. Spaced … one … second …. Apart .

And to add to the fun, not one of them has ever been on a hill.

There’s Warren, the former Ace from the former reality show Gladiators. His life fell apart, now he’s a Church of England vicar. Luckily, he seems to have kept up with the bodybuilding.

Dockers is going to let Charlett, 38 year old pole fitness instructor, think she’s the leader for now. But Dockers is middle management; Dockers has been in the army; Dockers sees himself as the Alpha Shark.

Miranda, 50 year old granny and cancer survivor, takes on the routefinding. “I’m a pre-Google Map girl. I can use a compass and a map.” Also she cooks a mean scrambled egg over the campfire.

The first ordeal is a Tibetan style two-wire bridge over the Paradise Gorge – a bit like the one at Steall below the Mamores, but with bigger drops and a safety harness.

Dockers, the alpha shark, hams it up to make it intimidating. Bad policy? Anyone who wimps out at this point takes their cash out of the game.

Drew, the one-armed marathon runner, copes with the danglewire just fine. Afton, fitness coach, is the first one in tears. And why was nervous social media influencer Tara left till last to make the crossing?

How to fight the Alpha Shark. (“You will require a chainsaw”)

Day two involves an even dodgier and more dangly footbridge.

Tom the London tour guide, amiable and empathic, strikes me as a natural leader. Straight away I mark him down as one of the eventual winners. But I think Charlett’s going to get voted out soon, she’s coming across really bossy and annoying. How is she going to react when she starts getting the votes against her?

The basic strategy ought to be simple. Get rid of the slow people who might give up anyway and take their £14,285 share out of the game as they go. Miranda the Granny’s already feeling worried, she’s definitely one of back markers – hence the deployment of scrambled egg expertise.

But for the alpha males, already, it’s about getting rid of rival alphas. And the very first vote dumps the collaborative natural leader I’d identified as the eventual winner. Meanwhile, the self-styled alpha shark who engineered that is getting backs up, and will be kicked out next rather than the Miranda, who’s slow but a real sweetie.

Mount Head, 2582m, is to be found in the Forbes range, somewhere north of Glenorchy. Not that Glen Orchy, obviously.1

The lower slopes are noted for not having any established trails; and off-path in the New Zealand Alps can get spiky. The upper slopes are NZ grade l.1, roughly Alpine PD–. There should be glacier crossings coming up, and some easy scrambling: the trailer does suggest a bit of iceaxe work ahead.

And you know, these sophisticated game engineers: they have managed to reproduce, in a synthetic and middling-convincing style, the tactics and personal conflicts of a real-life Himalayan expedition.

I’m not thinking now of the 1950s. Back in the 50s, yes, the basic conflict was already clear. The more you haul those loads to the South Col, the lower your chances are of getting onto the summit push. But the resolution of all that was really uninteresting. The likes of Wilfrid Noyce, Marlborough and Cambridge men as they were, loyally hauled loads to the South Col, left it to chance and Sir John Hunt to work out who’d be the ones going to the top. (The team was 90% Cambridge or Sandhurst: how many Cambridge/Sandhurst on the summit? Precisely zero.)

But the 60s brought individualism. The 60s brought ego. And so we see the likes of Whillans and Haston: both of them dead, and we shouldn’t speak ill of them now they’re gone. But somehow, was it just a quirk of the logistics that Haston and Whillans ended up at the top camp with the gear in place hauled up there by the likes of Martin Boysen, Pete Boardman, Pertemba Sherpa, and Mick Burke.

Meanwhile, what do we make of Doug Scott? Scott’s not obviously one of the nasty guys. Hippie ethos, later life devoted to building schools and medical centres in the Sherpa country. But to climb the climbs he did, that means drive and determination. And yes, in that tent with Haston was Doug Scott, up there for the Everest South Face summit push.

So where were the ITV team and the hidden cameras tracking the treachery when we needed them up on Everest’s southern slopes?

In the TV show there’s plenty of peril, but it’s always on the end of a safety rope. On the real mountain: well, that’s a bit more serious. Do you rescue this guy, who’s probably not going to make it anyway, and your own life’s in danger while you’re doing it?

The 1971 Dyhrenfurth expedition to Everest’s unclimbed SW Face. 30 climbers from 13 different countries, a near perfect Reality TV setup.

Indian climber Harsh Bahaguna, injured in a fall and with altitude sickness, is trapped in a storm at 7100m. After several hours trying to rescue him, the risks to the rescuers are becoming more and more obvious.

“I’m sorry, Harsh, old man,” says Whillans. “You’ve had it.”

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more on WHY CLIMB MOUNTAINS?

But now, these last weeks, lying in darkness in the empty house. Now I’m noticing it again, the foul air that drifts across my chamber from the dead folk below.

All of them, gone now. And I know, the good Lord in his mercy, he does not punish unjustly, and this tribulation … A man dying should be at peace, how much more so one like myself in holy orders. At peace, and not – well, was it then my own sin of Pride, all those years ago? That young man who renamed himself with a name that, a few short weeks from now, will be gone from the annals of the world for ever.

So, here in the dark, I’m writing it down on paper. It might help, to face these thoughts, and face them down. It helped my three daughters, always their pens scratching away, writing, writing, poor girls with nothing else to do in this lonely house among the gravestones.

Fifty years now, since I came to St John’s College of Cambridge, with its green courtyards and carved stone chapels –  arriving from our hut in County Limerick. A weedy, misshapen boy, how could I be otherwise, raised as I was on oats and potatoes. My Irish accent just waiting to be mocked. And bearing a name like Paddy Brunt.

So, in my pride, I changed it. Changed just a couple of vowels, to make a name that to anyone educated in the language of Homer would carry authority, a touch of grandeur, a seriousness. I named myself for the Thunder.

A sound behind me. My servant Martha has come to light the lamp. I read better now, since Dr. Harforth took his scalpel to my clouded lenses. Clouds cleared from my eyes only to let me see the grey vapours that sag across the grey moorlands; the three grey gravestones that soon enough will be the only record of the proud name I gave myself.

Close to the south window I read for two or three hours while the light is strongest. My own sermons, sometimes; but those are sadly disappointing. Once, in a dusty closet, I came upon some poems of my little Anne. Clumsy and poorly phrased, but how could they be else? My poor girls, living so far from any suitable companionship. Reading these rhymes of Anne’s, though, brought back her voice to my ears, and I prefer now to forget.

Behind me, the door closes; the lamp trimmed by faithful Martha, the smoky smell of the trimmed wick, and the shadows retreating a little into the corners of the room. None left living of my name: my son, weakened by the brandy and then he took to the laudanum as well. He lies below the floor of my church, has escaped at least the foulness of the overcrowded graveyard. Even my five daughters, all of them gone to the graveyard before me. And I alone to bear the name that in my vanity I gave to myself. And God in his infinite wisdom and mercy has ruled that it shall vanish with me, never heard again from the lips of men, no more dwelt upon in their thoughts.

So I sign it now for the last time: the name that I wrote for myself below the tall stone towers raised by long-dead English kings.

Fifty years ago I wrote it, in that book with its leather covers. Now God has reached down with his finger and rubbed it out again. My name wrtten like footprints across the peat, my name of the thunder. Spelling it out now: beta, rho, omicron, nu, tau, eta. Signed, and now forgotten for ever. Gone from the world, gone from the minds of men. In twenty years, in ten, in five: never heard again, never written down, unknown.

Βροντή – or, in the English letters: Brontë.

A name unknown.

(signed) Patrick Brontë.

The uncaptioned picture is Haworth Parsonage and its graveyard. The Brontës are having a moment in the UK just now with the launch of Emerald Fennell’s new film of ‘Wuthering Heights’.

Paddy Brunty did indeed gain a scholarship to St John’s College and rename himself. He lived to the age of 84, partially blind and with the rest of his family already dead. By 1861 though, ‘Jane Eyre’ was already a success, with ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ both on their way up. So he may well have realised that his new name would in fact live on.

He also set in hand repairs to the village sewers including the drainage of the graveyard, thus saving many hundreds of Haworth lives after his own death.

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more of my SHORT STORIES

Since we’re piggybacking on Ms Fennell, here’s my earlier post about Emily Brontë and an exciting moment on the moors

Late in the afternoon I come down an old green miners’ path, and cross the A68 at Carter Bar.

In 45 miles along the border ridgeline, this is the only road crossing. The main road to Edinburgh rises to a couple of lay-bys, passes between a saltire flag and a cross of St George, then dips between two hills into the slate-grey plains of the Scottish lowlands.

Into the evening, I head on along the wide, grassy ridgeline, gently rising over Leap Hill and Hungry Law. Where a corner of plantation comes up from the English side, I find shelter and deep heather for a night out under the trees. Hundreds of stars between the spiky branches; and then onwards into the early spring sunlight.

The wind whispers through the yellow grasses, scarcely louder than my own breathing; cool air moves across my face. The sky above is the chalky-blue of a wheatear’s egg: I came across a wheatear nest on the moorland once, more than 40 years ago now, but I think I remember the colour.1

It’s too early in the year for the wheatears themselves, along with their brown counterparts the meadow pipits. In another month the pipits will be asserting their property rights, filling the sky with twittering song like a budget version of the skylark, supposing skylarks themselves were a bit too posh and poetic for you. On the right, the hill curves down to the deep Coquet valley, and the spruce-tree monoculture of that corner of Northumberland. But on the Scottish side, long green valleys wind out between rounded hills; the low, golden sunlight is caressing their sexy curves.

Twenty miles ahead, invisible still in the blue haze of morning: the range’s high point, the Cheviot itself. Nobody else about; a gentle breeze and the sun shining; it’s a peaceful scene.

Well, but is it?

John Berger’s book ‘Ways of Seeing’: we read it a lot in the 1970s: but it’s still worth looking at today if you come across a copy or find it online. Right at the start, he shows you a cornfield: golden in the sunshine, a flock of rooks in an arcing curve above it, a sky painted in swirly colours. You can almost feel the rising warmth of an early autumn day.

Turn the page and you see the same picture again. But this time, it has a caption under it: “This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself.” And, of course, the whole picture changes. The black rooks are sinister, threatening. The swirly sky is confused, oppressive. Not the same picture at all – except, of course, it is.

And the Cheviots: the shapely, grassy-green, unpeopled hill range separating north-east England from south-east Scotland: it is, as I said, a peaceful scene. Isn’t it?

Well, here’s a Border ballad from five hundred years ago:

O Westren Wind, when wilt thou blow
The small rain down shall rain;
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!

Who’s the speaker here? According to the poet Robert Graves2, this is a fighter lying out on the moors, dehydrated from loss of blood and dying from his wounds.

For yes, the peacefulness here is actually a scene of warfare and desolation. In the White Mountains of Crete, there are whole villages abandoned and crumbling because of blood feuds between rival warlords. And it’s the same here, except the houses themselves have faded back into the landscape so you don’t even see them.

For nearly 300 years, from Bannockburn in 1314 to the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the hill country between England and Scotland was a war zone: a place where neither monarch ruled and it suited both of them to keep it that way. Instead, your security depended on your family warlord in your own local valley, and lasted only until a stronger warlord from across the Border, or just from the neighbouring glen, came over the hill on a moonlit night to burn down your cornfields and steal away your cattle.

My own family surname represents a Borderer who cleared out some time in the 16th Century and managed to start a new life as a sheep dealer down in Yorkshire. Those who stayed – they got killed, or they died of starvation after losing their livestock. Leaving behind the tall pele towers along the valley floors, and the ballads collected two centuries later by Walter Scott. A fine set of ballads they are at that, exciting horseback rides along the hill ridges, bloody battles, warlords leading ‘hot trod’ reprisal raids or treacherously reneging on their commitments made under the ‘black mail’ protection money racket.

The crossing at Carter Bar: that’s where one of the border battles took place, the Redeswire Fray. On a day of supposed Border truce, a quarrel over a card game erupted into a full International Incident. (My ancestor, Fatlips Turnbull of Bedrule, gets a mention in the ballad as the sensible chap who’d gone to the card game already wearing his leather armour.) On Windy Gyle there’s a pile of stones where Lord Russell got killed on a different truce day. At the hill foot near Morebattle (yes, the clue is in the name) stands the forbidding Cessford Castle: stronghold of the Kerrs, the most feared of the riding families on the Scottish side.

Two hundred years later, as Walter Scott was collecting the ballads3, the descendants of those local warlords found it more convenient to turn over the still-empty glens and hilltops to large-scale sheep. We hear about the Highland Clearances: the Lowland Clearances were the same, except that, thanks to those Reiving Times of previous centuries, there were fewer people to clear. So that now, the Cheviot is the big granite lump that’s the high-point ahead of me along the range: but the Cheviot is also a notably effective breed of upland sheep4.

It’s mid-afternoon when I reach the Cheviot (the hill, rather than the sheep). Being a big flat-topped lump of impermeable pinky-brown granite, the summit of the Cheviot is a swamp. I set off across it on a compass bearing, threading between the peat-pools, until the ground suddenly falls away at my feet. I’m looking down into a huge hollow of the hill: the fabled Hen Hole.

It’s haunted by the fairies; if you’re unlucky enough to get an earful of their magic music, you wander around in the Hen Hole for ever, until the wind blows over your white bones. It was also, of course, a handy secret spot for hiding any stolen cows. The stream runs out between walls of ragged granite, peregrine falcons up there, and a peaty waterfall at your feet.

Then a long walk out along the College Valley. Four lonely farmhouses, and little woods, and a silver river. But on either side, every second hilltop has a hillfort settlement: Ring Chesters and Great Hetha and Yeavering Bell. You can make a hill circuit visiting eight or ten of the things.

This must have been a busy, well peopled place – back in the Iron Age.

I trudge to the five bar gate in Wellington boots because it’s winter and the garden slopes very slightly downhill and ground water drains into a pond and the surrounding earth is spongey and moss covers small rocks. The Cheviots have become part of my landscape. Having recently moved from Cambridgeshire, England, to the Scottish Borders this range of hills is a welcome change to the flat landscapes I’m familiar with. The vista appears only when I’ve emerged from a clump of trees. Exactly what I will see is a daily surprise. On reaching the gate my view of The Cheviots is unobstructed; 180 degrees from the east through south to the west. I stand and stare. The land mass, a constant presence, rises gently in the distance. I survey its curves. Assess conditions. Study the light. Except when mist hangs in the air or fine mizzle shrouds them. Except when clouds hang low and touch the ground. Such days are frequent at this time of year. Yet I’m attuned to the strange invisible dormancy, sensitive to the effect the rolling land forms have on the weather, and I imagine the bone deep chill fought off by hikers in their protective layers of clothing and sturdy boots. I turn and listen to the soft sucking sound of my steps as I take the short path home and with every heartbeat I replay the scene in my mind. This daily ritual.

Meanwhile, for the corresponding cross-post across on Yasmin’s ‘Home and Place Writing’

Home & Place Writing

Could I Attempt a Climb in The Cheviots? Not Yet.

My aging body is learning about hills since moving to the Scottish Borders last year from the seriously flat fenlands of Cambridgeshire. There’s a street in our nearest town, Berwick-upon-Tweed, that appears to me as though it has a 45 degree incline but I don’t know how you would measure it…

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3 months ago · 1 like · Yasmin Chopin

In last week’s post, the first winter ascent of Mont Blanc was achieved by wealthy and independent Englishwoman Miss Isabella Straton, along with her local guide, the former shepherd Jean-Estéril Charlet.

Miss Straton on Mont Blanc

As a woman climbing mountains in the 1870s, Isabella Straton was unusual but not unique.1 But when it came to behaving in ways that Victorian ladies didn’t, she took it all a bit step further when, ten months after the climb on Mont Blanc –

First, however, a spot of sociology. (If you suspect that sociology consists of saying nothing much in extremly fancy language, then you’ll skip straight to the paragraph about the Petit Dru. Howver, I do undertake not to use the words ‘community’, ‘transgressive’, ‘holistic’, ‘agency’ and ‘intersectionality’.)

Sociology of the snows

At first sight, this female entryism2 into Alpinism does seem jolly odd. What could be more manly than clambering up vertical rock faces and extremely steep ice while conquering the summits with the aid of an extremely sharp little axe? Given the obstacles in the way of women taking a leading part in anything in the 1870s as obstacles go, Mont Blanc is a pretty big one.

Socially speaking, early-Victorian Alpinism was indeed an odd affair. Invented by the English upper-middle class and, like everything else the English upper-middles did, a boy-oriented, upper-class activity. Even so, it did take place several hundred miles east, and several thousand metres above, the normal social conventions. And, when you’re already on the other side of Europe, that does make it easier to break the boundaries.

Which did offer an opening for an independent and adventurous young woman like Miss Straton: a place where not all, but certainly some, of the Victorian gents were happy to drop their patriarchal attitudes and just be mountain-climbers3. And mountain climbing did also involve collaboration with a very different social group: those working-class Swiss, Italian and French chamois-hunters and hill farmers.

Okay, so that relationship was a financial one, master (or ‘Herr’) and employee. But once tied together on the climbing rope, up in themountain mists, these important distinctions began to blur. Half a dozen harsh candlelight breakfasts and sub-zero glaciers, a crevasse rescue or two, several sunrise moments on the airy pinnacles – and the relationship could become something much more equal. We are, after all, safely half a continent away from the stifling social conventions of early-Victorian England.

Leslie Stephen’s relationship with his guide Melchior Anderegg was warm and deferential – Stephen, that is, showing deference to his guide. In a hovel high on the side of the Täschhorn, Albert and Mary Mummery and their guide Alexander Burgener practised the quickstep together…

All right, so you’re ahead of me here. For an unmarried early-Victorian woman who’s got her own money and wants fun, this is an opportunity. Off to the Alps, on her own or with another fun-seeking woman, and hire a guide. Who, strange and socially different as he is, speaking a strange Savoyard patois as he does, ain’t an upper-middle-English early Victorian.

Doing the Dru

Meanwhile, her guide Jean-Estéril Charlet was also a bit special. His mountain skills went far beyond mere competence. Early on he formed ambitions on the Petit Dru, the spectacular rock needle seen above Chamonix.

During several solo attempts within a few metres of the gap between the Drus he developed the ‘rappel’, the technique of descending on a doubled rope and then retrieving it by pulling down on one end. Charlet despised the ladders used to conquer the bigger but easier Grand Dru: “That is not an instrument of alpinism!”

The Petit Dru couldn’t actually be soloed with the techniques of his time. In the end Charlet, though a guide himself, employed two others to climb in support for his first ascent in 1879. They used 100m of hemp rope, involving13 of his trademark descents ‘en rappel’ on the way down again. It’s a classic moment in the history of Alpine climbing, today graded at D– with rock up to 5c.

Perseverance rewarded

Turn your back on Mont Blanc towards the other side of the valley, and you’re looking at the smaller, but still inspiringly rocky, Aiguilles Rouges. Barely half the height of Mont Blanc, but technically far more demanding: serious rock and several unclimbed summits. Just the thing for a top guide and his adventurous client.

The write-up by Jean-Estéril is from the journal of the French Alpine Club: his companion discreetly named as “Miss S—”. The anonymity bestowed by the English establishment on their guides here reversed – for good reason, there’s already plenty of scandal about Miss Straton among the respectable folk back home.

Two attempts established the one likely route. They set off again in the 1875 season “with the inflexible resolution of getting to the top this time”.

We arrived, not without a certain amount of effort, at a somewhat rebarbative shoulder of which we had previously had occasion to make the dangerous acquaintance.4

Charlet has an oddly English-upper-middle way of writing: I suspect he’s been reading Leslie Stephen’s ‘Playground of Europe’ with its Victorian humblebragging. Isabelle, with good French from her upper-class education, may have had a hand in the write-up.

On the steep wall above the shoulder a hold unfortunately came away in his hand. He thought himself “out in the open air” along with his handhold, but managed to jump down a step and regain his footing.

Isabelle had considerable help from the rope over this section. But then the route continued as an airy ridge, and soon they were building their summit cairn.

The descent was equally tricky, using Charlet’s technique of the doubled rope for the steeper sections. “I promised myself, solemnly, to never again set out on this tough and dangerous ascent; but the promises of mountaineers, as we know, are on a par with promises of drunks.” And a few months later he was up it again with a pair of friends from Geneva. Today it’s graded D– 5c, with rock up to IV.

Here’s some footage of today’s standard South Ridge route:

They named their Aiguille for their own perseverance – not just in repeated attempts on the mountain, but in managing not to acknowledge the real nature of their relationship…

Because, ten months after their climb on Mont Blanc…

Miss Isabella, wealthy English heiress, and Jean the shepherd, carpenter and mountain guide, were planning their wedding.

There was just one thing to get straightened out first. Because even more precious than Jean-Estéril’s climbing comrade Isabella was his career as mountain guide. And the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix – well, it’s very strict about the proper conduct of its members.

Fortunately, it hadn’t occurred to anybody to write in a rule against getting engaged to (rather than engaged by) one’s client. And so it was that Jean-Estéril Charlet and Isabella Straton married on November 28, 1876. It was a big event in Argentière, involving sixteen horse-drawn carriages.

The convention-busting pair took the paired surname of Charlet-Straton. Though 38 at the time of their marriage, Isabella quickly fell pregnant. Two sons, the bilingually named Robert and explicitly English James, at the ages of 11 and 13 ascended Mont Blanc (in summer!) with their Dad on his 23rd ascent of it. Isabella, by then in her early 50s, stayed at home managing their hotel. At which the gentlemen alpinists, just so long as their wives weren’t along to be scandalised, could enjoy English levels of comfort and cleanliness along with the unique mountain knowledge of the proprietor and her husband.

Isabelle never returned to England, preferring to remain in the small Alpine village while founding an illustrious dynasty of guides, mountain-climbers and hoteliers. Where Jean-Estéril had created the technique of the ‘rappel’ on the doubled rope, their great-nephew, Armand Charlet, created the 12-pointer crampons and the associated technique that replaced step-cutting on steep ice and snow with a faster and therefore safer style of movement – which he demonstrated on the parent peak of both the Petit Dru and Isabella’s Aiguille du Moine, making 100 ascents of the couloirs of the Aiguille Verte.

Meanwhile, down in Chamonix, the 74-bedroom Hotel Pointe Isabelle, named for her first-ascent mountain, was run until recently by their descendants.

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With thanks to Ian Huyton of White Marmot, Argentière, for pointing me to several useful accounts of Isabelle and Jean-Estéril. Ian’s own (shorter) account of their lives is here.

The last day of January, exactly 150 years ago, a woman called Isabella Straton stands on Mont Blanc. Not on the summit itself – not in that bitter north wind with the powder snow in it, but a few steps down on the southern side. At her feet great drifts of snow dropped out by the wind on this more sheltered side: snow piled up in curves and drifts (and how right it was of her guide Jean-Estéril, choosing the windswept Bosses ridge against the more sheltered route of the Ancien Corridor, snow like this on the Corridor, impossible of course, never mind the avalanches….) The curves and hollows of the drifted snow, down to the top of the ice-towers of the Brenva Face; and below the ice-towers, nothing. Nothing but the Val d’Aosta running out into Italy; the mountains either side looking almost flat, so far below where she stands. And beyond them, the piled peaks of the Alps.

They’ve been here before, in summer: three times, in fact. But how different now! Not just the biting cold (–10° Fahrenheit, she’s checked the thermometer sewn to her rucksack, people always want to know the temperature). But the air, almost violet in colour, and so clear. She never thought it could be so clear. The jags along the skyline that she knows are the Écrins, and to the left, lit by the low winter sun, the white gleam 80 miles away: Monte Viso. They climbed that, her and cousin Emmeline, Jean-Estéril cutting steps up the snowfields and than all that delightful rocky scrambling, warm fingers in the sunshine, not like today. She waves her arms in wide circles to restore circulation, the way Jean has shown her, it wouldn’t do to let the hands freeze up again, they wasted enough time that way already on the Bosses.

Behind her, Jean-Estéril is shortening the ropes for the descent, rearranging the sacks, making sure the lantern is where he can get at it along with the flint and steel to light the thing. She doesn’t need to watch over him like a fussy client, Jean knows what he’s doing. She stamps her feet to keep out the cold, records the view in her memory: the fluted snow drifts, distant Monviso, the light. While preparing mentally for a tough bit of work, the high-speed descent of 1750 meters of windswept snow and broken ice, in gathering darkness.

It’s 3.30 pm when Jean-Estéril taps her shoulder to set off. 31st January 1875. They have just made the first-ever winter ascent of Mont Blanc.1

I was intending a short anniversary post about Miss Isabella Straton and her fine winter climb. But I’ve a horrid feeling Miss Isabella’s going to stretch towards the 2000 word mark again.2

In 1865, the 27 year old Mary Straton found herself alone in the world with an awful lot of money. A daughter of the landed gentry with estates in Gloucestershire and funds in government bonds, she had inherited an income of between £4000 and £7000.

Is that a lot? Given the stability of the currency in the 19th century, we can use the handy Jane Austen income assessor. Miss Straton was less well off than Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice (£10,000 a year) but about on the level of his friend Mr. Bingley. So yes, she was not just rich, but lord-of-the-manor rich. With just one catch. If she marries anyone, the husband gets the lot.

She didn’t marry anyone. Instead – 1865 was the year of the Matterhorn disaster – she changed her name from boring old Mary into Isabella and went off to the Alps to climb mountains.

She took along her second cousin Emmeline Lewis-Lloyd: not quite so posh as Isabella, from a family of gentleman-farmers from mid-Wales. Emmeline was equally independent-minded and somewhat scandalous, running her own pony-breeding business on the slopes of the Brecon Beacons. Together they made an early attempt on the Matterhorn, only four years after its first ascent; then made a first ascent of their own, the Aiguille du Moine. It’s a minor outlier of the Aiguilles Vertes, today graded at a modest PD (Peu Difficile, the second easiest Alpine grade). There’s the two abseils on the descent, but their highly competent guide was in the process of inventing the ‘rappel’ descent on the doubled rope. They also made that early ascent of Monte Viso (today PD, II+).

Their regular guide, Jean-Estéril Charlet, was a carpenter and shepherd from the village of Argentière outside Chamonix. Charlet became so much part of the team that Emmeline offered him some off-season work at the family farm in Wales.

Emmeline dropped out to concentrate on her ponies, while Isabella and her guide climbed the Aiguilles de Goûter, du Midi, de Blaitière, and another first ascent they named as Pointe Isabelle (PD+ III). They also climbed Mont Blanc, three times – but always in normal summer conditions.

At the end of 1875 a different lady climber with her guides, along with at least one party of gentlemen, were lurking around the grim little hovel at the Grands Mulets, hoping to snatch Mont Blanc’s first winter ascent. Isabella and her guide decided to join in the fun; it would be amusing to get there ahead of her friend and rival, Miss Marguerite Brevoort.3

Winter climbing has various disadvantages: the deep new snow, the iced up rocks, the avalanches. But mainly it’s the weather. And without reliable forecasts, you had to be up there at the Grands Mulets ready to go as soon as the sky cleared overnight and it looked like a clear day between the storms. Despite spending three nights at the hovel,4 and even one camped out on the glacier of the Grand Plateau, Meta Brevoort didn’t get her weather window. And neither did the party of the painter Gabriel Loppé a few days later.

But, after three days hanging about in the hovel, Isabella and her guides got lucky.

The hut is at 3050m, with a a serious 1750m of height gain before the summit. (Today’s climbers, from the cablecar at Aiguille du Midi, only have about 1000m of climb). They left at 4.30am, following the trail already broken by Gabriel Loppé’s party to reach the glacier shelf of the Grand Plateau three hours later.

The weather was magnificent, clear, and calm ; the thermometer (Fahrenheit) showed three degrees below zero. [– 20°C.] The Aiguille du Midi was golden with the rising sun, the snow plateau near it a most delicate rose colour, and the peaks of the valley of Chamouni were lighted up by the sun—a beautiful and strange contrast with the cold and severe aspect of the ever lonely, solemn, grand plateau.5

Despite the wind blowing plumes of snow off the Bosses du Dromédaire, they decided on that route rather than the more sheltered but trickier Ancien Corridor round to the left. Once up there, the windblown snow was firm under their hobnailed boots. But the wind itself was violent, and so cold that two of her fingers became frostbitten. The guides revived the fingers in the usual way by rubbing them with brandy and snow for three quarters of an hour. Delayed by that, they reached the summit at 3pm.

The thermometer showed 10 degrees below zero. The view was magnificent beyond all anticipation. The immense amount of snow on the Italian side added much to the grandeur of the scene. When we had given Chamouni an opportunity to observe that we had attained the summit [ie through the hotel telescopes], we went down a little on the Italian side, and remained for half an hour in comparative comfort, sheltered from the wind.

Isabella’s letter says nothing about the descent. But from a climbing point of view, this is the most interesting part of all. Leaving the summit at 3.30pm, they had just 80 minutes left before sunset, with perhaps an hour of mountain twilight after that: and 1750m of vertical descent to the austere comforts of the Grands Mulets. Against that, the pair had been climbing together now for 15 years. Charlet was himself one of the leading guides of the time, and he felt Isabella was up to it.

On the wind-blown snow, they will have descended at blistering pace, presumably by standing glissade: using the feet as tiny skis, leaning back on the point of the iceaxe for stability and for braking. Linked together on a short rope, this calls for strong nerves and fierce concentration. Descending towards the Grand Plateau, Charlet would be making high speed turns to swerve the crevasses, even leaping over the smaller ones – Isabella, elated, leaning into the wind of their downhill speed.

I see them perhaps even down the steepening of the Grands Montées in the very last of the light: getting their breath back, putting on any spare clothing, even taking a drink supposing their water bottles weren’t frozen solid. And then the broken icefield of the Petit Plateau: Jean-Estéril deciding against the lantern, the thin moon already behind the mountain but perhaps a few high clouds throwing down its light; that plus the stars giving a better view of the night glacier than the limited glow of the candle. In this more sheltered ground, they’d followed earlier tracks on the way up and these were probably still visible: the guide feeling with his feet for the hardened footprint-shapes within the blown snow. Behind him, Isabella needing to stay alert to follow his exact steps, careful with the rope that mustn’t jerk him from behind or, if too slack, catch against his feet.

They reached the hut at 7.30pm. Four hours down from the summit, less than half of that in daylight. Bloody impressive.

The English papers (such as the Pall Mall Gazette) failed to acknowledge her ascent; one of them even credited it to Mr. Loppé and his party. Which is why she wrote the letter to the Times about it.

So what did Isabella and her guide Jean Charlet get up to after that? Something rather surprising.

Which I’ll write all about next Wednesday.

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Isabella’s ascent re-enacted in 2019

But now and occasionally, in my life on the hills, there comes along an innovation that I’ve been entirely happy not needing to have – and almost at once, can’t believe I ever managed without.

This happened, indeed it did, with fleece clothing. Wooly jumpers: okay, they got rather heavy when wet, and really did absorb an awful lot of water, and wasn’t it his wooly jumper when it got caught in his karabiner that led to Tom Patey’s fatal fall off that seastack? But if it’s good enough for a sheep, let alone Tom Patey, then it’s altogether adequate for the likes of me.

Again, a few years after that: waterproof trousers. Legs get wet, legs get dry again: this seemed entirely satisfactory. And crampons? On Scotland’s icy gullies? Whatever’s wrong with the noble art of stepcutting with the axe?

But most noticeably of all – because it’s come about, in the history of hillwalking, six separate times over: is the matter of maps.

Coleridge and his sketch map

When the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was planning his nine-day hike around the Lake District, he had to make the map himself. Which wasn’t a problem. There were people right there in Keswick who knew the way across to Wasdale: he collated all their information and sketched it together in his notebook.

Okay, so he got Ennerdale and Wasdale the wrong way around. Which didn’t matter much; finding the way was part of the fun of it, and the shepherd at the top of Eskdale could tell him how to get over into Duddon. And yes, he did lose half a day on the Dunnerdale heights, ending up back where he started off. So what? He was having a grand time of it all the same.

Jonathan Otley’s magnificent new map

But then in 1818 came Mr. Jonathan Otley, clockmaker of Keswick. Not the first to make a Lakeland map: but Jonathan was a trained surveyor, and also had a portable barometer for measuring heights with.

And he produced absolutely the last word in maps. I mean, it had everything on it: all seven radiating dales in exactly the right order. It even clarified which was which out of Sca Fell and Scafell Pikes.

Which, was this even a good idea? With farm incomes falling all the time, the shepherds of the various valleys were supplementing their income with sixpences and shillings from guiding the influx of new tourists from the cities. If it was too easy for those tourists to find out where Great Gable was, then this might have serious economic consequences.

Whatever, this map has it all Every single hill – what more could any of us possibly want for finding your way among the Lakes?

Bartholomew’s with the contour lines.

Meanwhile, away up in the Scottish Highlands on a hill called Schiehallion, a mathematician called Charles Hutton is busily inventing the contour line.

And Otley is obsolete. Actually having the shapes of the hills, right there where you could see them on the map in your hand. And colour shading to help indicate the heights as well as looking so richly greeny-brown. And those cool contour lines, every 250ft you go up. And spot heights! We never asked for spot heights, but they’re so handy aren’t they?

Here’s a bit ofmy Grandpa’s map that guided all his climbs and fellwalking through a lifetime of the Lake District. No more wandering down the wrong side of Esk Hause and ending up at the Woolpack Inn. With a compass and a bit of attention to where you’ve got to, no need to get lost again, ever.

Sometimes, you can even still find the way when the cloud comes down.

One-inch from the Ordnance Survey

And then, in the years between the wars…. And now, honestly, this is not just the best map there’s been so far, but, in all essentials, the best map there could ever be. Superb clarity, enormous one-inch-to-the-mile scale, those useful National Grid markings even if they are in those foreign kilometre things, a precision contour interval of just 50 feet, a soothing blue and brown colour scheme and classic Gill Sans italic fonts.

And if the big hills of Wester Ross, all shrouded in their rainclouds, haven’t been entirely surveyed yet – those big flat ridgetops on Beinn Dearg, not in any way resembling the real-life mountain… It all just helps keep us alert and paying attention. We need at least a little bit of original exploration in our lives, no?

Harveys

And then, some time in the 1960s, the Cuillin of Sky lose much of their mystery. Alas: it’s the end of the one place in the UK where you could wander as lost as you liked, without any clue at all as to where you might be up there or which of the spurlines descending into the mist might represent the continuation of the fabled Main Ridge.

A Harvey map, with its intimate contour detail, all clear enough you could even read it in the rain, even read it without your glasses: what more could we possibly desire?

Outdooractive and other apps

Well, perhaps we’d like a map that actually shows on it our current position, using a little blue dot, that would be tasteful? Obviously impossible – except, sometime around 2010, it went from impossible to obligatory.

Obligatory for some, at least. Not for us map and compass men and women.

Which, any road, just has to be the end of the line so far as mapping and routefinding goes. Your map not only knows the exact shape of the surroundings, and pinpoints exactly where you are in it. It’ll even tell you which way to turn, and give a little beep if you’re more than 10m off your route. Ten years ago, never knew we needed it. Ten years from now: criminally irresponsible to be using anything else. But from here on out, no further improvements can be imagined.

Well, you know: that’s exactly what they were saying back in 1821 about Jonathan Otley’s magnificent new map.

So what do you think? Is your map or app cleverer than you are yourself? Will future phones do the walking for you so you don’t even have to get wet?

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Schiehallion stands high
Almost touching the sky

Kinlochrannoch Lullaby – Scottish traditional

Gravity. Yeah, it’s heavy, man. Any two bodies in the Universe attract one another with a force that depends only on the mass of each of them and how far they are apart. The Universal Gravitational Constant, written as G, is the force between two objects of 1kg each, at a distance of one metre. (Yes, that’s a very, very small number…) Once we know G, we know the force between any two objects in the entire Universe.

A mass of 1kg is attracted by the Earth with a force of 9.8 Newtons, and the distance to the Earth’s centre is 6370km. This allows us to determine G, that Universal Gravitational Constant – if only we knew the weight1 of the Earth2.

The Earth orbits the Sun at a distance of 150,000,000 km, taking 365 and a quarter days to go around it. Again, this allows us to determine the mass of the Sun – if only we knew that Universal Gravitational Constant.

And continuing from there, we can weigh every item in the Universe – once we know the mass of just the Earth. (Why should we want to know the masses of the distant galaxies? Come off it, of course we want to know the masses of the galaxies.)

The shape of Schiehallion

In the year 1774, Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, worked out how to weigh the World. You do it using a plumb line, with a very large mountain as counterweight.

They sent a surveyor called Mr Mason3 to look at some mountains. The one he chose was Schiehallion, above Loch Tummel, because of its nice symmetrical shape. They built two small observatories, half way up each side of the hill. They pointed telescopes straight up the plumb lines, and used the stars to work out how much the two angles diverged. That came out at 0.0016 degrees. This meant that Planet Earth’s gravity was about 36,000 times as strong as Schiehallion’s.4

That was the easy bit. And already enough to confirm that the Earth wasn’t hollow, which one or two oddball types still thought it might be.5 He’d also shown that Newton’s ‘Universal Law of Gravitation’ doesn’t just apply to planets but also to tiny little items like Schiehallion. As for working out the exact mass and centre of gravity of Schiehallion itself: well that was just a matter of map-making and some sums. So Maskelyne went back to Greenwich to go on with being the Astronomer Royal.

Despite its elegant symmetrical shape, it took another two years to survey the mountain, through a couple of particularly nasty winters.

‘The business was in a manner quite new, which laid me under the necessity of inventing and describing such modes of computation as should be proper to be applied in so important and delicate a business.’6

Specifically: to make sense of the thousands of altitudes and angles, mathematician Charles Hutton hit on one simple, but clever, idea.

This method was the connecting together by a faint line all the points which were of the same relative altitude … the relative altitude of all the parts being known; and as every base or little place had several of them passing through it, I was thereby able to determine the altitude belonging to each space with much ease and accuracy.

Yay! He just came up with the contour line.

And after that, the sums…. Divide the mountain into little vertical prisms and apply Newton’s inverse-square law to each one. A calculation that would take even a modern computer several milliseconds. It took poor Mr Hutton two years.

And at the end of it all: the average density of Planet Earth is 1.8 times that of Schiehallion. Or to put it another way, the Earth weighed in at 427 billion Schiehallions.

And now, the final step. To get to the mass, we just need to multiply that by the density of Schiehallion, as measured in tonnes per cubic metre.

Well, you just need to look that up. ‘Common rock’ has density of 2.5. Which gives us, at last, the weight of the World at 4.9 sextillion tonnes.

That’s 4,900,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes. Add three more zeros if you’re counting in kilograms.

“Common rock has density 2.5”. As a mathematician it wasn’t Charles’s business to actually visit the hill up there in rainy Scotland. Still less go round picking up lumps of Schiehallion’s quartzite and schist to hang them on thin strings from a spring balance while dangling them into water.

And to be fair, geology hadn’t properly been invented yet. Rocks were still just rocks.

.All the same, if he had done that thing with the spring balance and the string, he’d have found that the density of Schiehallion rock is around 2.7, which would have got him even closer to the real weight of the World – which is actually a smidgeon under 6 sextillion tonnes.

So, he was 15% too low. But anyway, he got the right number of zeroes after the decimal point. And so showed that the centre of the earth is made of something at least twice as heavy as ‘common rock’.

The only thing he could think of that was heavy enough would be a big lump of metal, such as iron maybe?

Well, well, Mr Hutton. You got that spot on!

Schiehallion stands high

The approach from Loch Tummel towards Loch Rannoch gives the classic cone-shaped view of Schiehallion – seen best in late autumn with the snow-topped hill standing above the blue loch and golden birch trees.

Schiehallion’s shape, as appreciated by the astronomers, makes for a straightforward ascent route: the very good path built by the John Muir Trust up the eastern end, for the 2km of stony ridgeline and the bare rock at its top. Its isolated position, as also appreciated by the astromoners, makes for great views. So Schiehallion is a busy hill. That straight-up-and-down from the car park carries 20,000 walkers a year, according to the John Muir Trust. The walk of 9.5km and 750m (6 miles and 2500ft) takes about 4 hours.

I've preferred a roundabout approach, up the wilder western end. This leaves the stony ridgeline, and the JM Trust's good path, as treats for the downward journey.

Schiehallion is celebrated in science, in scenery: but also in song.7 ‘Kinlochrannoch Lullaby: it was recorded by The Jacobites in 1987, but the song is older than that. “Let me paint you a picture of mystery” – oh go on, after all those difficult sums you deserve a slightly tinkly song about a fine, fine mountain.

Kinlochrannoch Lullaby

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In August 1803, the poets Coleridge and Wordsworth along with William’s sister Dorothy left the Lake District for a tour of Scotland. Six days into their trip they reached the Falls of Clyde, near Lanark. In those days the river was undammed, and the falls more impressive than today.

“How majestic!” remarked a tourist standing beside Coleridge. The poet turned to him with gratitude.

“Thank you, Sir! That is the exact word for it,” Coleridge was starting to say – when the man continued: “Yes! How very sublime and beautiful!”

Today we probably don’t even see the point of the story. But in the inn the night before, Coleridge and the Wordsworths had been trying to pin down the precise meanings of ‘beautiful’, ‘pretty’, ‘picturesque’ and ‘grand’. In the 1800s, Landscape Appreciation was one of the fine arts. Different sorts of scenery were looked at in specific and different ways. And ‘Sublime’ meant, in a certain sense, the exact opposite of ‘Beautiful’.

The Beautiful was what soothed and induced contentment. A small farm in fertile country was beautiful, the curves of a woman’s body, the landscape of Windermere. Sometimes considered as a particular aspect of the Beautiful, but sometimes contrasted with it, was the Picturesque. The Picturesque was correctly composed, following the paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicholas Poussin, with foreground, a lake to lead the eye into the composition, and mountains closing the end of the scene. Detail was to be rugged, with tree stumps, chunky boulders, and the occasional ornamental bandit. An ordered garden is beautiful, explained Lakeland travel-writer William Gilpin in 1792: a wilderness is picturesque. The face of a young maiden may well be beautiful: that of an old hag is picturesque. We can see the landscape arrangements of the Picturesque (albeit usually without the bandits) in any picture postcard or Lakeland calendar; and more especially in the scenery about Derwent Water.

But Borrowdale was better: for Borrowdale was Sublime.

The roar of a lion; darkness and huge empty spaces; Satan as described by Milton in Paradise Lost – all these are examples of the Sublime. So are earthquakes, thunder, and the great emptiness of the sea. We can be sure about it thanks to a detailed handbook, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, written by the young philosopher Edmund Burke in 1757. In the presence of the Sublime you felt a very particular emotion: “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature… is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all is motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” The eyes open wide, and a great silence comes in from the mountainsides. Burke describes it as “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling”.

It was easier in the 18th Century to find scenery scary. Even if actual bandits were by that time extinct, there were some very wild and unshaven characters around the slate mines of Honister. Getting lost in the hills was very much easier to do, and even the rockfalls, traditionally feared by anyone venturing beyond Grange and through the Jaws of Borrowdale, do seem to have actually happened in those distant years. One came within 24 hours of obliterating Wordsworth in the Wallowbarrow Gorge.

For my book the Riddle of Sphinx Rock1 I set out to explore the different ways of going up Great Gable – including the 18th-century landscape-appreciation way. Gilpin and other guidebooks make my starting point obvious. It has to be what Keswick residents called the ‘Devil’s Chamber Pot’; the place where the poet Thomas Gray turned back in terror: sublime, scary Borrowdale. As I start out from Seathwaite, on a frosty February evening, I know there won’t be bandits; I am fairly confident of not getting lost. What I’m not sure of is whether I can get up the interesting-looking northern ridge of Base Brown in the last of the daylight. There is also a piquant uncertainty about the night. Will my sleeping bag and nylon bivvy, weighing less than 3lb between them, keep me bearably alive through a night of brisk wind and several degrees of frost?

The ridge to Base Brown is blocked by a crag, half-seen in the evening, with the Hanging Stone standing against the grey sky above. In the last light, I find the little path around on the left, a path that contours above a Borrowdale that’s now almost invisible. Somewhere on the slope, the night wind rattles the bare twigs of a rock-grown rowan tree. Up on the ridge crest again, there’s no need for the torch: the full moon is shining through the clouds, picking out the old snow among the stones. Behind, a last set of headlights creeps down the valley and is swallowed by the Jaws of Borrowdale. A couple of faint farm lights, and otherwise I could be all alone on the planet.

So, did I experience the special tremble? Well, there was a bit of shivering: the air was well below freezing, and the wind was brisk. Eighteenth-century emotions are not easy to retrieve, and Lakeland, even on a February night, is no longer a very scary place. But yes: gazing up at the clouds flapping like washed sheets across the moon – looking across the black hole of Borrowdale to the huge shape of Glaramara, and the pale shine of the snowfields, and the gleam of ice on the Great End buttresses. The mind goes very quiet, the eyes open wide. And it’s still there; not particularly pretty, no reaching for the camera for any picturesque picture … just sublime.

The Sublime in landscape appreciation was invented in the 1750s. As early as 1803, beside the Clyde, ‘sublime’ was losing its meaning and becoming just another word for nice. But fifteen years later, Byron and his friends went off to Switzerland to appreciate the mountain scenery in the way that was, after Coleridge and Wordsworth, pretty much compulsory for any poet. After it got dark, they sat down to tell some spooky stories: Byron has some ideas about vampires; Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. And the idea that what’s scary and terrifying is also some sort of fun – that idea moved across from landscape-appreciation into literature. From where it has never gone away – except to make itself even more compelling in the cinema.

Fellwalking today is about healthy exercise, along with being interested in the geology and the mountain ringlet butterfly. It’s testing your vigour around the Lakeland 3000s walk, and your nerve up the Napes Needle. But it’s also about the view. The picturesque and the pretty are all around us: the field patterns of Wasdale, the Langdale Pikes rising above Elterwater, the swans on the Rothay. But the hugeness – the scariness – these are not to be found on the trodden path, nor seen from under the hood of the warm and waterproof jacket, in bandit-free Borrowdale.

But let darkness fall, and the frost, and we people are once again a whole lot smaller than Scafell. The cosiness and the pretty scenes are actually an illusion. It’s the grandeur and the fear that are real.

The continent we walk on is itself drifting across the ocean at an inch or two a year, but with such inexorable power as to raise a Himalaya when it eventually crash-lands on the other side. Slantwise gullies show how Great Gable was cracked across when Scotland encountered England 400 million years ago. Twenty miles below us – closer under our feet than Penrith is from Scafell Pike – red-hot melted metal supports the underside of the mountain. Take out the compass, it moves in sympathy with the world-wide flow of the iron under that thin continental crust.

Then night falls, and shows us how the Earth spins at 800mph under the stars. Every few minutes a meteor streak reminds us of the big one, the comet that’s coming – maybe this time next year – maybe at 9am on 11th June ten or twenty or a hundred million years in the future, to end (if nothing else has by then) the great age of the humans, and give the planet back to the beetles and the bacteria; and to the mountains.

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