This one’s something I read earlier this year, posted now as a Christmas recommendation for anyone who knows a hillwalker. It’s the sort of book that has something for anyone who is even vaguely interested in British hills.
It is subtitled A View of 16 British Mountains. The sixteen mountains are: Beinn Dearg (the one round the back of Liathach), the Black Mountain, Cadair Idris, Crib Goch, Cnicht, Cross Fell, Shiehallion, Ben Loyal, An Teallach, a selection of Assynt hills, Askival, Ladhar Bheinn, Loughrigg Fell, Great Gable, Bein Macdui and Ben Nevis. So a fairly mixed and scattered sampling from across Britain.
Simon Ingram is editor of Trail magazine, so no stranger to outdoor writing.
Now, I have to confess I’ve never read Trail in my life. I pick it off the newsagent shelf occasionally, leaf blankly through its brightly coloured pages, sigh, and put it back again. I’m a member of that a silent majority of hillwalkers who don’t read outdoor magazines and don’t endlessly prowl gear shops. We wander the hills wearing the same old gear every year until it wears out, and then we venture grudgingly into a shop to try to buy something new that’s as close as possible in every way to the old stuff we had before. We are suspicious of any hill activity that involves the words “challenge” or “adventure”, because we look on the hills as places that offer comfort, quiet and contemplation. If we find ourselves being “challenged” or “having an adventure”, then we’re pretty sure we ‘ve just done something wrong, and we try very hard to learn from the experience so that it doesn’t happen again.
So, to be honest, Ingram’s descriptions of his own hillwalking experiences seem a little overwrought to me. He seems constantly to be having adventures—setting off late, flirting with terrible weather, being forced to change plans late in the day, and fretting about gear and water and navigation and exposed ridges. I kept feeling that he could avoid all this if he just, well, sorted himself out a bit better. His description of An Teallach, in particular, is so full of episodes of awe and foreboding that it reads more like a trip to the Gate of Mordor than a day hike up a lovely big mountain.
Fortunately, the sixteen mountains aren’t actually what this book is about. They are just the narrative hooks from which Ingram hangs fascinating discursive essays on pretty much all things hill-related: mining and rock-climbing, natural history and weather, painting and poetry, history and geology. He has a great sense for a telling anecdote and a colourful character. We read (among many other things) about the Welsh potholers squeezing through into a new chamber, only to find themselves in a disused mine being used to store dynamite; the marvellously improbable nocturnal encounter between Bill Tilman and Jim Perrin in the summit shelter of Cadair Idris; Norman Collie‘s panic attack on Ben Macdui; the alligators on the Hebridean island of Rum; and the odd characters involved in running a weather station on Ben Nevis and a physics experiment on Schiehallion.
So, apart from intermittent twinges of worry about the sheer intensity of Ingram’s relationship with some of his chosen hills, I enjoyed every page.
Comfort, quiet and contemplation Looking down Glen Affric from Mullach Fraoch-choire, Summer 1980
I awoke to the shrilling of greenshank and the loud piping of oyster-catchers. My holiday had indeed started. Not a breath of wind stirred and the green hills around me were overdrawn by a grey line of settled clouds. There was no knowing what the day would bring forth, so I had a leisurely breakfast, picking up my binoculars now and then to watch a sandpiper or redshank go about its business. From the wood came songs of blackbirds and thrushes, and the little chorus of wrens and willow warblers thrown in made a lovely little choir.
Weir’s idyllic awakening is something that many of us who own a tent have shared. But none of us will ever again be able to share Weir’s specific experience. Here’s why:
The car park below the Mullardoch dam (Click to enlarge)
The monstrous Mullardoch dam blocks off all but the most determined access to upper Glen Cannich. Behind it, Loch Mullardoch stretches westwards for 15 kilometres. Access to the surrounding hills is limited to one truly horrible path that stretches partway along the north side of the loch: muddy, undulating, and in places obliterated by landslides. The south side of the loch has no access paths at all.
A walker standing at the outlet of the Allt Coire a’ Mhaim, eight kilometres west of the dam on the north shore of the loch, has a certain sense of commitment—the way back to the car park is either up and along the An Riabhachan ridge or back along that horrible path. (Usually, as this realization sinks in, it starts raining.)
But it wasn’t always like this. Before the dam was built in 1951, Loch Mullardoch was a mere seven kilometres long. A single-track road ran along its north side. There were cottages by the roadside at Mullardoch, Cosag (or Cozac, or Cossock) and Coire na Cuilean. At the head of the loch, flatlands opened out. There were two lodges (Old and New Benula Lodge) and multiple estate buildings at the loch-head, and a bridge spanning the broad river that entered the loch at its western end. From the estate buildings, a path ran through Caledonian pine forest most of the way back along the southern shore.
Old Benula Lodge and outbuildings, looking across the river from above the road. The right of way continues up towards Loch Lungard in the distance. Beinn Fhionnlaidh looms in the background. Picture from Iain MacKay’s privately-published “The Last Highland Clearance”, uncredited in the original.New Benula Lodge from the road. The Old Lodge lies on lower ground to the left. Coire Mhaim, below An Socach, is in the background. Picture from Iain MacKay’s privately-published “The Last Highland Clearance”, uncredited in the original.
The road continued westwards on the south side of the river, and then along the southern shore of lost Loch Lungard (now submerged and assimilated into Greater Loch Mullardoch). Eventually it reached the settlement of Lungard—a few cottages tucked under Meall Shuas. Beyond that, a path went farther west, crossing the watershed and letting down into Glen Elchaig.
Ordnance Survey map of Lochs Mullardoch and Lungard, before the dam. (Click to enlarge)Shoreline after the dam, from OS Open Data. (Click to enlarge)
The whole system made a direct link between Kintail and Cannich. It was cycleable throughout its length—or at least, it was reputedly cycled on at least one occasion, by a Reverend Mackay, in 1910, in a blizzard.
The hydroelectric scheme submerged all these paths and buildings as far west as, and including, Lungard. Beyond that point there’s just a sad little stump of path, still making the connection to Glen Elchaig via Iron Lodge.
Bartholomew’s 1912 “Survey Atlas of Scotland”, which best shows the buildings in the area. The current Ordnance Survey shoreline is marked in blue. (Click to enlarge)
A few traces remain: a couple of gable-ends and a chimney standing on the shore of the new loch at Am Mam (NH 123303); tumbled walls of two bulidings at Dorus a’ Choilich (NH 102288); and some ruins at the head of the loch, beautifully photographed by a pair of valiant canoeists in their blog here (the relevant photos start about halfway down the page). From the background in these photographs, I think they’re the remains of the buildings at Gobh-alltan (NH 088291).
The completeness of the inundation may well be the explanation for why the “Hydro Board” was not required to re-establish access to upper Glen Cannich, as it did in other cases—there was simply no functional community left in the upper glen to require that access.
The water level of the new loch is variable, and the effect of changes in level is most marked in its upper reaches, where the surrounding terrain slopes gently. The level seems to have been at its highest shortly after the dam was placed, notably in the OS seventh series mapping of 1961. It’s now lower than the shoreline marked on current OS maps. We can switch back and forth between a range of map coverage at the National Library of Scotland‘s wonderful selection of georeferenced maps and overlays. (All the maps I’m using here come from that source.)
Here’s the shoreline from the OS seventh series mapping of 1961, superimposed as a blue line on Bartholomew’s 1902 map, which dates from before even the Old Lodge was built:
(Click to enlarge)
And here’s a recent shoreline traced from the Bing satellite map at the NLS:
(Click to enlarge)
With the fall in water levels, it seems that the ruins of Lungard should have emerged into the air again. And they have. Here’s the OS 1:10,000 map of the settlement during the 1900s:
(Click to enlarge)
And here’s the Bing satellite view of the current shoreline in the same area (NH 103300). The line of the river is pretty much the same, and gives you orientation:
(Click to enlarge)
In Tom Weir’s Highland Days, he describes a five-day stay in Glen Cannich in the 1930s, from which I quoted at the head of this piece. He hitched a “bumpy ride” in someone’s car from the Glen Affric Hotel to Benula, and then set up camp close to the Lodge to explore the surrounding hills. Even in May, months before the stalking season, the keeper was forbidden to accommodate climbers in the Lodge, but that didn’t stop him leaving eggs, milk and scones beside Weir’s tent of a morning.
One day the rain went off at 3pm, so Weir nipped out to quickly bag An Socach—nowadays rather more difficult to access!
In More Days from a Hill Diary, 1951–80, Adam Watson describes driving up to the New Lodge in 1951 (he must have driven past the construction work on the dam), and taking the zig-zag path behind the lodge straight up on to Sgurr na Lapaich, before making a circuit on cross-country skis over An Riabhachan and then down the Allt Socrach to the lodge again.
If I make a rough plot of the routes taken by Weir and Watson (Weir gives little detail, especially of his return routes), it’s a fine indication of the outdoor possibilities that are now lost to us beneath the waters of Loch Mullardoch:
But any ground that is not quite flat is of some interest to a mountaineer and the humblest hill is not to be despised, least of all by a mountaineer long past his youth.
I chose “Walking” as the label for this category after rejecting “Climbing” (which suggests a degree of rope-dangling I don’t aspire to) and “Hiking” (which would tend to exclude the occasional short opportunistic wander, of which I’m quite fond).
I’ve been walking in the Scottish Highlands for more than forty years. Sometimes I walk between the hills, sometimes I walk over the hills. For almost all of that time I’ve had no agenda whatsoever, which goes some way towards explaining how, in all that time, I’ve failed to complete any of the various lists of hills maintained by the Scottish Mountaineering Club and others.
I acquired an agenda last year. It’s because of this map, which used to hang on the wall of my office at work, and which now graces our study at home:
Possibly the best OS map, ever
This is the 1964 Ordnance Survey inch-to-the-mile, coloured, shaded-relief map of the Cairngorms Mountains—as the caption says, probably the most beautiful map the Ordnance Survey have ever produced. As a boy, I used it while I crept around the hills in the bottom right-hand corner. It was abandoned, but still loved, when the Ordnance Survey went metric. Eventually it acquired a frame, as you see it now.
It contains 46 Munros, 19 Corbetts, 5 Grahams and 6 Marilyns below the height of 2000 feet. And it occurred to me last year that I’d climbed pretty much all of them, over the years. So some time in the next few years I’m going to try to polish off the remaining four.
Apart from that, I’m going to carry on with my customary random progression around Scotland. I’ll report back here.
