Photos one and two: on Beinn a'Ghlo. Photos three and four: wild camp on Ben Macdui
Beinn a'Ghlo: hill of the mist, or hill of the veil. The literature surrounding this Scottish mountain abounds in adjectives such as beautiful, mysterious, isolated and remote. Yet veils and mysteries seemed a world away when I began my visit to Beinn a'Ghlo at the end of June. I stepped off the train in the small and quiet township of Blair Atholl, and was soon walking past flower-filled meadows and bright green pastures. Only ninety minutes south of where I live, yet Blair Atholl and its immediate environs exude a softer, lighter ambience than the frequently-stern landscapes nearer to home. I could have been in Sussex.
An hour or so later, I arrived at the base of the mountain proper, and any notions of being in southern England were quickly dispelled. A steady wind was blowing beneath a uniform grey sky; as I climbed I could not help but notice that, despite the wind, a distinctive silence seemed to have enveloped the entire scene. This, the eerie silence, is another feature of Beinn a'Ghlo sometimes noted in the literature. Was this 'just' a fabrication of my own imagination? Was the silence 'really' out there? Was the reality a mixture of the two? Was there any practical way of knowing?
A long serpentine ridge connects the three major summits comprising the massive bulk of Beinn a'Ghlo. I moved along the twisting snake of the back quietly and with the respect appropriate to this great mountain. I sensed the place to be a repository for some ancient wisdom long disappeared from the world of human exoteric knowledge. When the time arose for me to return to Blair Atholl, I eschewed the ridges and trodden ways, instead making a beeline across the stone and heather for a bridge across the river way, way below. As I started to descend, I sensed a movement out of the corner of my left eye. Over a mile away, and far below, a herd of deer had nevertheless caught my scent. As a single body, they moved across the surface of the corrie, bunching close together as they went. I have never seen such an enormous herd of deer in my life, and the sight brought to mind those aerial shots of huge herds of wildebeest or buffalo roaming across the great plains of Africa that are the staple of wildlife documentaries on television. Mountain of hidden mysteries indeed.
More recently, I had the pleasure to visit another mountain that brims with folklore. As part of a wild camp multi-peak trip across the Cairngorms, I took in the second highest summit in Scotland, Ben Macdui. As Rennie McOwan observes in his fascinating book 'Magic Mountains', the Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui is the best-known spectre of the Scottish mountains (as well as being, according to the author, the one about which most nonsense has been written). As one penetrates the interior of the Cairngorm massif, a very particular quality of savage wildness emerges. Wide highland spaces cut through deeply by crag-lined, loch-cradling, clefts and canyons. Ben Macdui is characterised not so much by its massive domed summit as through the cliffs and gashes that form its perimeters. Personally, I saw no evidence of the Grey Man. However, many claim to have done so. Certainly, the enormous rock-and-gravel strewn summit area seems more suited to the Moon than to be regarded as an Earthly landscape, and it is not difficult to envision all kind of otherwordly happenings taking place on the upper slopes of Ben Macdui.
Rennie McOwan is of the opinion that the Big Grey Man no longer walks the tops of the Cairngorms. 'The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdhui will never return to that mountain. The mountain is too busy. It is often thronged with people. The old mystery has gone. There is no longer an atmosphere when the feel of the hill can frighten people.' He has a point. Certainly, as I stood beside the summit cairn and became aware of a man not fifty yards away conversing on his mobile phone, it seemed as if there was a human conspiracy at large to remove the mystery from these high places. Yet I have been to spots where the mountains have provoked fear in me. I have had strange experiences in these high places, and felt the veil between the worlds become wafer-thin. We can still learn much from these repositories of the most ancient of wisdoms, the mountains. I shall return.....
