Standing proud on the north-west seaboard of Scotland, the final landward port-of-call before the sea, the Hebridean islands, and the vast North Atlantic, Beinn Alligin is one of a trio of mountains sometimes referred to as the Torridon Giants. Any straw poll of people acquainted with Scottish mountains will certainly put them up there amongst the most awesome and awe-inspiring. Of the three, Beinn Alligin is sometimes regarded as the most feminine. Its narrow ridges, vertical precipices, and celebrated three 'horns' (in truth more like spines on a stegosaurus) notwithstanding, the mountain exudes a grace and shapeliness absent in its neighbours - Liathach, a real hulking monster of a mountain, and Beinn Eighe, a sprawling cordillera of its own, capped with quartzite that sparkles in the sun like snow.
Time to get personal.........
My first acquaintance with Beinn Alligin dates to, probably, 1966. Several family summer holidays took us to the northern Highlands of Scotland, then more isolated, and subjectively more distant, from the mass of humanity than today. Over the course of these midge-infested forays into the almost-unknown, we climbed to the top of mountains in the region, no mean feat at a time when guidebooks were thin on the ground, and full of dubious suggestions for routes up peaks that were, as yet, pathless. In fact, the only mountain we failed to ascend was Beinn Alligin. We turned back, driven away by a lethal mixture of cloud, rain, and impenetrable precipices - twice. Our first attempt involved a direct assault on the craggy slopes beetling over the waters of Loch Torridon. Not recommended. Impossible to us, in fact. For our second effort, we decided on a more subtle approach, skirting the eastern slopes of the mountain and scouring the slopes for an opening onto the ridge above. The cloud was down thick, and the rain began to fall increasingly hard, transforming the low-level path into a gushing rivulet. We eventually sloshed around to the back of the mountain, where one of the most memorable vistas of my life opened up. Beneath the glowering canopy of cloud there stretched into the ink-black distance a vast and eerie landscape of rock and boggy grass speckled with a multitude of tiny lochans. This was no vista of planet Earth as I knew it, but an import from another world. I stood in awe while droplets of rain began to find their way through the seams of my clothing; then we trudged soggily back to the comfort of the car and the rest of known civilisation.
A few years on, I forsook the mountains and wild places. Yet, buried deep, the experience of Beinn Alligin lived on. And it rankled. The only mountain from my youth that I had set out to climb and had failed; twice! Unfinished business of the family kind. More than thirty years later, and with the wild places calling me once again, I returned to Torridon with Martha, and quietly resolved to exorcise this festering affair. On a chill, dark June morning in 2004, we set off up the path that nowadays leads steeply up the mountain, first climbing the open hillside then up a shallow corrie. At an altitude of 800 metres we disappeared into the mist, but nothing was going to stop us now. Beinn Alligin consists of two major peaks connected by a narrow ridge. We simply climbed to the first summit, but that was enough for me: a chapter in family history could be closed.
With a sense of completion in my heart, that evening I sat by the loch and phoned my mother to tell her the news. "You'll never guess what - we climbed Beinn Alligin!" "Well I never" was her reply, slightly less amazed on her sickbed than I. My mother was frail, having been ill for some time, but her mental faculties remained in good shape.
This conversation, on the theme of family completion,was the last that I had with my mother. The following week she was taken into hospital, to die a couple of days later without regaining consciousness. Completion indeed. Very strange.
For nigh on eight years the Giant of Alligin slumbered silently, a final terrestrial outpost before the immenseness of the northern seas. Then, near the end of May this year, a friend phoned. He was climbing mountains on the north-west coast over the weekend. Did I want to come?
Saturday was hot, the air still, the sky cloudless. Above us loomed the peaks and ridges of Beinn Alligin. We retraced Martha and my footsteps from those years back; then, with the primitive rocky landscape resplendent in late spring sun, we continued along the curving narrow ridge, over the highest peak, before clambering over the celebrated Horns. For the first time, I had completed the full traverse of Beinn Alligin.
It was with the profoundly calm well-being that comes from experiencing that connection with the greater universe that I returned home on Sunday evening. As I put the key in the lock, a strange sensation shot up the length of my spine. I opened the door gingerly and ventured indoors. From the Olympian heights of the weekend I was transported in a split-second into a Stygian underworld of uncontrolled running water lashing through the semi-darkness, uninvited damp, musty smells overwhelming the nasal passages. Sodden plaster all over the furniture and floor, living room transformed into a lake, a giant hole where the ceiling used to be. Upstairs it was the same: two bedrooms saturated, ceiling plaster and sodden loft insulation everywhere, water still pouring out of a substantial hole in the water tank in the loft. Shiva - Kali in full flow, the god of chaos and destruction triumphant.
The water tank that sprung a leak while I was on Beinn Alligin has gone, as have Martha and me from the house for the time being. The place has been properly dried out (a three-week job with dalek-like machines), and at the time of writing is awaiting the (overdue) arrival of builders. Temporary enforced homeless status for most of the summer. Events both dramatic and traumatic in my life once more entwined with a certain mountain. Strange. Very strange indeed.
'Synchronicity' is a term first coined by Carl Jung in the 1920s, and used widely since, to describe an 'acausal connecting principle'. I first became really aware of the phenomenon around 1998, when I decided to undertake a period of regular shamanic underworld journeying. During this process, aspects of reality revealed themselves that I had hitherto been totally ignorant of. Penetrating these new layers of existence led to all manner of weird things happening. An orangutan appeared unannounced on a journey. What the hell was this animal doing there, one that I hadn't given a moment's conscious thought in my life before? The next day I got on the commuter train home, to find a full-page magazine article spread out on the seat before me about - orangutans. Another time a strange symbol appeared on one of these shamanic journeys; then I went for a walk, only to see that very same symbol in the back of a parked car. And so it went on, incident upon incident.
How far do you go? Maybe it's not a choice freely made. At the time, this eruption of synchronicity seemed like a weird if invaluable adjunct to normal functioning of the universe. Nowadays, I'm less sure. The Beinn Alligin phenomena have opened up the experiential possibility that synchronicity is a norm, happening all the time, but we are just usually unaware of its working.
How far do you go, indeed? The deeper you go into the workings of the universe, the stranger it gets. Jump in deeply enough, suggests Neil Kramer, and 'normal' functioning' becomes pretty tricky. Hold down a job, do regular things in regular ways: forget it. Just so. Just so.
If separate selfhood is consigned to the scrapheap of delusion, automatically everything is seen as interconnected and everything becomes possible. Linear cause-and-effect as an adequate description of the working of the universe is replaced with something far more embracing, a magnificent interrelatedness of all, extending beyond the conventional confines of time and space.
Meaningful coincidence: me and a mountain curiously intertwined. Hills, mountains, rivers, seas, plains: all the elements of the landscape are particular configurations of energy, and manifest in their own way consciousness. When the distinction between what is 'alive' and what is 'dead' falls by the wayside, anything becomes possible. Everything becomes a tiny reflection of a pulsating universe. Which sounds very sweet and nice, but can just as easily be destructive, terrifying, and to the less-than-fully enlightened mind, trauma-inducing.
Fanciful though it may sound, I occasionally sense the mountains as great storehouses of memory, keepers of wisdom from time immemorial - and therefore potentially great teachers. There have been times when I have felt that the rocks are trying to communicate something to me. Perhaps it is no accident that the rocks of the northern Highlands of Scotland - Torridonian sandstone, Lewisian gneiss etc - are among the most ancient to be found on the planet. Maybe, just maybe, this is one factor producing the curious attraction of these places to human beings, an attraction which far outweighs the mathematical height and dimensions of the mountains there. And it could be one part of why they appear to exert such influence and power in the life of this one human being at least.
And it all looked so nice at the time........
