Why does anyone write about mountains? Afterall, they are only huge lumps of rock, frequently cold, mostly dangerous and often really difficult to get to. Up until the 19th century people knew how to treat mountains, they avoided them. They took the view that mountains were only things that get in the way and it was best to go around them. Mountains were places where demons lived and there were fierce creatures that would try and eat you that’s if you didn’t freeze to death of course. It was permanent winter up there and winter was something to be endured not enjoyed.
Read my new Novel Sky Dance
In the 19th century people shivered through the dark cold nights of December. If you were poor, and most people were, when it got dark you went to bed as you couldn’t afford candles to light the place and it was bloody freezing anyway. The idea that anyone would go somewhere that was cold and inhospitable by choice would have seemed ludicrous to them. The attitude of folk to mountains is well summed up in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson when he recounts the pair’s journey through the Scottish highlands. After crossing Rannoch moor the spectre of Buachaille Etive Mor (meaning the Herdsman of Etive), arguably one of the most spectacular mountains in Scotland, rose before them. Judging by the number of biscuit tins this mountain appears on, it is the pin up girl of the Munros. Boswell was astounded and said something like, “Crickey look at the size of that thing!”
Johnson simply sniffed, “It is, sir, merely a considerably protuberance.”
Mountains are something that anyone of sound mind would avoid yet the human race seems fascinated by them. So much so that there are heaps of books on the subject including some of my own. There are accounts of the lives of famous mountaineers, histories of ascents, guide books by the score. So why would anyone want to write about them? The truth is that nobody does.
What people actually write about is their relationship with these high and scary places, so, as with all writing, the mountain writer is actually writing about himself. We write about our fear, how we overcame it, we write about the feelings that these wild and often magnificent places evoke in us.
Books that inspired me 
Many years ago, as a fledgling ice climber and just before I moved to Scotland I bought a copy of Ken Wilson’s Cold Climbs. This book became my bible. It was filled with magnificent accounts of the great ice climbs of the day. Classic routes that fired my imagination. I would read over and over tales of climbs like Point five and Zero Gully, imagining myself poised on the front points of my crampons teetering over hundreds of feet of air. Climbing has moved on since that book was written, techniques have changed and different climbs inspire a new generation of climbers yet still that book is a great classic now sadly out of print.
For me one of the great reads of mountain literature is Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void. In this book Simpson recounts his miraculous escape from a massive fall on a remote mountain in south America. The fall should have killed him, the cold should have killed him, despair should have killed him. It is a book that is at once terrifying and also inspiring when one sees the indomitable human spirit in its determination to survive. It’s one of the few climbing books that made my hands sweat while I was reading it, sweaty palms, the climber’s indication of fear, has to be the ultimate accolade for any adventure book.
I’m about to publish my third book, Sky Dance, and writing this book has marked a change in my
writing and my attitude to the mountains and wild place of the British Isles. My first book, The Last Hillwalker Kindle edition, rereleased by Vertebrate Publishing in paperback on the 5th September 2019, charted my life in the mountains for over forty years. I started out as a fresh faced schoolboy, amazed at the open spaces of the Lake District, moved to Scotland to follow my passion for ice climbing and joined a mountain rescue team. Over the past ten years my relationship with the mountains has changed. I have begun to take a gentler pleasure in them and to be fascinated by the wild life that inhabits our mountains. In doing so I have become acutely aware of the damage we are doing to our wild places.
Scotland’s wild places are now under siege more than ever. I see wind farms doting the hillsides wherever I look, and bulldozed tracks violate even the most remote areas. Nowhere else in the world is land ownership concentrated in the hands of so few people. Scotland is owned by around four hundred people and many of these land owners ruthlessly exploit the landscape for their own ends. There is virtually no control over what goes on in the Scottish hills and that needs to change.
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Scotland could be an oasis of wild forests helping to reverse global warming. Its forests could be home to lynx and wolves and its seas protected so that the ocean can begin to heal itself. Instead Scotland’s hills are over grazed by herds of deer whose numbers are kept artificially high so that a few rich men can hunt stags in a practice that is a relic of the Victorian era. Our lochs are polluted by salmon farming and our seas destroyed by over fishing. At the heart of all these problems is the question of who owns the land. There are some enlightened land owners who are trying to rewild their estates and work in sympathy with the landscape but far too many are entrenched in the past and obsessed with highly destructive practices such as driven grouse shooting which have turned our hills into blood-soaked deserts. There are some landowners who have as their estates, huge tracts of land, many square miles in area, and it should not be at the whim of a landowner to decide whether to use the land as a huge sporting playground or to manage the land in a more ecologically sympathetic way. These hills are our hills, and the wildlife that inhabits them or should inhabit them, are part of our natural heritage and belong to all of us. The most crucial question facing our wild landscape is land reform, while the Scottish hills remain in the ownership of a few rich men, and it is mostly men, we will never see them become the environment that they could be.
Sky Dance is a funny romp through the Highlands. Rory and Angus, the two hillwalking heroes of the book have a narrow escape from an avalanche, are washed away in a Highland river and finally turn to crime in order to see the hills they love rewilded.
It’s a funny book but it also has a message and I hope that message makes some small contribution to the end of Driven grouse shooting an odious practice that causes huge damage to our wild lands. Find out more about the damage driven grouse shooting does to our hills by visiting Revive
Sky Dance will be published on the 5th of September but you can order it now as limited edition (250), signed hard back that would be a fantastic addition to the library of any committed outdoor
