William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015
Text, illustrations and photographs © Simon Ingram 2015
Image accompanying Chapter 13, ‘Buße Tun’ (‘Doing Penance’)
by Walter Tafelmaier, reproduced with permission
The author asserts his moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
Cover photograph © Justin Foulkes/4Corners 2016
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Source ISBN: 9780007545407
Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780007547890
Version: 2016-02-25
To Mum and Dad, for letting me wander;
and to Rachel and Evelyn, for bringing me back.
There are more reasons for hills
Than being steep,
And reaching only high.
Norman MacCaig
‘High up on Suilven’
CONTENTS
PART I: SPRING
PART II: SUMMER
PART III: AUTUMN
PART IV: WINTER
Seven miles north of the village of Tyndrum in the Southern Highlands of Scotland the A82 flinches hard to the left and begins to climb. The pitch of your car’s engine drops. You slow. Heathery embankments recede around the tarmac and the sky begins to widen as you approach the top of a rise. The road makes a long arc like a tensioned longbow until it finds north-west then, abruptly, it snaps taut. The horizon flees around you. And ahead, beyond the sharp vanishing point of the road and softened by distance, are mountains.
These are not the elegant meringue-and-meadow peaks of the Alps, nor the shrill slants of geology you might find in density in the Himalaya or the Andes. The mountains that lie ahead of you as you drive this road are old and crouched, and etched with lines of incredible age.
The place wasn’t always like this. It’s the ghost of a once much mightier landscape. They say the ancient mountains of Scotland once stood five or six times higher – as high as the young peaks of the Himalaya stand today. Some of the oldest surface rocks in the world cover their faces and line their gullies and cracks, exposed by the millennia like dead bone to the wind. The mountains here are the ruins of a giant, explosive volcano –