Scree (almost) goes on holiday to Scotland…

Since the start of the year, there’s no doubt. I’ve worked too hard! And my late June trip to Big Sands beach and campsite near Gairloch was looking like no exception. No matter how I tried to put a positive spin on things, spending 7 to 8 hours per day writing a funding bid wasn’t looking much like time-out. Yet having taken on too much as of late, not working would have undoubtedly been more stressful still. So there I was at 7am every morning: already at my picnic table desk having roused myself with a dip in the sea, putting in some early work hours to leave time for more familiar kinds of holiday adventure later on in the day. I’ve never really been one for lazy (aka relaxing) holidays, and my Scottish trips have long tended towards hill-running adventures, which on this occasion seemed to be increasingly focused on climbing Corbetts (those Scottish hills in the 2,500 to 2,999 feet height category below the Munros). I say this as if I was surprised, and I was really. At no point had I sat down and decided that the Corbetts were on my agenda. Rather, I was simply going out and climbing new hills, as was my wont. Going to new places. Doing something different. And certainly there was no ‘harm’ in getting out my blue Bic ballpoint at the end of the day and making a record of where I’ve been, and when. Right?

It’s a slippery muddy peak-bagging slope. Not even one week in, I found myself flicking through the guidebook to work out how many Corbetts I’d climbed already, how many were left to go, how long it would take me to finish bagging them, and (slightly strangely) what age I’d be by then! Good, I guess, to know that you’ll still be alive by the time of compleating them! Already on this holiday I’d done an epic late afternoon / evening run up Beinn an Eoin and Baosbheinn, and a fabulous scramble along the ridge of Beinn Dearg, the retiring, somewhat neglected mountain in the Torridon range. I’d given up even pretending to run the ridge between Sgurr nan Lochan Uaine and Sgurr Dubh it was so rough and pathless, and the quartzite scree slopes so endless. All of this squeezed around my priority task of writing a 15,000-word fundraising application for the poetry festival which I’d taken on the Directorship of alongside my work on Scree (which at this point had started to flag rather as a result of other workloads). Next up on the schedule were Meall a’Ghiuthais and Ruadh-stac Beag, and then I’d spend a three-day backpack ticking off four or five Corbetts in Letterewe Forest…and before I knew it?

Darn. Did this mean that Scree, and all of my ideas behind it, were broken? Corbett bagging? Really? Wasn’t Scree meant to be about getting away from a target-setting approach to the outdoors? Exploring other, less instrumental and more wandering approaches? What chance did the project stand if I couldn’t even stick by its principles for the duration of a single year? It was as bad as the time I turned vegan, wrote my (painfully idealistic) university dissertation about the philosophy of a meat-free diet, only to be broken within the year by a shiny wedge of Stilton which my parents had bought, during a holiday in the Outer Hebrides. By comparison, my week-old vegan fare had been looking rather mouldy (!!), and back in 1997, vegetarian supplies weren’t the easiest to come by in Harris.

Of course, my tendency to overcommit myself, and work too hard, comes from a not dissimilar high-achieving mindset to my peak-bagging one, which in is turn encouraged by the particularly target-driven culture that we live in. At the same time that I heard I’d been successful in my Arts Council funding bid for Scree, I was also appointed Director of StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival. Even on paper it was too much, but I simply wanted to do them both! How exciting! Of course I could manage! It would just be a busy year…! And let’s face it - I’m yet to meet the freelancer who doesn’t take on too much for fear of impending ‘famine’. Having turned freelance in February 2020, my own memories of the ‘famine’ involved in trying to live off Universal Credit during the Covid lockdown were far too recent. When did hard work kill anyone?

In fact, by the time I arrived in Gairloch, I wasn’t too far off finding out. I’d already started dreaming about bits of my head (literally) falling off because it was too full, and I was probably more exhausted than I’ve ever been. It wasn’t just workload - I was really struggling to contain the concepts and ideas behind two major, and very different, projects…In this context, I’m sure that you’ll be glad to hear that I didn’t climb Meall a’Ghiuthais and Ruadh-stac Beag. And I didn’t tick off the four or five Corbetts in Letterewe. No. The weather in the north west was turning, so I headed to the Cairngorms instead to ‘bag’ whatever I could find by way of Corbetts there! Running up to the top of a hill at 10pm to ‘bag’ an extra peak? No problem. It’s Scotland, in June, and light until pretty much forever. Of course, I told myself that I wanted to see the non-existent sunset.

However, the whole experience, in the context of Scree, did get me thinking. Just before I’d set off on my not-a-holiday, Summit (the British Mountaineering Council magazine) had published a three-page spread about the project. In response, a number of people had written to me, including a fella who wanted to tell me all about his Not-quite-there club. With a burgeoning membership of one (himself), the aim of the club was to undertake conventional challenges, but to either deliberately undermine or to sabotage them en route! He’d stopped half a mile short of John O’Groats having cycled from Lands End (how could he? I know that I wouldn’t be able to). He hitched parts of his walk along the Pennine Way so that he couldn’t subsequently claim that he’d finished it! You’ve got to write an article about it for the Scree website! I replied, and he reluctantly agreed. I imagine that he duly wrote the article, but hasn’t quite got round to putting the stamp on the letter yet!

Yet even though my backpack through the Cairngorms was designed to ‘bag’ the two Corbetts, one of the wonderful things about any walking trip in that part of Scotland is the sense of time which the scale of the landscape creates. I swear that Cairngorm miles are longer than Lochaber ones let alone the really short Lake District equivalents, and carrying a fully-laden backpack including both tent and photography kit, there was no way I was going to get anywhere fast. Undoubtedly I tried at first; the first time someone with a day-sack overtook me I felt distinctly piqued (pun intended)! But with every step I took, the more I found the landscape seeping into me, and slowing me down. For the first time ever on a hike, I lay down in the sun at one point and fell asleep – only to be woken up half an hour or so later by a frog jumping across my breasts! I was also learning that Corbett-bagging has a very different rhythm and mood to climbing the Munros, which it’s hard to rush. Paths are limited, the ground often rough, and the way they’ve been categorized means it’s difficult to combine many hills in one day. There’s nothing particularly glamorous or even exciting about the amount of bog, scree and heather trudging which I already realise will be involved, and in contrast to the stream of people on the summit of Bynack More (reputed to be the easiest Cairngorm Munro), Creag Mhor was empty save the three ptarmigan chicks which I so very nearly stood upon (cue the frantic scuttling of a ptarmigan mother, and me, literally, running for the faraway hills!)

So, is there a different way of peak-bagging, informed by a different kind of a mindset to ticking them off? Or are aimless wandering and peak-bagging polar opposites? Certainly, even while ‘doing’ the Munros (aren’t the verbs we use to describe this process awful), I loved how the challenge took me to new parts of the Scottish Highlands every time, and up supposedly ‘boring’ hills which I wouldn’t otherwise have bothered with. The Corbetts, meanwhile, are even more geographically widespread, and most of their names relatively unknown to most people, including myself. There was something old-fashioned about the experience that I can’t quite put my finger on - indeed, those few people I did bump into looked a little confused, as if to say: what are you doing here? If it is possible to peak-bag in a more wandering, exploratory way, then perhaps the Corbetts are a good place to start…?

This all said, I’m yet to climb another Corbett since. I’ve reined in my workload, and spent two weeks of actual holiday doing practically nothing. I did also spend a good amount of time while staying near Gairloch staring absent-mindedly out to sea, in ways which the above commentary doesn’t capture. Perhaps this time was as important as I know my mountain time is to me. The only memento I brought back from Torridon was a piece of quartzite whose patterns resembled a map, which really got me thinking. Scree-mapping? Before I climb any more Corbetts, my  next outing will be a meander mapped from the markings of a piece of Pike o’ Stickle scree in the Langdale Pikes. I just hope the resultant route experiment takes me past a tarn for some more lazy water-watching along the way. I’ll keep watch for breast-loving frogs…