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- Herausgeber: Vertebrate Digital
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
In Mountaineering in Scotland, climber and mountaineer W.H. Murray vividly describes some of the most sought-after and classic British climbs on rock and ice, including the Cuillin Ridge on Skye and Ben Nevis. The book – written in secret on toilet paper in whilst Murray was a prisoner of war – is infused with the sense of freedom and joy the author found in the mountains. He details the hardship and pleasure wrung from high camping in winter, climbs Clachaig Gully and makes the second winter ascent of Observatory Ridge. Murray recounts his adventures in Glencoe and the mountains beyond – including a terrifying near-death experience at the falls of Falloch. Murray's first book, Mountaineering in Scotland is widely acknowledged as a classic of mountaineering literature. It inspirational prose – as fresh now as when first published – is bound to make a reader reach for their tent and head for the hills of Scotland. He asserts, 'Seeming danger ensures that on mountains, more than elsewhere, life may be lived at the full.' This is classic mountain climbing literature at its best.
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UNDISCOVERED SCOTLAND
Climbs on rock, snow, and ice
W.H. Murray
www.v-publishing.co.uk
CONTENTS
– CHAPTER 1 –
The Undiscovered Country
The exploratory urge moves every man who loves hills. The quest of the mountaineer is knowledge. He is drawing close to one truth about mountains when at last he becomes aware that he never will know them fully – not in all their aspects – nor ever fully know his craft. Like the true philosopher, the true mountaineer can look forward with rejoicing to an eternity of endeavour: to realization without end. I have climbed for fifteen years and have hopes of another forty, but I know that my position at the close of my span will be the same as it is now, and the same as it was on that happy day when I first set foot on a hill – the Scottish highlands will spread out before me, an unknown land.
The yearning to explore hills was born in myself in 1934, when I, a confirmed pavement-dweller, overheard a mountaineer describe a weekend visit to An Teallach in Ross-shire. He spoke of a long thin ridge, three thousand feet up, with towers and pinnacles and tall cliffs on either flank, which fell to deep corries. And from these comes clouds would boil up like steam from a cauldron, and from time to time shafts would open through them to reveal vistas of low valleys and seas and distant islands.
That was all he said, but the effect on myself was profound, because for the first time in my life my exploratory instincts began to stir. Here was a strange new world of which I had never even dreamed, waiting for exploration. And unlike so many other dreams, this was one that could be realized in action. At the first opportunity, then, I went to one of the few mountains I knew by name – the Cobbler at Arrochar. It was a fine April day, with plenty of snow on the tops. When I stood by the road at Arrochar and looked up at my first mountain, the summit seemed alarmingly craggy and blinding white against blue sky. How I should ever get up I could not imagine. I picked out a route by the line of a burn, which vanished towards a huge corrie under the summit rocks. And what then? I felt a nervous hesitation about my fate in these upper regions. Had I been entering the sanctuary of Nanda Devi I could have felt no more of the sheer thrill of adventure than I did when I stepped off that road on to the bare hillside.
Later in the day, when I entered the Cobbler corrie, I recognized that I had entered what was, for me, true sanctuary – a world of rock and snow and glossy ice, shining in the spring sun and, for the moment at least, laughing in the glint and gleam of the world’s joy. I too laughed in my sudden awareness of freedom. Had I thought at all I should have said: ‘Here is a field of free action in which nothing is organized, or made safe or easy or uniform by regulation; a kingdom where no laws run and no useful ends fetter the heart.’ I did not have to think that out in full. I knew it instantaneously, in one all-comprehending glance.
And, of course, this intoxicated me. For it was a great day in my life. And at once I proceeded to do all those wicked things so rightly denounced by grey-bearded gentlemen sitting at office desks in remote cities. I climbed steep snow-slopes by myself. Without an ice-axe or nailed boots, without map, compass, or warm and windproof clothing, and, what is worse, without a companion, I kicked steps up hard snow, going quite fast and gaily, until near the top I stopped and looked down. The corrie floor was now far below me, and black boulders projected out of the snow. If I slid off nothing would stop me until I hit something. I went on with exaggerated caution until I breasted the ridge between the centre and south peaks.
At that first success a wave of elation carried me up high walls of sun-washed rock to the south peak. That rock had beauty in it. Always before I had thought of rock as a dull mass. But this rock was the living rock, pale grey and clean as the air itself, with streaks of shiny mica and white crystals of quartzite. It was joy to handle such rock and to feel the coarse grain under the fingers.
Near the top the strangeness of the new environment overawed me a little – nothing but bare rock and boundless space, and a bright cloud sailing. Nothing here but myself and the elements – and a knowledge of my utter surrender to and trust in God’s providence, and gladness in that knowledge.
On the flat rocks on top I sat down, and for an hour digested all that had happened to me. In being there at all I had, of course, sinned greatly against all the canons of mountaineering. But I did not know that. This was my Garden of Eden stage of purest innocence. It was not till later, when I plucked my apple in search of knowledge, that I read in text-books ‘Man must not go alone on mountains’ – not when he is a bootless novice. Meantime I looked out upon the mountains circling me in a white-topped throng, and receding to horizons that rippled against the sky like a wash of foam. Not one of these hills did I know by name, and every one was probably as worth exploring as the Cobbler. The shortness of life was brought home to me with a sudden pang. However, what I lacked in time might in part be offset by unflagging activity.
From that day I became a mountaineer.
Upon returning home and consulting books I learned that there are five hundred and forty-three mountain-tops in Scotland above three thousand feet. They cannot all be climbed in one’s first year. This thought did make me feel frustrated. I once received a book after waiting long and eagerly for its publication. Like a wolf coming down starving from the mountains I gulped the courses in any order, reading the end first, snatching bits in the middle, running here and there through the pages in uncontrolled excitement. I wanted to know it all immediately. In the end I was sufficiently exhausted to sit back and read whole chapters at a time. That was exactly how I felt about mountains.
In my first year I sped all over Scotland – going alone because I knew no one else who climbed – snatching mountains here, there, and everywhere. As it happened I could not have made a better approach. The best and natural way of dealing with mountains is the way I luckily followed: before starting any rock-climbing I spent a summer and winter on hill-walking only. Rock-climbing, as a means of penetrating the inmost recesses and as sport, should not come until later. Thus I made a wide reconnaissance by climbing several peaks in each of the main mountain districts. This preliminary survey gave me a good idea of their differences in character, which are surprisingly wide, and showed what each had to offer.
When I went from the rolling plateaux and snow-domes of the Cairngorms, mounted among broad forests and straths, to the sharp spiky ridges of Wester Ross, set between winding sea-lochs, I had the sensation peculiar to entering a foreign country; a sense not to be accounted for by any material changes in scenery, but one that is none the less shared by all men. I can travel from Inverness to Sussex and feel only that I have moved from one part of Britain to another. But Wester Ross is another (and better) land. Again, when I came from the Cuillin pinnacles and the stark isles of the west to the heathery swell of the southern highlands I returned from vertical desert to grassland, although still hungering like a camel after its dear desert.
Between such different areas Glencoe and Lochaber held a fair balance. They had everything: peak, plateau, precipice, the thinnest of ridges, and green valley, all set between the widest of wild moors and a narrow sea-loch – they were Baghdad and Samarkand, at once home and goal of the pilgrim.
Then I joined a mountaineering club. For the course of that first year’s wanderings showed plainly that no man can have the freedom of mountains unless he can climb on rock and snow. The mountains are under snow for several months of the year. Indeed, they excel in winter, offering a sport and beauty quite different from those of summer, a sport harder and tougher, and a more simple and pure beauty. The plateaux and the summit ridges, the great cliffs and the snow-slopes, these are four facets of the Scottish mountains none of which can be avoided, except the cliffs, and these only if a man is content to walk on mainland tops.
In the Cuillin of Skye the rocks are not a facet, they are the mountains. Cliffs must not be thought of as blank cliffs. They are cathedral cities with many a spire, tower, turret, pinnacle, and bastion, amongst which a man may wander at will, and explore and adventure, upon which he may test qualities of character and skill, and by aid of which conquer nothing except himself.
In succeeding years the wider my experience grew the more clearly did I see that however much I might explore this unknown country called the Scottish highlands, I should never plumb the Unknown. To know mountains we must know them at the four seasons, on the four facets, at the four quarters of the day. The permutations are infinite. For the variations in snow and ice and weather conditions are inexhaustible. No winter climb, say on the north face of Nevis, is ever the same twice running. Its North-east Buttress, for example, is on each visit like a first ascent. If we go to the Comb of Arran in autumn frost, on a day of still, crisp air when distant moors flame red through a sparkle of hoar, we shall not recognize it as the mountain we knew when clouds were scudding among the crags and the hail drove level. I have been a hundred times to the top of Buachaille Etive Mor in Glencoe. In unwise and sentimental moments I am apt to think of it as an old friend. But I know full well that the next time I go there the Buachaille will surprise me for the hundred and first time – my climb will be unlike any that I’ve had before.
Treasures of reality yet unknown await discovery among inaccessible peaks at the ends of the earth, still more on the old and familiar hills at our very doorstep, most of all within each mountaineer. The truth is that in getting to know mountains he gets to know himself. That is why men truly live when they climb.
That heightened quality of life on mountains naturally enough came foremost to my mind in war. In 1942 I made an after-dinner speech in the middle of the Libyan Desert. The toast of ‘Mountains’ had been put to me by a young German with whom I shared the meal. In my reply I managed to say all that I have to say about mountains in three sentences. But first of all let me explain how the situation arose.
Just one hour before I had been sitting in the bottom of a slit-trench. My battalion had been whittled down to fifty men, and we were waiting, with the rest of our brigade, for an attack at dusk by the 15th Panzer Division. My battalion commander, with the perfect frankness that such gentlemen have, had said to me: ‘Murray, by tonight you’ll be either dead meat or a prisoner.’ Thus I sat in the bottom of my slit-trench and went through my pockets with the purpose of destroying anything that might be of use to an enemy. I smashed a prismatic compass, tore up an identity card and my notes on battalion orders. Then I came upon an address book. I flicked over the pages and read the names. And suddenly I saw that every name in that book was the name of a mountaineer. Until then I had never realized how great a part mountains had played in my life. Most of the names belonged to men who are very much alive and active today. While I read over them I also realized, again for the first time, how much I had learned from these men, and been given by them, and how little I had been able to give in return. The same had to be said of mountains. And while I sat in the trench I had a clear perception of the two ways of mountaineering that mean most to me.
The first is the exploratory way, the way of adventure and battle with the elements. I could see storm winds and drift sweeping across the plateau; long hours of axe-work on ice, among sunless cliffs; the day-long suspense on rocks that have never before been scratched by nails. These show the harsh aspects of reality, of which a man should know – of which he must know if he’d know mountains and know himself. Rock, snow, and ice sometimes claim from a man all that he has to give. Sometimes the strain on body and nerve may be high, discomforts sharp. But the mountaineer gets all the joy of his craft; his mastery of it is, in reality, the mastery of himself. It is the foretaste of freedom.
I made no effort to think in that trench. Ideas came and went of their own accord in a matter of seconds. I saw the other aspect of mountaineering – for the sake of mountains and not for sport. I could see a great peak among fast-moving cloud, and the icy glint where its snows caught the morning sun. There were deep corries and tall crags. All of these were charged with a beauty that did not belong to them, but poured through them as light pours through the glass of a ruby and blue window, or as grace through a sacrament. These show an ideal aspect of reality, of which a man should know, of which he must know if he would arrive at any truth at all about mountains, or about men.
At dusk the German tanks came in. When the shambles had ended a German tank commander took charge of me. It was bright moonlight. He waved a machine pistol at me and asked, in good English, if I didn’t feel cold. Now the desert at night is often exceedingly cold, and without thinking I said: ‘It’s as cold as a mountain-top.’ And my German said: ‘Good God! do you climb?’
He was a mountaineer. We exchanged brief notes about mountains we knew and liked in Scotland and the Alps. After that there was no end to what he would do for me. He gave me his overcoat, and asked when my last meal had been. I said: ‘Thirty-six hours ago.’ So he took me over to his tank and produced food. We shared a quick meal of British bully and biscuits and German chocolate. After that he fetched out a bottle of British beer and knocked off the top.
‘Here’s to mountains,’ he said, ‘and to mountaineers – to all of them everywhere.’ He took a pull at the bottle and passed it to me. I drank too. I felt moved to reply.
I said: ‘There are three good things you get out of mountains. You meet men and you meet battle and beauty. But the men are true, and the battle’s the only kind that’s worth fighting, and the beauty is Life.’
I smashed the bottle on the German tank.
– CHAPTER 2 –
The First Day on Buachaille
Three years in central European prison camps. Release, April 1945.
During the fine weather of May I was unable to climb. At first if I walked for more than ten minutes I felt faint, and so felt no desire of mountains. My love of them was platonic, requiring of the body no act of outer expression. Four weeks later a first instalment of accumulating energy began to clamour for employment. My last climb in 1941 had been the Buachaille Etive Mor, and my first now could be none other. That is, if I could get up, which was exceedingly doubtful. My thoughts flew at once to Mackenzie. He was back in Glasgow. If any man could get me up Buachaille he could. So to Glasgow I went on 2nd June 1945.
After six years of war I could see no change at all in the Mackenzie – still lean and upright, hawk-eyed and brusque. He too was keen to get back to Glencoe. He had spent the last year or two in the School of Mountain Warfare, but not once had he enjoyed a good rock-climb. I told him gently that he could not get one now if he went with me. We must go up by the easiest possible route, go very slow, and not seriously expect to get to the top.
We left Glasgow in my old pre-war Morris eight very early in the morning. And a well nigh perfect morning it was. As the sun spread over Rannoch the genuine golden air of the good old days spread over the miles of moor (I had begun to wonder if my memories of such days were simple feats of imagination), and the liveliness of all spring mornings again entered into me. I felt now as Mackenzie always used to feel when the first snow of October came on the hills – days when MacAlpine drove us north from Glasgow, usually under rain clouds that boded ill for the weekend, but which had no damping effect on a Mackenzie wild with enthusiasm. His first sight of the snow-capped hills in Glencoe would conjure forth song and piercing whistles. ‘Bound along, Archie! – or the snow will be away before we get there!’ and similar exhortations inspired the driver.
So I ventured to suggest to Mackenzie that we must aim after all at getting to the summit. No half measures would do on a day like this. I would get to the top or drop dead trying. We came round the famous bend from the Blackmount – and there was Buachaille.
The day was again 8th September 1935, when the final entry in my diary reads: ‘I think that for me the most vivid experience was my first view of Buachaille Etive Mor. In the clear morning air every detail of the enormous, pointed cliffs stood out sharp. But the most striking moment was turning a corner of the road and seeing the great shape, black and intimidating, suddenly spring up in the moor. To me it was just unclimbable. I had never seen a hill like it before and my breath was taken away from me.’
Days of innocence! Maybe. But that was precisely how I felt now. As always before, we went straight to Coupall Bridge in Glen Etive, put on our boots, and started. It is the great advantage of this starting-point, as against that from Altnafeadh in Glencoe, that the long approach over the moor is lightened by the shapeliness of the peak, inspiring one from the front, drawing one on and up. Every crag and each long ridge points to the summit-cone. It is a symbolism not lost on the climber. What delight to the eye that was! To see again all the detail of the rocks, every crag of which I knew so well. The delight of recognition – a recognition of form, beauty, character, the lines of weakness and strength, every wrinkle, pit, and scar, on cliffs dove-grey and terracotta. From a distance only is the Buachaille black.
An avoidance of the cliffs, such as we contemplated, now seemed to me miserably inappropriate. Surely we might manage to get up an easy rock-climb? A very easy one – say Curved Ridge, if we roped? I made the suggestion somewhat timorously, for I feared to burden Mackenzie with a hundred and forty pounds of human baggage. He agreed and grinned. We changed direction slightly. The moor was drier underfoot than I ever remembered it – our very boots took on an unaccustomed bloom to the brush of old heather, and the swish, swish of the boots was a song of old, an heroic poetry and new live drama all rolled into one after the dead mud of the prison compounds. I reminded myself from time to time that I was free to go in any direction I wanted. I could turn right round and go right home. Glorious thought! So on I went, breathing in great draughts of moorland air, a free man with a free wind blowing on his right cheek, and sun smiting his left, the scent of the year’s new thyme at his nostril, and the swish of dry heather round his boots. Rock in front. I stopped. ‘Bill,’ I said, ‘maybe we could manage Central Buttress?’
‘Ha! now you ’re talking!’ exclaimed Mackenzie. ‘We could manage it if we kept to a V-diff.’ We changed direction.
We scrambled upwards over heathery outcrops to the base of Central Buttress, and moved rightward to the north face. We roped. I hesitated for a moment over the bowline knot, but tied it first time. I was greatly relieved. It would have embarrassed the Mackenzie to have had to tie it for me. He started up the first pitch and ran out about sixty feet. Then he turned and was ready for me. Now was the test. I looked at the rock, light-grey, crystalline, very rough – and so very steep. I stood back and chose my holds. What would happen? Was the old skill lost? – rock-climbing a thing of the past? I gave myself, as it were, a prod, and climbed.
At the very instant my hands and feet came on the rock six years rolled away in a flash. The rock was not strange, but familiar. At each move I was taking the right holds at the right time – but no, I did not ‘take’ the holds – of their own accord they came to me. Hand, foot, and eye – nerve and muscle – they were co-ordinating, and my climbing was effortless. I reached the top feeling trust in rock and, what in the circumstances was far more wonderful, trust in myself. And also, I should add, gratitude for the Mackenzie, from whom ten years ago I had learned much of my rock-snow-ice climbing.
The lower part of the north face goes up by a series of rough walls to the Heather Ledge, which divides the buttress about three hundred feet up. The last wall on this lower part is split near its top by a short crack at a high angle. The crack was my next important test – the test for exposure. For although the holds are good the body is forced out of balance over a long drop. When I came to make the move it certainly scared me, but the point was that I could control myself. I got up. The true testing question, of course, for progress in rock-, snow-, or ice-craft is not ‘Did you get up?’ but rather ‘Did you enjoy getting up?’ – if not always just as the moves are made, then very shortly afterwards. I was able to answer ‘Yes’ to my test, with the appropriate qualification. This meant that we could safely deal with the steeper and more difficult upper buttress.
We had a choice of four routes and I left the decision to Mackenzie. He chose his own Slanting Ledge route, which starts right in the middle of the buttress. This would certainly be less exacting than a continuation by the north face climb, the difficulties being not less in standard or exposure, but shorter in length.
On Heather Ledge we lay back and rested a while. It is the great merit of Central Buttress that it faces south-east – the sunniest cliff in Glencoe and Glen Etive. And Heather Ledge is a balcony, wide of prospect and fit for philosopher kings, where the governments of the earth are measured against the government of the firmament, and fall into perspective, and are made humble. To me, on the Heather Ledge, the fruits of the first were pitiful masses of humanity still crowding the barbed-wire compounds of Europe, and of the other, the mountain world. Everything that is wide and boundless and free, and which is therefore dear to the heart of a mountaineer, is here exemplified; the skies seem vaster than elsewhere, stretching to horizons too far to be identified. The very winds blow more fresh and clean. They purify – give health and life and power to the souls of men imprisoned in flesh and bone and long walled-up in the concrete of the barrack cities. They are purifying winds of the free firmament. To their influence aspire multitudes of men, ringed by the red-rusted wire of mud compounds, beyond and below the rim of the horizon, where governments of the earth sow and harvest. To such men they are true symbols of the winds of the spirit.
All men do not like mountains. It may be that many hate them. But they all love the free adventure and beauty to be found on mountains – or should I say to be won?
‘Time’s up!’ said Mackenzie. We walked to the highest point of Heather Ledge. On the nearly perpendicular face above, a ledge ran forty feet diagonally left. We climbed without much difficulty to its top end, where we turned a corner on to a face somewhat less steep. This wall had good holds, on which we climbed until the increasing angle forced Mackenzie to make a long right traverse on rocks little less than vertical, and most exposed (as much so as anything on Rannoch Wall). He halted; then climbed straight up, advancing slowly and obviously having trouble in getting suitable holds. I remembered that on the first ascent eight years ago Mackenzie had nailed the pitch twice. But that was during a rainstorm in the late afternoon, and the pitons had been removed. I watched him closely, saw him resist the temptation to hug the rock, and deliberately force his body away from it, so that he could go up in balance on holds that were not good enough for the grasping and wrestling technique so fatally comforting to the unpractised climber. His rope hung clear of the rock, swaying towards me in a white and rifled curve, beautiful in the sun. A rain-bleached rope – pre-1939, I reckoned, on which wartime moths had dined too well. However, it would hold a second man. The Mackenzie vanished – upwards.
My third test was at hand. A very difficult and exposed pitch at a high angle. I did not pass this one with flying colours.
When I made the right traverse and looked up I felt as weak as a kitten – the drop, the angle, the lack of holds – frightening! but healthily frightening, and not like lying flat in a midnight cellar listening to a bomb whistling down like a grand piano, nor like going into a bare room to chat with the Gestapo – here one had chosen the route, was free to act sharply amid sunny rock and air, to rely on oneself. I remember Mackenzie’s studied self-mastery, and pushed myself out from the rock. The moment I committed this act of trust everything went well. Up I went, treading precisely, taking my press-holds for the hands in the right relation to feet and angle. But I confess that I had to do this at high tension with set teeth. I could no more have led that pitch than flown in the air.
What a reaction that was when I reached the top! I mean the rejoicing and being able to give thanks for it all – the joys of coarse-grained rock sun-warmed to the hand and firm to the bite of the boot-nail, the elation of mastering nervous limbs and of flooding their muscles with energy, of using them in a practised craft, fighting, winning – and sharing such adventure with a friend.
‘What did you think of that?’ asked Mackenzie when I joined him.
‘Not bad,’ I said. ‘Best climb for years.’
‘Now, are you telling me!’ exclaimed Mackenzie. ‘Indeed – who would have thought that!’
‘Best climb I’ve had too,’ he added a minute later.
Our climbing was by no means done, however. A stretch of easier rocks led to the top of the buttress, whence we traversed north on to Curved Ridge. I suggested that we now descend a little and climb the Crowberry Ridge Direct, but Mackenzie employed his veto. He swore he was feeling too tired. It is not like my Herr Mackenzie to be so tactful! It is rather his appalling habit to speak the truth always. Yet on this occasion I wonder …
So up we went by the Curved Ridge, and then by the Crowberry Tower, at last to plod rhythmically over the last brow to the cairn. I knew well how every stone on the cairn should look, and for a moment was wrathful to see that a few had been rolled away. Still, it was just the same cairn, and I clapped my hand on its top, suddenly remembered the blank despair with which I had last made the same movement, and laughed to myself at the folly of such days; for despair is only for the very young or the very old, and either way it is still foolish. I looked out to Schichallion eastwards, and followed the north horizon round to Mull in the west. All was as it should be. I had returned. I knew these hills so very well that they startled me into no transports of ecstasy – not even after long absence – but they had the greater power to bestow a content that I cannot name, save in terms that must seem vague to any one without a practical knowledge of them – the Recollection and the Quiet. Peace, one might call it? – but again, how many men do know what peace is, as against the sympathetic experience of dimly perceiving it outwith themselves? Not many, I fear. It might then be asked whether I mean that mountains are necessary to happiness or to the true completion of any man. Quite to the contrary. So little are they necessary that one of the happiest years of my own life was one of three spent in a prison camp. It would seem that whether mountains contribute to happiness or its reverse depends entirely upon a man’s own attitude of mind and heart. They contribute happiness in so far as they elicit a man’s love, at first it may be only of themselves, but in the end of the All of which they are just a part.
However, it is fatal (and impossible) for a man to be philosophic about such love at the time of union. The heart and will leap out to it, his mind grasps. In a second it is done. That is all.
‘The one thing that matters among mountains,’ said Mackenzie, looking out to blue and receding hill-ranks in the north-west, ‘is that we enjoy them.’
Simple words. Greatly overlooked. They embody the whole secret of successful mountaineering.
– CHAPTER 3 –
The Great Gully of Garbh Bheinn
Since the beginnings of mountaineering in Scotland Garbh Bheinn of Ardgour has presented a double challenge to climbers: hard access and virgin cliffs. Ardgour has always been relatively unknown country, lying far to the west across Loch Linnhe – one of the greatest sea-lochs in Scotland; thus hardly accessible at weekends. In addition, being one of the best rock-peaks in Scotland and yet so rarely visited, Garbh Bheinn has remained rich in unsolved problems for the rock-climber. In 1946 the most notorious of these problems was the Great Gully. Its earliest history had, in broad outline, been much like that of the Chasm and Clachaig Gully of Glencoe. It had repelled assault over a long term of years, been declared impossible by a past generation of climbers, and finally been once again declared impossible so late as 1946.
The first notable attempt was by Messrs. Hastings and Haskett-Smith in 1897. They were defeated before the halfway point by an eighty-foot cave-pitch, bristling with overhangs. Subsequent parties met the same fate, so that around this pitch there settled a magic halo of impregnability. At close quarters the halo might intimidate, but at long distance it flashed like a lure. While I entertained no foolish hope of having skill enough to climb that gully, still – it was unknown – a gully presenting a challenge. Response had to be made. On 8th June 1946 good weather and a strong party set me westward bound for Ardgour. My companions were Douglas Scott and R.G. Donaldson.
On passing Glencoe village we had our first view of our mountain across Loch Linnhe, from which it rose two thousand nine hundred feet. By virtue of form rather than height it dwarfed all the other hills of Ardgour. A splendid rock-buttress, twelve hundred feet high, gave a free and noble lift to the summit. That clean grey tower, standing between a silver tide-rip and a dappled sky, was our battleground for the morrow. When we looked closely we could see the dark score of the Great Gully directly under the summit, splitting the buttress from top to bottom.
We crossed Loch Leven by the Ballachulish ferry and Loch Linnhe by the Corran ferry, and then drove seven miles south to Garbh Bheinn. That evening we camped in the lower part of Coire an Iubhair, a trackless glen running for two and a half miles beneath the eastern face of our mountain. A quarter of a mile from the main road we found flat dry ground and plenty of firewood beside the burn; so that we had our supper that night before a log fire at the water’s edge.
The site was ideal. The true mountain atmosphere was ours. We were ringed by hills; all around us their crests stood in relief against the clear night sky. The burn flashed and glowed to the leap of flame from the fire. And there was neither sight nor sound of civilization. There was no distraction. Thus we had true contact with the hills; not the mere physical contact of sight or touch, but an effortless sharing or mingling of their presence and ours. That is the direct communion, which we lose utterly amid the distractions of hotels, barely sense in the traffic of hut or hostel, and know truly in a camp or bivouac. When at last we fell asleep before the open door of our tent we did so with a feeling of intimate friendship with mountains, the product of which, being unsought for itself, was happiness.
The dawn broke from a clear sky. At nine o’clock, however, we walked two miles up Coire an Iubhair under locally gathering cloud. Showers and sunshafts struck us alternately, and long wreaths of mist curled and swayed around the summit of Garbh Bheinn. Behind this dark veil the rock of our buttress looked most forbidding and inaccessible. But after we had reached the upper corrie, from which the final peak springs in one great cliff, the clouds lifted and the sky turned blue. The party now split. Donaldson wanted to reconnoitre the only once climbed North Buttress a mile farther up Coire an Iubhair, reckoning the collection of data for a new route there to be more profitable than our visit to Great Gully; for Scott and I were not so audacious at this stage as to say that we were going to climb the Great Gully. We were only going to look at it. At 11.30 we moved into its foot.
The first two hundred and fifty feet were easy and featureless, and we preferred to scramble unroped up the rocks of the north flank, until a sudden deepening of the gully warned us to traverse in. We climbed a high but easy pitch, then the gully deepened, widened, and at last was divided by an almost vertical rib of a hundred feet. The right-hand branch was a mere cleft with wet walls, steep as the rib itself. So we tried the broader left branch; but this started with an overhang on which we both fought and failed. The preliminary skirmish and repulse had one good effect: it woke us up. We put on the rope and metaphorically spat on our hands. I tried to climb the rib. The rock was a coarse gneiss, and came clean to the finger-tips; but after thirty feet the already scanty holds became too few and far between, movements of body too difficult to calculate in advance, so that the chance to traverse into the right-hand cleft came as a providential relief – to be quickly regretted when I entered the damp and dim interior and looked around. The inner wall was green with loathsome growing things, and the side walls moistly sleek, clean enough, but perpendicular.
Scott joined me on a narrow grass ledge. The remaining seventy feet of the cleft looked ugly, but when put to the trial gave me holds nearly all the way; when they failed I bridged – back on one wall and feet braced hard against the other – and wriggled up. The cleft ended suddenly on a thin saddle attached to the central rib on our left. We scrambled over the rib info the left fork, which was now imposingly deep and broad and the true line of the gully. With that cleft in our rear we no longer thought of just looking at the gully. We were going to force a route to the limits of our ability.
A hundred feet of scrambling brought the most notorious pitch of Garbh Bheinn into sight. There was a long level approach, allowing time for its full, disconcerting effect on the mind, and allowing the gully to bite into the cliff, at last to rise up in one eighty-foot step – a step not merely vertical, but starting with a sixty-foot overhang. The flanking walls appeared to lean towards the centre. One would have sworn they were unclimbable. People had thought so for fifty years: they would think so for another fifty. That was our first verdict.
We walked to the foot of the pitch and adopted tactics that once had proved of high value to me in the Clachaig Gully: we did not look at the rock for several minutes – we had lunch. During the course of it we developed an awareness that the left wall was not truly overhanging; it was only vertical with a bulge in the middle. I at once abandoned lunch and climbed to the bulge on in-cut holds. Then the holds gave out, and I had to come down. We resumed our lunch.
There remained the right-hand wall, the lower half of which truly did overhang. We munched bread and cheese and looked at that wall contemplatively. If one started sixty feet out from the inmost cave, possibly one might climb the overhang by means of a projecting flake, then make an upward traverse above the line of the overhang to the top. Any such move would be very hard and exposed, and the rock was slabby. I took off my boots and started in stocking-soles.
Two strong arm-pulls on the flake took me up the first overhang, only to be faced with a second but lesser one. Again providence supplied a jug-handle hold on rock that would otherwise have been hopeless. Many a party capable of climbing that wall must have turned away in the past without a trial. The route selection became hard. One had to find a way through the local bulges by balancing delicately across slabs and pushing upwards by shallow grooves. When sixty feet up I became alarmed by the holdlessness of the rock, and halted on a tuft of grass. I had already climbed the height of a city building and the next forty feet looked worse than anything below; it might easily be too much for me, and my ability to climb down was becoming suspect. Such uncertainty of the issue makes a first ascent seem very much harder than any subsequent one. Knowing this, I refused to scare myself further by thinking about hazards ahead, and henceforth lived only from one move to the next. By making good each hand and foothold as it came to me, I duly found myself at the top of the pitch. I had run out a hundred feet of rope and was only two yards from the gully-bed. The climb had not been more than severe.
