This first sight as you inch into the mouth of Glen Coe never underwhelms. It’s astonishing. Even if you’ve seen it a dozen times, its magnitude is unexpected somehow. We’re constantly reminded how tiny Britain is, so it’s a surprise to find something so boundlessly big-feeling – especially to people who live in flat places where mountains don’t cut the horizon or fill the sky.
But if you’re a certain type of person, this sight carries something else, too: a kind of queer charisma. It invades the emotions and tickles something primal, enshrining mountains onto a sensory level far more stately than merely as a pretty backdrop to everything else. And if you don’t know what I’m on about, there’s an easy way you can find out: come here, drive this road, and see what happens.
You might feel nothing, of course. Maybe looking up at these mountains produces little more than a mental shrug before your mind wanders back to something more interesting inside the car. If so, best you get back to it. Where we’re going probably isn’t for you. But feel a flutter around your stomach when you enter Glen Coe – a frisson of adrenaline, an indefinable but unmistakable quickening of the pulse – and sense your eyes being tugged upwards, it’s got you. That’s it for you now. If you didn’t know it already, you’ve woken something up, and it’s never going away.
If that part of you is there, everyone’s got their own moment when they felt their mountain heartbeat spring to life. It could be something so subtle – passing through this glen or somewhere like it, watching the way evening light climbs across the buttresses of a far-off peak, the sight of windblown cloud snared and tearing from the point of a summit, the yawn of steep height against the sky. For some it remains something that stays at sea level. For others, the compulsion gets too strong, and little by little, the closer they creep.
The A82 continues into Glen Coe. The wastes of Rannoch Moor fall back from the roadside, and the mountains gather around you. Just after you pass that white cottage – the one they always put on the shortbread tins – they begin to leer over you and details emerge. The powerful gable of Buachaille Etive Mòr fills your windscreen, a side-slouched pyramid of wrinkled rock punching skyward. Grey water discharges from summits choked by cloud. All of a sudden the mountains of Glen Coe cease to resemble a distant frieze, the stumps of a range long cut down by time; they become physical and textured things, personalities almost. As your eyes trace the arêtes and buttresses, you feel deep emotions being nudged: awe, intimidation, even something implacable not dissimilar to dread.
It’s a strange thing, but it makes sense. Mountains are not the place for humanity to feel at home. They’re hostile, barren, bereft of comfort – we’re programmed as a species to avoid them. It’s a feeling as old as we are, nature’s chemical way of telling us that no, we can’t live there. It can’t sustain us. It’s cold. Hard. Find somewhere else to go. A field. A forest. A riverbank. This place isn’t for people. Mountains repel us. Fight us. Yet still, you’re being pulled closer. What would it be like, you wonder, to be up there?
The act of climbing a mountain – any mountain, anywhere – is to enter an environment that is challenging simply to be in. Up there, a vertical kilometre above you in that high ground, life is dangerously simple. Things wilt down to the basics: get up, move, keep warm, stay alive, get back. Trivialities at sea level, such as shelter and water, become coveted luxuries. All of a sudden we’re back in the state of primal essentiality that as a species humankind has been developing away from for thousands of years. It’s not like walking through the woods, or a trip to the park. Here you’re beyond the darkness at the edge of town. You’re walking back in time. It’s like anthropological nostalgia.
The things you see here in the high places become a visual drug. Once seen and felt, you’ll drive hundreds of miles just to be in this hard ancient landscape, and recapture those emotions. Spend sizeable amounts of money. Make personal sacrifices. Struggle through all weathers and dangers. And you probably won’t be able to explain why.
Some have tried, of course. There are many ‘justifications’ for climbing a mountain, some of them notoriously impenetrable, some of them shamelessly contradictory. You climb it because it’s there. You go up, to come down. None of them make much sense. Because in the pursuit of the profound, many of them compromise simple honesty: being on a mountain, a witness to its ways, just feels incredible. To hear the silence of a high stream frozen tight; to feel an ice-laden wind sizzle your skin; to stand on the prow of a mountaintop and look down on an ocean of lilac-lit clouds, whilst civilisation below slumbers beneath their shroud – and to live in a country where you can do all of this in the slender gap between Friday night and Monday morning. For anyone with even a vague appreciation of nature, climbing a mountain is a rare blessing: the closest you can get to a full-on sensory epiphany.
But mountains – particularly ours – are so much more than simply things to climb. Mountains aren’t things at all; things are just there. Mountains are places. And places are worth getting to know. Visiting. Inhabiting. Investigating. In places, things happen.
But first, something’s got to find that part of you, if it’s there. Find it, check its pulse, then really wake it up.
It was late October, and a filthy sky hung above the mountains of Glen Coe as I followed the road snaking its way between them, then continued north. Where I live in England’s east the horizon is empty of mountains; it is in fact a place particularly notable for its flatness. But this morning the skies above Lincolnshire had been full of the hard contrasts of dawn, and a solid grey weather front approaching the county from the west gave the convincing and novel impression that there was a tall, plateau-topped mountain range where there was in fact none. I allowed myself to imagine for a few minutes this wasn’t an illusion, and immediately the landscape’s entire mood shifted. Where before there had been just boundless sky, suddenly here was a presence in the landscape far more noticeable than anything else. Something to look at and, indeed, something looking back. This is the slightest dab of the feeling that fortifies the mood of the places overlooked by mountains for real. Of these, the valley of Glen Coe is perhaps the most overlooked of all – although my destination on this particular afternoon must surely run a close second.
I was driving through Scotland to Torridon, a nest of mountains in the remote North-west Highlands, to climb a peak by the name of Beinn Dearg. The summit of this otherwise anonymous hill isn’t on a lot of people’s lists of lifetime ambitions. Most people – even seasoned hillwalkers – will never climb it, particularly considering the visually throatier mountains nearby. And yet here I was, returning to climb it a second time, because ten years ago it had been Beinn Dearg that had checked my own mountain pulse.
That day the weather had been flawless. The September air was velvet warm, and blue sky and sun left the sharp mountains of Torridon entirely innocent of the malignant cloud or sudden wind so notorious in the Highlands. My companion Tom and I had sat in the breakfast area of the Torridon Inn that morning over a map of closely bunched contours when a man we correctly identified as both a local and a walker – in that he had a strong Scottish accent, shocked hair and wore a pink jacket that looked like it might once have been red – enquired as to our day’s objective.
‘Fine wee hill,’ he’d said when I pointed it out on the map.
I’d been preoccupied with the contour lines on the mountain’s western flank since the previous evening. Contours that were close together meant a steep slope; these ones were touching each other.
‘Is it difficult? It looks steep.’
‘Steep, aye. Hands-in-pockets job once you’re up, though.’
‘Hands in pockets?’
‘Aye, a bimble. Have a good day, lads.’
He winked and, with the beanpole stoop of an ageing hillwalker, was gone.
‘What does he mean?’ I hissed across the table at Tom as the door clapped shut behind him and my