Let’s go…

I wrote this article in July 2020, as the restrictions of Scotland’s first lockdown were lifted and freedom was restored. Last weekend, I went up two of the mountains for the first time since then and reflected on that day and the memories I’ll always have.

Beinn Ghlas (left) from the summit of Ben Lawers

The alarm on my phone shatters my sleep at 5am on a Sunday morning and wracked with guilt, I wake James. He opens his eyes and, not for the last time this day, he says “let’s go”.

We’d studied the weather forecast for days and had decided the night before that we would climb Beinn Ghlas and Ben Lawers, two of the highest peaks in the Southern Highlands of Scotland.

He’s climbed mountains before — a few years ago, he went up and down Beinn Talaidh on Mull with the ease of a mountain goat, only stopping occasionally to wonder why I was so far behind.

But, today was all about his first Munros (Scottish mountains that reach a height of more than 3,000 feet) and he was brimming with excitement.

I can judge James’s anticipation by the chatter, and he talked all of the way from Edinburgh to the car park at the foot of those hills, near Killin in Perthshire.

We put on our boots and started walking at 7.19am. My interrogation did not end there. The first part of the walk is a wild nature reserve, untouched by the sheep that graze higher up the hills, each one of which serves much like a barber, ensuring the place remains clipped and close-shaven.

James told me that he felt trapped. “I feel like a cow in a pen, and I just want to get out.”

That freedom came soon enough, and we turned from the gate to look up at the majesty of Beinn Ghlas, a magnificent piece of rock in its own right but often merely regarded as the hurdle over which you must cross to reach Ben Lawers, the tenth highest mountain in Scotland, which is obscured at that point by its smaller stablemate.

It’s a relatively straightforward walk to the first summit — the only obstacle being the view to the west and to the south west. At that time in the morning, on a good day, the light is beginning to dance quietly across the surrounding hills, and it changes so often that one stop to take it all in is not enough. 

In one of those moments, we heard voices behind us and glanced backwards to see a group of men marching with purpose behind us. They sounded as excited as James (it turns out some of them were up here for the first time too) but he was unimpressed at their brisk pace, relative to mine I assume, and implored “let’s go” again.

I persuaded him eventually that our pursuers were moving quickly and we should let them go ahead. They paused to talk as they passed. “How many are you doing?” one asked. “Just the two,” I replied. “We’re doing five, can you take a quick photo for us?” they asked.

Five. It had not crossed my mind that we might do more than two, but we started to wonder.

At some point near the summit of Beinn Ghlas, we moved ahead of that group again.

They had unwittingly fallen behind in a race of which they knew nothing.

We summited just before 9am, but any excitement or pride he (and I) felt as he bagged his first Munro was tempered by that competition. “Let’s go” he said.

We moved quickly across the ridge that separates the two mountains, my photography stops curtailed by his enduring impatience. A little more than 30 minutes later, James was at the top of Ben Lawers, I settled for second place and the early pacesetters followed.

The previous time I had been up there, I was alone. Having discovered that the sandwiches I’d packed the night before were still in the fridge at home and that I had instead brought two raw chicken breasts meant for the dog, I shouted loudly to nobody and sat looking down at the beautiful Lochan nan Cat and across to the hills that stand beyond it for a good couple of hours.

It was only when I was home that night that I entertained the notion that I should have spent less time cursing the raw chicken and more time walking, so this time I was determined to right that wrong. We ate the food I had remembered to bring this time, recharged and moved on. James probably said, “let’s go”.

It was a steep climb down into the gully that lay between us and Munro number three, and my knees were starting to signal their annoyance at the pressure they were now under.

As we moved further away from our starting point, I knew that irritation would only grow but we stood for a moment in that vast wilderness, looking north to Ben Nevis and the other big mountains that appear small next to it, and between us decided, having spent months locked down at home, that we now had all of the time in the world to enjoy this playground.

We scrambled to the top of An Stùc, our third conquest of the day, and it was still only 11.30am.

That mountain’s name means ‘the peak’ in Gaelic, but it was not to be ours; a chance encounter with two other walkers changed the course of the day.

A man whose love of the hills was written in block capitals all over his excited, cheerful face asked: “How many are you doing, boys?”. “Just the three”, I said, with no hint of déjà vu.

“No, you’ll get your fourth,” he declared, pointing to Meall Corranaich, which seemed to be many miles from where we stood.

Before I could speak, he dismissed my failure of ambition and carried on with detailed instructions. “Go back up Lawers, follow the path down to the west of Beinn Ghlas, turn that corner and you will see a massive boulder. Turn right there, and it will take you 15 minutes to get your fourth”. There was to be no further discussion and off he went.

James and I decided we would go to the boulder. It was on the way home anyway, so no harm in judging for ourselves whether 15 minutes was the well-meaning exaggeration of a man who looked like he skipped up Munros before he went to work in the morning.

We followed our newly appointed mountaineering adviser off An Stùc, albeit at a more leisurely pace. After all, my knees were now complaining much more determinedly and while I strapped one of them up, there was a pointless debate to be had about whether four was a greater achievement than three.

I hobbled down what I’d thought was the last hill of the day and marched up Lawers again. We moved quickly over the now crowded summit and down on to the path that is drawn crudely round the side of Beinn Ghlas, and which would lead us to the boulder of which the mountain man spoke.

That big rock was not hard to find, overshadowed only by Meall Corranaich itself. By this time, we were doing the fourth. The debate was half-hearted and… “let’s go”.

Up we went, the side of the hill so steep that any judgement of the time it would take to reach the top was built more on hope than anything more sophisticated. 22 minutes later (James was timing it), we arrived at the top of our fourth Munro of the day.

This time, the celebration was more business-like, as if we’d left our final Zoom meeting of the day and closed the laptop.

“Let’s go,” James said. And this time, we did. All the way home.