a memory of mountains

Somewhere from within the void of childhood memory, is a vague image: the smell of damp grass, the sound of stream water tinkering over rocks, looking up to see vast mountain sides disappearing into the clouds. I think I'd been let out of the family car and was standing, shorts round my ankles, my wee winkie out in the fresh air peeing into a huge trench. I probably wasn't yet eight years old.

Some twenty years later I was driving through Glen Shiel and had stopped for a pee by a ditch. As I looked up at the slopes of Sgurr na Ciste Duibhe disppearing into the clouds, I became aware of the smell of grass, damp from recent rain, and I heard the sound of a stream, dropping from the Corrie above. Slowly I realised why the place seemed familiar. On both occasions I'd probably been peeing into an old Jacobite defensive trench from the 1719 Battle of Glen Shiel, the last time that foreign troops would be engaged in battle on mainland British soil.

The memory of these infinitely high mountains, The Five Sisters of Kintail, may be what drew me to the outdoors and eventually to the hills.

Other memories are also hard to retrieve from the void. I do recollect trying to escape a factory job by roughing it, outdoors at weekends. There are flashbacks of walking for long distances along roads, shouldering a heavy backpacking rucksack and camping in fields, completely exhausted. I would pitch an old wet heavyweight-cotton tent, often in rain and often wearing sodden constricting denim jeans. There was no sewn in groundsheet so nights were shivery and damp. These were gruelling tests, so exhausting and painful that it was a relief to be back at work.

I began to hitch-hike around Scotland and before long, knew all the junctions, the best places to catch a lift and most hitching tricks of the trade, skills that would be useful in later years when I hitched lifts to the Lake District, Wales, and even as far off as the Italian Alps.

At some stage I must have progressed from walking along roads to climbing mountain paths. I recall one particular night camping in Glencoe during a gale. Catching odd winks of sleep, sat upright, desperately clutching my one tent pole while powerful veering winds tried to rip it and the sodden tent away into the night. Another occasion camped below Ben Nevis. This time with the luxury of a sewn in groundsheet. Unfortunately lack of waterproofing in the tent outer resulted in a three inch deep puddle of water which had been slowly absorbed by my lightweight summer sleeping bag.

Those desperate early experiences should have killed any enthusiasm. In fact, all the cold shivery nights, the shoulders worn raw from heavy rucksack straps, the blistered feet, these served only as a strange rite of passage. One made complete when, one day during my late teens I stood on the summit of Sgurr nam Fiannaidh, Glencoe, having completed the the Aonach Eagach Ridge, wearing tweed breeches, woollen chequered shirt, ill fitting boots and tartan bunnet. My first true mountaineer's achievement.

On that peak, almost three thousand feet above the Clachaig Inn, I stumbled into a German au pair. A good looking girl with long flowing blonde hair who made breeches look like clothing worth getting into. She was on a hill-walking weekend break from her Summer holiday job - looking after the kids for a family somewhere in Edinburgh. As I found out later, after a few hours of drinking and trying to sing German campfire songs in the Clachaig, looking after kids wasn't the only thing she was good at.

On that day I passed the initiation ceremony, became a man and became a mountaineer.

I'd found something meaningful to do, something to balance out the daily grind of working life. I'd discovered nature, beauty, wild places ... and one or two other things ...