The book of the bivvy : tips, stories and route ideas [3rd edition.] 9781786310781, 9781783628681, 1783628685

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The Book of the Bivvy

Ronald Turnbull When his antique Saunders Jetpacker went porous in 1996, Ronald Turnbull stopped bothering with a tent. He has made eight bivvybag crossings of Scotland coast-to-coast and slept on 36 Scottish summits, 46 English, four in Northern Ireland, seven in Wales and one on the Isle of Man. He writes regularly for The Great Outdoors, Lakeland Walker and Trail magazines and the UKHillwalking website.

www.ronaldturnbull.co.uk

The Book of the Bivvy Tips, stories and route ideas by Ronald Turnbull

JUNIPER HOUSE, MURLEY MOSS, OXENHOLME ROAD, KENDAL, CUMBRIA LA9 7RL www.cicerone.co.uk

© Ronald Turnbull 2021 Third edition 2021 ISBN: 978 1 78631 078 1 Second edition 2007 First edition 2002

Printed in China on responsibly sourced paper on behalf of Latitude Press Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All photographs are by the author unless otherwise stated.

Route mapping by Lovell Johns www.lovelljohns.com © Crown copyright 2021 OS PU100012932. NASA relief data courtesy of ESRI Contains OpenStreetMap. org data © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA. NASA relief data courtesy of ESRI.

Acknowledgements My thanks to various companions (Oliver, Colin, Virginia and Glyn) for confirming that it’s not just me and that the bag really is for having fun in. Julian Miles carefully explained just why I’d got so wet in Belfast and gave useful advice on various technical points. Don’t waste their efforts. Find a sunset summit somewhere and shake out that bag.

Updates to this Guide While every effort is made by our authors to ensure the accuracy of books as they go to print, changes can occur during the lifetime of an edition. Any updates that we know of for this guide will be on the Cicerone website ( www.cicerone.co.uk/1078/updates ). We are always grateful for information about any discrepancies between a guidebook and the facts on the ground, sent by email to [email protected] or by post to Cicerone, Juniper House, Murley Moss, Oxenholme Road, Kendal, LA9 7RL. Register your book: To sign up to receive free updates, special offers and GPX files where available, register your book at www. cicerone.co.uk.

Safety note To the man in Ruigh Aiteachain bothy who asked: ‘But what happens if it rains?’ I’d walked a long way that day, and it didn’t come out very lucidly. But the answer’s disarmingly simple, and he’ll find it in Chapter 8.

Front cover: Moorland bivvy below Beinn a’ Ghlò, Atholl

A survival bag or bivvy bag, carried as an emergency shelter, is a valuable safety aid. However, when the bivvy bag is used in place of a tent on trips through wild country, the margin of safety is reduced. This practice is only recommended to those with hillwalking experience, who understand the use of map and compass and how bad the weather could get. The normal precaution of leaving a timed route-plan with a responsible person is even more important for bivvybag walkers.

Contents Map key. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Bag for life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Bivvy night 1: Snowdon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 2 Primitive bivvy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bivvy night 2: Peigne and suffering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Problems of the polybag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plastic bag for pleasure purposes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Polybag facts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

15 15 17 18 19

3 Bivvy history. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rude people enquire into futurity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nights on the Eiger. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bivvy night 3: A walk on the Wye side . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mr Brown’s little green bag. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

20 24 25 29 31

4 Midlevel baggery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bivvy night 4: Fast asleep on the Berwickshire coast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cave behaviour. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bivvy night 5: A bedroom in Borrowdale. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fallback bag. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bag and camera. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bivvy night 6: Man management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bag shopping. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poncho, basha, tarp – and the groovy group shelter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

33 33 35 39 41 42 46 48 50

5 Time, things and Miguel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miguel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

52 53 54 56

6 Sleeping on summits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Bivvy night 7: Great Gable. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Walking on the wet side. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 7 The comfort zone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Bivvy night 8: Up Base Brown in down. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

Sleeping mats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Dew process. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Route 1: Merrick two-day trip. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 8 But what if it rains?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bivvy night 9: Wet under thorns in Belfast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further suffering. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What if it rains?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Look after your bivvy and your bivvy will look after you. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

80 80 81 83 84

9 Across Scotland by bag. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Wetness and weight: cross-Scotland constraints. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Route 2: Acharacle to Aberdeenshire. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 10 The art of lightweight long-distance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Bag and baggage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 The fuel on the hill. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Fast food. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 High cuisine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Bivvy night 10: A peat-hole on Bowland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 The importance of water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 11 Mountains under the moon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Route 3: Coleridge’s Helvellyn overnight crossing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 12 Bivvybag routes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 Route 4: Lakeland all the way. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Route 5: Rannoch Moor: the beauty and the bog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 Bivvy night 11: Helm Crag. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 13 But that was in another country. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 Foreign parts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 Route 6: Sierra Nevada: the Spanish 3000s. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Bivvy night 12: Cima Cadin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 14 And in the end . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Sheltered housing for the elderly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Appendix A Suppliers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164

Nightfall, Helm Crag (Bivvy night 11)

Symbols used on route maps route

bothy

start point

bivvy site

finish point

summit

start/finish point

building

direction of route

Map key

7

Bivvy on Middle Fell, Wasdale

8

The Book of the Bivvy

Sunrise light on Knoydart, from a bivvy site on Sgùrr nan Coireachan

1 INTRODUCTION How little you know of happiness, you comfortable people Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Ah, Knoydart! That remote peninsular is reached by no road, but by a long ride up the West Highland Railway and Bruce Watt’s boat out of Mallaig. Leap onto the jetty at Inverie with a real feeling of anxiety and self-reliance. The boat won’t be back for two days, and it’s 30 miles to the bus stop. Those miles aren’t easy ones. Knoydart’s Rough Bounds are well separated from the so-called Real World, concealed in mists and snowclouds, defended by midges and the mysteries of the ferry timetable. Here the sea creeps deep into the hills, the hills drop steep into the sea – and 2.5m of rainwater per year is transferred from the one to the other. Knoydart in the rain is where Hamish Brown came closest to abandoning his ‘all the Munros’ walk. Get lost in the mist and it’s 600m down a vertical bog, and what you get at the bottom is a river in spate and no footbridge. It’s best, here, to expect anything at all in the way of weather. And when a surprising sun beats down out of a sky of blue – as it does, not infrequently at all, in the month of May – we were equipped to cope. In my sack was a small green Gore-Tex bag 1 Introduction

9

On Sgùrr na Cìche (photo: Oliver Turnbull)

supplied by an elderly but very lively member of the Scottish Mountaineering Club. In Oliver’s sack was a similar one, and in his head the route-plan for this very eventuality. Sgùrr na Cìche. It’s the hard heart of the Rough Bounds. Its rocky sides steepen as they rise, till its top contour-lines crowd so close that there isn’t even space for a spot-height. By the side of Loch Nevis we stopped to brew a simple supper, and looked at the Cìche. Its western ridge started as a seaweedy spine rising out of the loch; indeed, its rocky outline could be seen plunging on downwards into the salt waters. Sun-heat beat back at us off the rock-spine, the warm air carried the aroma of the bog myrtle, and the bees were buzzing around in the heather. Not at all a night for the bothy. And so we raced the setting sun up the three miles (and one vertical kilometre) of the ridge. All the way, the pointed summit stood like a beckoning finger against the sky. We scrambled on hands and knees up the final steep metres to reach the cairn in time for the last two minutes of the day. The sun went down behind the rim of Ladhar Bheinn like an egg-yolk falling into the blades of a liquidiser. At this point we may calculate the altitude of Heaven as 1042m (3418ft). For on Cìche’s summit, at sunset, it is surely within touching distance. Two minutes down the eastern side we found, among all the bare schist, a grassy shelf sheltered by lumps of crag. Thirty kilometres away, Ben Nevis – that urban hill – crouched under the stars. All night long our noses poked into the night and were cooled and freshened by the breezes. But by dawn those noses were damp ones. Grey rain had rolled in off the Atlantic. Tendrils of cloud swirled around our little hollow; we were annoying, soggy tealeaves 10

The Book of the Bivvy

to be scoured out of its pristine sink. We bundled up the damp bags and dropped 250m to warm up, before breakfasting under a wet stone wall.

Bag for life Back at the start of this century, enterprising gear firms were adapting the new breathable fabrics into sophisticated sacks for sleeping in. They had two obstacles to overcome. The first was their customer research department, which kept asking the customers questions like ‘Would you like a zip-out midge membrane?’ ‘Would you like some hoops to hoop it up inside, and some little pegs to peg it out with?’ And the second was a certain credibility barrier. Surely, nobody with any sense really wants to sleep in a plastic bag. And so, if you wanted a simple green bag that didn’t cost very much and didn’t have fancy features, you applied to a man in Wales called Julian Miles. In a shed, with a sewing machine, Julian (his firm was Kathmandu Trekking) fulfilled the entire UK requirement for simple green bivvy bags without any fancy features. Meanwhile those enterprising gear firms were also developing camming gadgets, and down-filled clothing, and much better climbing boots. With the result that big-wall climbing, once reserved for a few fearsome blokes from the back streets of Sheffield (or Innsbruck if you happened to be Hermann Buhl), became a mildly popular form of fun. And when it came to sleeping out in the snow at the bottom of the Walker Spur, or on a minute stony ledge halfway up it, when offered hooped entrances and clever zips, the answer was ‘Thank you, but no’ – or an even more emphatic response than that. So various manufacturers with much bigger sheds than Julian Miles started making straightforward bivvy bags at straightforward prices for people who like uncomplicated outdoor fun. And outdoor magazines started to write about them – possibly even nudged Evening light on Stob Ghabhar’s west ridge that way by the first edition of 1 Introduction

11

Bedroom wallpaper: sunset light on Ben Venue, the Trossachs

this book back in 2001. In one respect, at least, I can claim to have had influence on the world: bivvy is now spelled like a real word, with two Vs and a Y. So where are they, all these bivvy bags? For in all my years of informal slumber, apart from a couple of rock climbers outside a hut in the Spanish mountains, I’ve never seen anybody else asleep in a bag. Is it just that the bivvy is so discreet that we don’t see it? A gentleman who didn’t give his name spent four months in his one, watching a farmhouse in Kent where some thieves were preparing to steal the great De Beers diamond from the Millennium Dome. And just as I’ve not seen anybody else, it’s likely the case that only one person – a dawn walker plus dog arriving at the summit of Ben More on Mull – has ever seen me. As for the other half-million bivvy bags manufactured by Britain’s lively outdoor suppliers, perhaps all of them are sitting in attics, their nervous owners eyeing them every six months like divers on the top board and wondering, ‘Do I quite dare? Or don’t I?’ Top board – over the top – topping – there’s a pun here, struggling with its zips and trying to emerge into the open air. So far, the bag has mostly been slept in by serious mountaineers, serious long-distance types, and of course the special forces. But even on a simple tropical beach it makes all the difference not to have the morning dew joining you in bed. Or you could take a bottle of whisky to the first flat place above the youth hostel and join Prince Charlie in the heather.

12

The Book of the Bivvy

The modern lightweight tent has opened up the wilderness – but for an increasing number of people the lightweight tent is just a bit too civilised. Can you really experience nature’s rawness from inside a zipped-up storm-flap? For those who want to bring a bit of old-fashioned pain and suffering back into the outdoor experience, the bivvy bag is the place to be. In a tent you have to unbag, boot up, and crawl all over a sleeping companion to see what the stars are up to. In a bivvy, the stars are shining right down on your nose. When the moonlight falls onto a sea of cloud, and the Isle of Skye floats across the sea like a silver dream, do you really want to be zipped up under an orange dome, asleep? And when the wind howls in the heather and the rain gradually trickles in, you don’t experience the full misery when you recline in waterproof tented splendour. If you like to travel a nice short distance with a comfortingly heavy pack, and to spend the sunset hours sitting in a cramped space rehydrating little packets over a cooker, then what you want is a tent. Or perhaps a youth hostel, or hotel. But if you want to walk right across the Lakes in a weekend, or right across Scotland in a week – if you prefer a small portable rucksack with no oppressive luxuries (like inflatable sleeping mats, dry clothing, or cookers) to interfere between you and the mountain experience – then you want the little green bag. Apart from anything else, a tent won’t ever fit onto that ledge on Sgùrr na Cìche.

1 Introduction

13

BIVVY NIGHT 1: Snowdon

Just below Snowdon summit

Tents are the indoors. And even if you had a tent up here, there’d only be one place wide enough to put it up – and it’s a bit tricky pushing tent pegs into a station platform. But who wants to be zipped up indoors when there’s a little gravel ledge right below Snowdon summit? Who wants to be tucked up inside a triangular synthetic bedroom as cloud rises slowly up the side of the mountain – cloud that’s pale under the moonlight, and then bright orange under the rising sun. Below the toe-end of the bivvy bag, Crib Goch sticking up like a shark in a custard-coloured sea. We’d carried the bivvy bags, and sleeping bags, over all the Welsh 3000s – messed around by torchlight on the flank of Crib y Ddysgl – just for this moment. As well as for the morning after: Y Lliwedd shrugging off its filmy negligee of overnight cloud, and at 5am the Brocken spectre striding in the air beside us all along the scrambly ridgeline. The late breakfast at the Pen-y-Pass café shack was pretty good as well.

14

The Book of the Bivvy

Any high-level day is improved by a high-level night: Hoy, Orkney Isles

2 PRIMITIVE BIVVY Cold ground was my bed last night, and rock was my pillow too Bob Marley, ‘Talkin’ Blues’

BIVVY NIGHT 2: Peigne and suffering On the way up, we met two other British people coming down. ‘Benighted: abseiled off. You’ll see our rope hanging in the chimney.’ Silly Brits, don’t understand Alpine climbing, always getting benighted. We told them we’d pick up their rope as we passed it and bring it back to the campsite that evening. Or that late afternoon – the Aiguille du Peigne is one of the littlest of the Chamonix Aiguilles, with good rock and at climbing Grade III (UK Diff) all the way. The trouble with climbing guidebooks is that they’re written by people who are very good at climbing. Our book was an English-language selection, and the English-language selectors had omitted the Ordinary Route up the Peigne in favour of this ‘terribly easy but rather nice rock route’. But there were

2 Primitive bivvy

15

600m of the ‘terribly easy’ rock. Which is fine if you consider UK Diff a scramble and climb it unroped. It’s not fine if you consider UK Diff a climb. As we went up we looked at our watches, looked at the rocks above, and became less and less British and more informally alpine in our climbing. We reached the previous people’s jammed rope and removed it from the chimney. We got to the top of the climb and crossed onto the Ordinary Route. We abandoned all idea of the summit and set off down the Ordinary Route. It got darker. The trouble with downhill rock climbing in the dark is that you can’t distinguish the worn footholds, the trampled ledges, the turned-over screes of the correct line. So on a suitable rocky ledge we decided to stop and get benighted. All night long we heard the meltwater dripping, so the temperature can’t even have got down to freezing. And we were equipped. We’d read all about this in The White Spider and gone out to buy some sophisticated survival equipment. ‘I would like,’ I told them at Tiso’s, ‘a bivouac sack.’ They looked puzzled, then laughed. ‘Ah – you mean a poly bag!’ Surprisingly, for such an advanced bit of kit, the cost was only five shillings. The five-shillingsworth was bright orange and rather thick. I wriggled into a cosy hole below some boulders. The other people’s rope, coils opened out into a long figure-of-eight, made a bed that was almost comfortable. A barley-sugar sweet, placed in the downhill cheek, spread an illusory warmth – bad for the teeth but good for morale. I certainly slept for some of the time. After we’d listened to about a hundred thousand drips, the dripping darkness gave way to a dripping grey half-light. When you know you’re about to leave the bag and be even colder, it seems less uncomfortable. A good shiver warms you up and then you can doze a little. But then a strange whirr and sudden rattle from overhead… We were directly underneath the Mont Blanc cable car. No more than 50m away in the grey air, well-fed people were passing through the sky in a warm plastic box. Their windows were steamed up: with any luck they couldn’t see us. We packed our bags and scurried down the mountain. In the meadows below, the first of the new day’s climbers were heading for the Peigne. A pair with the patched-breeches look of the British were heading off towards the bottom of the 600m terribly easy rock climb…

16

The Book of the Bivvy

Problems of the polybag Today we’ve upgraded the name to ‘survival bag’, but the price is relatively unchanged at between £5 and Free With This Month’s Issue. And there’s no doubt that these things aid survival. Dumfriesshire, for example, has two more inhabitants than it would have were it not for the survival bag. An elderly neighbour suffered a mild heart attack on the Enterkin Pass and lay for five hours in a snowstorm. A much younger one fell while descending into Glen Shiel, broke both ankles and his jawbone – and nobody knew where he was except a friend who’d just that day emigrated to New Zealand. He lay in his bag for four days. No piece of equipment does better in terms of lives saved per pound sterling, with the possible exception of bootlaces and other short lengths of string. But the survival bag means what it says. You wake up miserable, but alive. Much of that misery is down to dampness. A medium-sized human, in the course of a night, emits about a pint of water. This pint (or half-litre, for a slightly smaller person who thinks in metric) condenses on the inside of the plastic. From there it gets into your hair, your clothes and your sleeping bag (if you’re lucky enough to be in a sleeping bag). It gets in between the pages of this book: the later chapters will be largely concerned with that pint of water in the night. The plastic sort of bag is like the western side of Scotland. It’s warmer, but also wetter. This book is about misery that’s mixed in with pleasure, rather than taken straight; about self-indulgence rather than mere survival. However, all bivvy bags do have a secondary function as survival aids, and it’s true that you can’t have much either of fun or suffering if you died in Glen Shiel the previous winter. For pure survival, there are various items of lightweight plastic or so-called ‘space blankets’. These cost very little, weigh very little (about 100g) and are of very little use. That’s not the same as no use at all. After the London Marathon they gave us aluminised plastic wrappers with the sponsor’s logo. Thus we became, among the streaked concrete of Waterloo Embankment, a fluttering blue-and-silver throng as we consumed an other-worldly sports drink which itself tasted strongly aluminised. The space blanket claims to conserve 90% of body heat. This is misleading. Heat is transferred by radiation, conduction and convection. When lying under a stone wall in a snowstorm, heat is lost by conduction (into the freezing ground below) and by convection (into the passing breeze above). Aluminised plastic reflects only radiant heat. However, when strolling beside the Thames damp with sweat and wearing only your undies, the blue-and-silver wrapper is what you need over skimpy shorts and a Galloway sheep t-shirt. This wrapper came free – I only had to run 26 miles to get it. And while it was of little use as camping kit, it was also of little weight. Which I thought could be of value;

2 Primitive bivvy

17

Morning moment on Blencathra

so I took it on the Mountain Marathon. On these events a cooker is compulsory: so I also took along some delicious savoury rice. Alas! When Glyn unwrapped the cooker it was of a purely formal sort – small paraffin blocks, a stove like a dead spider sculpted out of rust, and a foil tub for a saucepan. The super-lightweight saucepan had been remarkable value: less than £2.50, with its first hot meal, plus beansprouts, included at no extra charge. Unfortunately, it had been on several mountain marathons already and was no longer rice-tight. A saucepan liner cut from the London blanket turned out just the thing. It shrivelled above the soup-line, but held below. The moral? Anything’s useful, so just take whatever weighs least… However, for serious survival (which means survival of snowstorms) you need a serious survival bag, and it weighs 300g. This is thick enough to hold in heat as well as air, and stiff enough that the breeze won’t mould it against your body. The books say you should bite a hole in the corner of it to breathe through and then enter it head first. This makes sense: warm air rises and stays in the bag. However, I’ve never been quite desperate enough to bite a hole in something that cost me five shillings. Two people are not twice as warm as one in a bag, unless the bag’s a very big one. If the bag gets tight it compresses your clothing and the bits of you pressing against the outside get very cold indeed. There are, however, group bags: these are specifically designed for several people to get miserable in together.

Plastic bag for pleasure purposes Some of us are too mean to buy a proper bivvy bag, and some of us just like to see how much we can do without. I come into both categories. So here is the technique for primitive plastic travel. 18

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If plastic bags get wet on the inside, the way to stay dry is to stay outside the bag. A foam mat is one of the things you probably didn’t bring, and the double layer of plastic underneath is insulation of a sort as well as groundsheet. When it starts to rain, you can postpone the damp by moving under a nearby tree. When the rain starts to drip through the leaves, it’s just possible it may already have finished raining outside. Otherwise, it’s time to get into the bag. Position it with the feet end slightly uphill. This means that condensation in the bag has a chance to trickle out the entrance. It also means that raindrops on the outside will drip off the entrance rather than trickling back inside. If you hold the entrance well open, air can get in and evaporate some of the condensation. You wake up moist but warm. It’s the next night – the crawling back into a bag that’s already damp – that’s going to be really horrible. So the advice is not to do that next night but to head down off the hill to civilisation with its youth hostels and shops selling proper breathable bags. However, it may not rain at all. In which case you simply keep going until you run out of muesli. You lie late to let the sun take the dew off the plastic, amble down to the village whose lamps had lightened your night-time. And discover that late though you lay, it’s still two hours too early for the shops.

Polybag facts The basic polythene survival bag should cost between £5 and nothing at all – they may be given away free with outdoor magazines. A fertiliser sack does the same job more cheaply, although the bedtime reading printed on the outside is less entertaining. The larger ones, designed to be carried by tractor rather than by hand, empty out to a good size; it’s important to wash out all traces of the previous contents, as fertiliser damages the skin. The more the bag weighs the more robust and effective it is – but the more it weighs, obviously. One at 250–300g is a good balance between heaviness and uselessness. It should be long enough to be able to get right inside with boots on and then fold down the end so as to let the rain drip – this means a bit over 2 metres. If planned for two, it should be big enough to hang loose around you rather than stretched tight about your bodies. One night under the moon in a plastic bag should persuade you that you want more nights under the moon, but in something other than damp plastic. Rawhide? Potato sacks? Stout Harris tweed? In the next chapter we’ll study various historic bivvy bags even less accommodating than polythene.

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Sunrise at the Quiraing, Isle of Skye

3 BIVVY HISTORY Brian an augury hath tried Of that dread kind which must not be Unless in dire extremity, The Taghairm called; by which, afar, Our sires foresaw the events of war. That bull was slain: his reeking hide They stretched the cataract beside. Crouch’d on a shelf beneath the brink, Close where the thundering torrents sink, Midst groan of rock, and roar of stream, The wizard waits prophetic dream …’ Sir Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake

The period from 1900 to roughly 1969 was a dark age of outdoor technique. When the marathon was reintroduced as an Olympic sport 100 years ago, it was considered unnecessary and unsporting to drink water along the way. As a result, marathon runners tended to collapse and die at the 20th mile. Certainly, 26 miles and 300 yards were too far for all but the toughest and most athletic. Today, hundreds of thousands of people every year cover the distance, some of them only moderately fit, some of them dressed as chamber pots and crocodiles. And at every mile marker they pass a drinks station. But we can be sure that Pheidippides – the original marathon runner – knew about the importance of water. So did the Aztec post-runners, who covered over a hundred miles a day up and down the Andes. When the Dyhrenfurth expedition attempted Kanchenjunga in 1930, each expedition boot, once its massive crampon was strapped onto it, weighed in at 2.75kg 20

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Roman military sandals

(or 5.5kg for the pair). Professor Dyhrenfurth seems to have considered this a good thing, as it strengthened character along with legs. And yet the Roman soldier, as he padded along the ridge of High Street, knew all about lightweight footwear. Legionaries wore hobnailed leather sandals; auxiliaries preferred the lightweight boot called the caliga. One report describes the caliga as very comfortable, and better than the modern military boot. The upper was cut from a single piece of leather, laced all the way up the front and sometimes left open at the toe and heel. The sole pattern resembled that on a modern pair of trail shoes – designed to optimise the distribution of the walker’s weight. Today’s boot design may just about be catching up with the Romans. It’d be interesting to run a comparative gear test against a pair of Brashers… Back in the dark days of 1970 I headed up into Glen Affric for a week of Munrobagging. On my back was the state-of-the-art rucksack: a dangling pear-shape of stout canvas. Any self-respecting Roman soldier would have flung that pack into the bog. It added 4.5kg to the effective weight. And that effective weight already included the tent of the time: 5kg of cotton, and hemp cordage, with wooden poles connected with ferrules of solid iron. The 33 pegs on their own weighed more than a tent of today. And yet, a hundred years earlier, imaginative Britons had been sleeping out under tents with a total weight, including poles and groundsheet, of nothing at all. In 1878, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson appears to have invented the bivvy bag. This child of my invention was nearly six feet square [ie before sewing into a bag] … a sort of long roll or sausage, green waterproof cart cloth without and blue sheep’s fur within … A tent, above all for a solitary traveller, is troublesome to pitch, and troublesome to strike again; and even on the march it forms a conspicuous feature in your baggage. A sleeping-sack, on the other hand, is always ready – you have only to get

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Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes first edition frontispiece (Walter Crane)

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into it; it serves a double purpose – a bed by night, a portmanteau by day; and it does not advertise your intention of camping out to every curious passer-by.

So here is bivvy literature’s first write-up of a night in a bag. Like many after him, RLS leaves it rather late to select his bedroom… The rain had stopped, and the wind, which still kept rising, began to dry my coat and trousers. ‘Very well,’ thought I, ‘water or no water, I must camp.’… The wind roared unwearyingly among the trees; I could hear the boughs tossing and the leaves churning through half a mile of forest; yet the scene of my encampment was not only as black as the pit, but admirably sheltered… I tied Modestine [his donkey] more conveniently for herself, and broke up half the black bread for her supper, reserving the other half against the morning. Then I gathered what I should want within reach, took off my wet boots and gaiters, which I wrapped in my waterproof, arranged my knapsack for a pillow under the flap of my sleeping-bag, insinuated my limbs into the interior, and buckled myself in like a bambino. I opened a tin of Bologna sausage and broke a cake of chocolate, and that was all I had to eat… All I had to wash down this revolting mixture was neat brandy: a revolting beverage in itself. But I was rare and hungry; ate well, and smoked one of the best cigarettes in my experience. Then I put a stone in my straw hat, pulled the flap of my fur cap over my neck and eyes, put the revolver ready to my hand, and snuggled well down among the sheepskins. I questioned at first if I were sleepy, for I felt my heart beating faster than usual, as if with an agreeable excitement to which my mind remained a stranger. But as soon as my eyelids touched, that subtle glue leaped between them, and they would no more come separate. The wind among the trees was my lullaby. Sometimes it sounded for minutes together with a steady, even rush, not rising nor abating; and again it would swell and burst like a great crashing breaker, and the trees would patter me all over with big drops from the rain of the afternoon… When I awoke for the third time, the world was flooded with a blue light, the mother of the dawn. I saw the leaves labouring in the wind and the ribbon of the road; and, on turning my head, there was Modestine tied to a beech, and standing half across the path in an attitude of inimitable patience. I closed my eyes again, and set to thinking over the experience of the night. I was surprised to find how easy and pleasant it had been, even in this tempestuous weather. The stone which annoyed me would not have been there, had I not been forced to camp blindfold in the opaque night; and I had felt no other inconvenience, except when my feet encountered the lantern or the second volume of Peyrat’s Pastors of the Desert among the mixed contents of my sleeping-bag; nay, more, I had felt not a touch of cold, and awakened with unusually lightsome and clear sensations.

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Rude people enquire into futurity Even earlier, in 1858, the explorer Charles Packe was sleeping out on the summits of Lakeland, and backpacking along the Pyrenean High-level Route. In the Pyrenees he spurned the mountain cabanes of the shepherds (‘a lodging which few Englishmen would prefer to the open air’). Throughout the chain, and especially on the Spanish side, there is a great deficiency of hotel accommodation on the mountains, so that a sleeping bag is almost an indispensable part of his kit to anyone who would see and thoroughly enjoy the grander parts of the Pyrenees … More may be seen in the mountains in four or five days camping out than in three weeks of hotel life with an occasional excursion. Besides the bag, a tin saucepan with a lid, a frying pan and a few spoons ought to be taken.

According to Packe’s obituary, there was hardly a mountain top of eminence in Britain on which he had not passed the night, often with no shelter but a blanket or a cloak. His companion Count Henry Russell-Killough used the mountain itself as his bivvy bag: after digging several caves into the side of 3298m Vignemale, he had himself buried overnight at the summit. His head alone stuck out into the clouds, and frost formed in his beard. Whatever we think of the rival claims of Packe and Stevenson, it’s clear that the mystic exploitation of the bivvy bag goes back much further than either of them. The quotation at the top of the chapter is from the fourth canto of ‘The Lady of the Lake’ by Sir Walter Scott. This 70-page poem has 30 pages of notes to it. Helpfully, Sir Walter explains: The Highlanders, like all rude people, had various superstitious modes of inquiring into futurity … A person was wrapped up in the skin of a newly-slain bullock, and deposited beside a waterfall, or at the bottom of a precipice, or in some other strange, wild, and unusual situation, where the scenery around him suggested nothing but objects of horror.

Although Scott doesn’t say so, it seems clear that the subject should lie naked within the warm and bloody hide, with only his head showing. Leather is moderately breathable – that’s one reason why it’s good for making boots with. However, it probably is not as good as Gore-Tex or Milair, if we judge from the contemporary records. One John Erach of the Isle of Lewis was a night within the hide; during which time he felt and heard such terrible things, that he could not express them; the impression that it made on him was such as could never go off; and he said, for a thousand worlds he would never again be concerned in the like performance.

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Nights on the Eiger Much has been written about the north face of the Eiger (in German, Eigerwand) – in the 1930s the most dangerous and difficult face in the Alps. In the first four years of attempts none succeeded and of the 10 who set foot on the face, all but two lost their lives. (For comparison, of every 80 people who have climbed higher than Everest Base Camp, around 25 of them have reached the summit and one has died on the mountain.) What is less frequently realised is that the eventual conquest of this face was down to advances in bivvy technique. The early attempts fell into a pattern that soon became familiar to the watchers at the telescopes of the Grindelwald hotels. Fit and vigorous, the climbers would make excellent progress on day one, crossing the first icefield and even the second before being pinned down by the afternoon stonefall. They would then bivouac. After the bivouac they would continue much more slowly, hesitating at every difficulty. They would make less than half the height gain of the previous day, and be forced to a second bivouac. On the third day they would vanish behind the clouds of an Eigerwand blizzard, and a week or two later their bodies would be found in the avalanche cone at the foot of the face. Most famous of the Eiger overnight spots was at the top corner of the Flatiron buttress, between the second and third icefields. This small stance under an overhang, sheltered from stonefall, became known as the Death Bivouac. The first seven to sleep here either died of exposure and exhaustion, or were caught soon afterwards by storm or stonefall; the eighth, the Italian Claudio Corti, only got away by being winched off the Traverse of the Gods by a climber who had descended 300m from the summit on a wire cable. The bivouac was again used on 28 August 1961 by Adi (Adolf) Mayr, attempting the first solo ascent. He climbed very strongly to reach the Flatiron early on his first afternoon, but was brought to a stop there by stonefall. The next morning he was seen to climb with unaccountable hesitancy and slowness, and fell to his death from the Ramp. The discovery that was the key to the face was not the famous Hinterstoisser Traverse but rather the bivouac site immediately above: the Swallow’s Nest. Here it is described by Heinrich Harrer, one of the four-man team that made the first successful ascent of the Eigerwand in 1938 (all quotations are from his book The White Spider, translated by Hugh Merrick): We reached our rock knob and were able to fix two belaying-pitons; then we spent hours in digging a small seat out of the ice below it. We tied ourselves and our belongings to the pitons for security’s sake, furnished our seat with coils of rope, and started to cook our meal. The knob of rock afforded us complete protection from

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Guide to the Eigerwand (photo: Jonathan Williams)

stones; the view from our perch was magnificent. All the conditions for a happy bivouac were present…

At this bivvy in 1962, Chris Bonington and Hamish MacInnes used as a bivvy bag the plastic cover of Hamish’s motorbike. Coming across another climber who needed rescuing, they abandoned their attempt without much regret – a bike cover isn’t an adequate bivvy bag at 2500m. One of Harrer’s teammates, the German climber Ludwig Vörg, had already discovered the Swallow’s Nest, level with the bottom corner of the first icefield and protected by an overhang. Its comforts would allow the climbers to start the second day refreshed, and to cross all three of the icefields before stonefall. Not for nothing was Vörg known as the ‘Bivouac King’ (Bivakkönig). He equipped the Swallow’s Nest with fleece-lined sleeping bags and air beds, and built it a low wall of stones. And as the ascent unfolded, his bivouac technique was crucial. The four climbers spent their second night on the Ramp, below the Waterfall Chimney (the ‘usual bivouac place, a good bivouac’), as described by Harrer: We arranged our bivouac about 8ft below that of Heckmair and Vörg. We managed to drive a single piton into a tiny crevice in the rock. It was a thin square-shafted piton. It held after only a centimetre, but it was just jammed. Obviously, once we

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hung our whole weight on it, it would very likely work loose with the leverage. So we bent it downwards in a hoop, till the ring was touching the rock. In this way we did away with any question of leverage and knew we could rely on our little grey steely friend. First we hung all our belongings on it and, after that, ourselves. … We managed to manufacture a sort of seat with the aid of rope-slings, and hung out some more to prevent our legs dangling over the gulf. Next to me there was a tiny level spot, just big enough for our cooker, so we were able to brew tea, coffee and cocoa. Heckmair and Vörg were no more comfortably lodged. The relaxed attitude of Vörg, the ‘Bivouac King’, was quite remarkable; even in a place like this he had no intention of doing without every possible comfort. He even put on his soft fleecelined bivouac-slippers, and the expression on his face was that of a genuine connoisseur of such matters. It is absolutely no exaggeration to say that we all felt quite well and indeed comfortable … Our perch was about 1200m above the snowfields at the base of the precipice; if one of us fell off now, that was where he would certainly finish up. But who was thinking of falling off? It was a good bivouac.

On the third day, the weather – as usual on the Eiger – got very bad. Their final bivvy was above the White Spider, in the Exit Cracks. After we had climbed an ice-bulge, we came upon a rock-ledge protected by overhangs from falling stones and avalanches. When I say a ledge, I do not mean a smooth comfortable feature on which it is possible to sit; it was far too narrow and precipitous for that. Heckmair found a place where he could drive in a rock-piton firmly, and with great patience fixed enough hooks on which to hang all the stuff, as well as securing himself and Vörg. Fritz and I arranged our overnight abode about 3m away. The ledge was scarcely as broad as a boot, and only just allowed us to stand erect, pressed close against the rock; but we contrived to knock in a piton to which we could tie ourselves. Even then we couldn’t sit, not even on the outer rim of the ledge. However, we found a solution. We emptied our rucksacks and tried fastening them too to the piton, in such a way that we could put our feet in them and so find a hold. We were sure it would work all right, and so it did. Between us and our friends we had fixed a traversing rope, along which a cookery-pot went shuttling back and forth. Vörg had taken on the important post of expedition cook … Fritz, being Viennese, is a coffee connoisseur, and praised Ludwig’s concoction … It was now 11pm. Ludwig had given over cookery and ‘retired to rest’. Even here, on this tiny perch 3700m up, and 1500m sheer above the nearest level, he hadn’t foregone the comfort of the bivouac-slippers. Andreas had to keep his crampons

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Modern-day mountaineers’ bivvy gear left to dry below the Matterhorn

on, so as to get some kind of stance in the ice for him to maintain a hold; but his head rested on Vörg’s broad back … Fritz and I had pulled the Zdarsky-sack over us; our rucksack architecture served splendidly as support for our legs, and very soon I could hear the deep, regular breathing of my friend as he slept by my side. Through the little window in the tent sack I could see that there were no stars in the sky and the weather was still bad; it looked as if it were snowing. There was an occasional small snow-slide from above, but they only slid over the skin of the tent, with a gentle swishing sound, like a hand stroking it … I wasn’t worried about the weather. I was possessed by a great feeling of peace; we would reach the summit tomorrow. This sense of peace increased to a conscious glow of happiness. We humans often experience happiness without recognising it; but here, in that bivouac of ours, I was not only genuinely happy; I knew I was. This, the third bivouac for Fritz and me on the North Face, was the smallest in terms of room; in spite of that it was the best. And if you ask me why, the reason was the rest, the peace, the joy, the great satisfaction we all four enjoyed there.

Harrer’s book not only gives a detailed description of the route, but the allimportant data on the various bivouac sites, from the Bivouac Cave, above the 28

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Shattered Pillar and below the Difficult Crack (narrow and wet; too low) to the ‘comfortable overnight spot’ to the left of the Ramp icefield – first used by Gaston Rébuffat and French members of the European ascent of 1952. Ludwig Vörg himself was killed fighting on the Russian front in 1941. This Eiger expertise was slow to spread to the flatlands. Even in the comparative humpiness of the Scottish Highlands, the hard men were wrapping themselves in groundsheets, or constructing howffs out of heather and stones in the hollows below various dripping boulders. But all that was about to change. In 1938 the DuPont company discovered Teflon and its employee Wilbert L Gore started wondering what it was for. Teflon (which is a registered trade mark) is the lightweight name for polytetrafluorethylene. In the 1960s men started going to the moon; in the process they discovered that Teflon was useful for non-stick saucepans. In 1969 Bill Gore’s son Bob was playing with a sheet of Teflon and discovered that if he stretched it suddenly in both directions, it grew billions and billions of tiny holes. The Age of the Bivvy Bag was about to begin.

BIVVY NIGHT 3: A walk on the Wye side The White Lion at Chepstow has been there for 400 years; and for most of that time people have been leaving from it to walk up the Wye. ‘Starting tomorrow, are you?’ they asked me in the bar. No – I had personal and poetic reasons for pressing on that night. For I wasn’t the first scruffy-looking long-distance walker round there. Before me – a couple of hundred years before me – had walked a figure still less reputable, without benefit of breathable jacket or modern socks, waving his arms, scowling into the shrubbery, and reciting strange new-fangled verses into the wet air. A few miles above Tintern Abbey, that man would find a partial explanation as to why some people want to walk home, in the dark, by themselves. Early in his walk write-up, Wordsworth refers to:

… vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire The Hermit sits alone … …and on the Explorer map, a tempting 3km ahead, was a small black mark labelled ‘Grotto’. Would the grotto be available for informal bivvy use? Would it even be findable in the night-time woods? A belly full of pub lasagne and half-asleep was the right state for nighttime woodland walking. Autumn leaves had covered the path so that it looked

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Tintern Abbey

like any other bit of forest floor. The way was findable as a half-seen dip in the ground, or as the only tree gap without any ankle-height brambles. For this it’s best to bypass the thinking brain and connect the eyeballs direct to the balls of the feet. The direct gaze may be sharper; but in the dark, peripheral vision is better at picking up faint impressions. Compass bearings by torchlight: thus I was hoping to pin down the map’s small grotto speck. But the path knew nothing of map-reading, and took me straight there. It’s a neatly built part of the ruined environment, simulating the remains of a lime kiln. Its roof is a broken dome, and its floor is leaves and little limestone pebbles. A whole half-dome of dry space meant I could take everything out of the sack and use the sack itself as a mattress. Projecting bits of ruin were handy for hanging up the food, away from any grotto mice. Outside in the night, rain pattered from twig to twig. The day came cloudless and egg-shell blue above the black branches. The path was a beech-leaf shelf, high up the side of the winding Wye. Morning mist filled the valley, and lapped against tree trunks just a few metres down the slope. Ahead and above, the first golden sun was picking out

… these steep and lofty cliffs That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

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Mr Brown’s little green bag At the end of the day the mountaineer looks for a ledge, lays down his sack, hammers in a piton and attaches himself to it. After the hard, acrobatic effort of the climb he is lost – like the poet – in contemplation; but to a greater degree than the poet he can be a part of the hills around. The man who bivouacs binds his flesh to the flesh of the mountain. On his bed of stone, his back against the great wall, facing empty space which has become his friend, he watches the sun fade over the horizon to his left, while on his right the sky unrolls its pilgrim-cloak of stars. At first he is wakeful, then, if he can, he sleeps; then wakes again, watches the stars and sleeps again; then at last he stays awake and watches. On his right the sun will return, having made its great voyage below this shield of scattered diamonds. Gaston Rébuffat, Starlight and Storm (Étoiles et Tempêtes), translated by Wilfrid Noyce, John Hunt and a few words by RT

Following the triumphant achievement on the Eiger – the accomplishment of not one or two, but three comfortable nights out among the storms and stonefall – climbers after World War II took their bivvying onwards to new heights. In the 1950s, Gaston Rébuffat was the checked-shirted and cable-pattern-stockinged young star of the Mont Blanc massif. And for him, the reason for doing the Walker Spur of the Grandes Jorasses would be not the ascent itself, not the ticking off of another of the six great north faces of the Alps, but the two bivouacs on the face of the mountain. Starlight and Storm, for all the vividness of its descriptions (even in translation this is a classic of mountain writing), is remiss in terms of kit list. No tables of relative weights, no hints on suitable retail outlets. But the black-and-white photos of limestone or granite interspersed with grim grey ice and backed by the sunrise light on the Aiguille du Plan – as foreground detail they do give some hints of Gaston’s gear. High on the Walker Spur the night was spent sitting on small ledges, with the mountain itself for backrest. Instead of a sleeping bag, a down-filled jacket, with a waterproof (or somewhat waterproof) gaberdine jacket over the top. Rather than rain, powder snow would be the main way of getting wet. Lean forward carefully, Rébuffat advises, to get it out from behind you without it going down your neck. For the legs there was the obvious option of the rucksack. Most sacks only come up to thigh level, but the one designed by English climber Don Whillans has an unfolding sleeve that pulls up to your waist. Or, for the elegant overnight, there was the pied d’elephant or elephant foot – a special tiny sleeping bag for the knees downwards. It was Whillans’ climbing partner Joe Brown, a plumber by trade, who adapted the new Gore-Tex material into something to go to sleep in. Widely celebrated for his first ascent of Kangchenjunga, not to mention covering the crags of Snowdonia with 3 Bivvy history

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excitingly overhanging rock climbs, Mr Brown may, even more importantly, be the originator of the breathable bivvy bag. In 1968 he and his comrade Mo Anthoine set up a company called Snowdon Mouldings in a hut on Llanberis’ High Street. Its project was to manufacture the indestructible Joe Brown climbing helmet. Given the helmet was indestructible, sales tapered off quite quickly. So in the mid 1970s the firm took delivery of 30 rolls of Gore-Tex at £1000 each. The rest, as they say, is stitchery.

RUCKSACK AS BIVVY BAG It takes a special sort of climber to bivouac in a rucksack. A climber such as Mr Norman Croucher. Croucher climbed over a fence for an informal bivvy on a wooded bank below a roadside. Well, he was drunk. What he didn’t realise was that his legs were on a railway line. Once out of hospital, he continued his climbing on two artificial legs. He turned out to be good at altitude – perhaps because he had a normal-sized heart servicing a reduced amount of body – but slow in snow because of his unconventional feet. Descending from the summit of Cho Oyu, with daylight fading, he sent his speedier Sherpa down to the high camp. Then he unbuckled his legs, stuck them in the snow, and slid inside his rucksack for the night. ‘Obviously, keeping your feet warm is a problem in high altitude climbing,’ says Croucher: ‘ – but only if you have feet.’

Edward Whymper’s pioneering blanket bag, Alps 1860s

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Salute to sunrise on the Cobbler, Scottish Highlands

4 MIDLEVEL BAGGERY I followed a flight of steps down to the vegetable plots on the river bank. Under a wild cherry at the water’s edge I unrolled my sleeping-bag. As the light faded I dined from a tin of mussels, mopped up with stale bread, and familiarised myself again with the noisiness of night. The river roared, insects sounded like aeroplanes and the occasional ‘plop’ of a cherry falling on my sleeping-bag felt more like the impact of an apple dropped from a cliff-top. Then there was that primitive fear of being found, alone and defenceless in sleep. I drove Que Chova [his umbrella] into the meadow grass by my head, within easy reach. Nicholas Crane, Clear Waters Rising: in Galicia, Spain

BIVVY NIGHT 4: Fast asleep on the Berwickshire coast However slow you take it, the Berwickshire coast is always going to involve Fast walking. That’s because of Fast Castle. The castle is a couple of unstable masonry corners standing against the sea: a fringe of stonework topping off 50m of grey rock. I came down to it as the last sunlight glowed brown across the dead heather. A stiff breeze whistled through the dry grass; far below, the sea swished against the rock stacks. A seagull soared up to castle level, let out a cackle or two, and dropped back into the shadows. Fast Castle must have been quite something when it was still there, and is celebrated as a place where Mary, Queen of Scots spent a night. The facilities

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Fast Castle in 1823 (there’s less of it there now) by Rev. John Thomson of Duddingston

are not what they were in 1566, but then Queen Mary didn’t have a Gore-Tex bivvy bag or a plastic box of Co-op luxury coleslaw. A metre of land connects the castle with the barren moorland above; there’s a path of crumbling concrete protected by an ancient chain. Southeast is a single lighthouse, and a rock tower like a second castle stands against the fading sea. Northwest, I looked up the coastline to the glow of Torness nuclear power station, and two black lumps against the sunset – the volcanic plugs of Bass Rock and North Berwick Law. Gore-Tex bivvy bags are slippery, and I didn’t fancy a midnight descent to the black sea-stacks. So I retreated to the moorland at the mainland end of the iron chain and bedded comfortably among the heather. The sea stretched away towards Denmark – reminding me, as it must have reminded Queen Mary in 1566, that most of our planet is underwater. Meanwhile the sea-cliff steepness, dropping to darkness, and the harsh cry of seabirds told me that the sea moves inexorably inwards, battering the little solid bit that we scamper about on. We come to the edge of our busy land, so worked over with footpaths and fenceposts and bits of litter, and gaze over a vast emptiness. It’s bound to remind us how unimportant we are, and how we’ll soon be dead.

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The Book of the Bivvy

Cave behaviour I am that serpent-haunted cave Whose navel breeds the fates of men. All wisdom issues from a hole in the earth. Kathleen Raine, ‘The Pythoness’

A soggy Sunday in October, and men in tracksuits are taking orange markers off St Raven’s Edge after the weekend’s hill-racing. Down at the Kirkstone Pass, cars are draining from the car park in sync with the light draining from the sky: in each case leaving behind a wide and somewhat stony grey emptiness. But at the Kirkstone Pass Inn they bravely serve Sunday lunch until it’s time for Sunday supper. Above Colin’s head is a picture of the winter drifts and intrepid motorists with shovels. In another couple of months this is going to be a lonely place. In another couple of hours, indeed, this is going to be a lonely place. Around us, as we tuck into our carrots and roast, the tables gradually empty. With brown emptiness indoors, and grey emptiness outside, sticky toffee loses its attraction. Besides, we don’t want to haul half-digested sticky toffee up Red Screes. There are three hills to cross and a cave to find, and two and a half hours of day to do it in. We climb briskly up Red Screes, with only the pimpled footprints of the fellrunners for company. Up on top it’s cool and very quiet. The hill looks scruffy with its fallen walls and wide trampled paths. But mankind has retreated behind the walls of its cities, leaving Red Screes to whatever creatures roam the night hours. In this case, to Colin and me. We wander over Little Hart Crag and follow broken fencing up into the cloud. On Dove Crag we come across the trodden road of the Fairfield Horseshoe – the artefact of a vanished race and civilisation. A crag should be vertical, but this ‘Dove Crag’ is flat stones in the mist, and a wall leading forward. But then we drop out of the col, drop out of the cloud, and find Dove Crag the crag. It’s been said that if you fall off the top of Dove Crag you go down 100m without touching rock and land 6m out from the crag foot. I haven’t tried it myself, and it really doesn’t look any worse than vertical. It faces north, so stays damp all day, and the strata are all wrong so there are no handholds. Thus, in the 10 years from 1955 to 1965, Dove Crag turned from the nastiest, most unclimbable cliff in Lakeland into a sporting and amusing bit of rock covered in juicy routes. No holds, but one very notable hole. Somewhere in the top right-hand corner of all this is the Priest’s Hole. It isn’t visible until you get there, it’s reached by a climb or scramble above the 100m of sporting and amusing rock, and we have 25 minutes to find it or we’ll be sleeping on the wet hill. We discover a path leading up into the crags, but it just comes out at the top. We find a ledge leading across, but it just ends in the middle. And then Colin comes 4 Midlevel baggery

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Priest’s Hole, Dove Crag

upon a little rock stairway worn grey and pale, and a footpath zigzagging up. No wet hill for us tonight.

FINDING THE PRIEST’S HOLE From above: The path down into Dovedale doesn’t follow the ‘public footpath’ line on the OS map. (Instead it leaves the low point of the col and goes down the valley bottom past the small tarn at NY 374 111). Follow the public footpath line rather than the path, descending alongside Dove Crag. The cave is at the top of the vertical part of the crag, at 670m altitude. Look out for a 2m easy scramble, leading to a terrace path – this scramble is at 650m (for those with an altimeter). One zigzag above is the cave. Note that the scramble is undemanding (except when it’s icy), with good holds, and well worn. If you are on dodgy adventures among vertical rocks you are in the wrong place. From below: Follow the path up left of Dovedale Beck, to cross a footbridge at the entrance to a higher hanging valley – Hunsett Cove. (From here you can see the letterbox slot of Priest’s Hole high in the face of Dove Crag.) After a further 500 metres the path heads up the slopes to the right, becoming steep

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but well-pitched in stone steps. After a stiff climb you arrive suddenly at the third level, Houndshope Cove. At this point leave the main path and turn up left, with the very steep crags of Dove Crag on your left, for about 100 metres, then look out for and take the little scrambly path slanting left. The cave remains dry in most winds. There’s no water closer than the Dovedale path except after heavy rain. The scramble is just difficult enough to deter sheep. The floor is trodden earth with small stones in; a closed-cell foam mat is recommended. The place is occupied on most Saturday nights.

The cave is a wide black slot with a low, badly built wall across it. Inside there’s almost enough room to stand up, and a floor of beaten earth. The bedrock sticking up out of the floor is a bit low for sitting on but worn smooth by many boots and bottoms. The floor is excellent; with a foam mat below the bivvy its small stones will be almost comfortable – and more important, they aren’t going to poke holes in the expensive Gore-Tex. At the back there’s a tin box containing various practical items: a broken umbrella and some metal mesh for the fireplace (there isn’t a fireplace); a vodka-bottle candleholder; two delicately scented blankets and the visitors’ book. 4 Midlevel baggery

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Dawn view from the Priest’s Hole

Outside there’s a yard or two of gravelly ledge: a balcony for sitting and contemplating the evening. The evening is ordinary – cloud just above, and rain all around the horizon – but the balcony view makes it special. Below are a few yards of steep grass and then the valley floor 600m further down. A single light shows from the Brotherswater Inn, but the rest of the scene is grey shading to black. Just as the light goes, the rain arrives. We retire to the interior to cook and to read the book. It’s the Priest’s Hole because a priest may have sheltered here but probably didn’t. However, in the intervening years it has housed priests, mullahs, lamas and those of no spiritual persuasion whatever but just a well-formed silly streak. An inch of visitors’ book has been written in less than a year. They were here at the Millennium Moment, found it rather cold, and watched snowflakes blowing upwards past the entrance and fireworks at Penrith. Some friends of Colin’s were here when they should have been mending a bothy somewhere in Scotland. Fourteen people from Outward Bound were here, along with three adults. Steve complained of the lack of reading matter in the metal box; the two Daves complained of the distance to fetch water; Ruth complained of the need to pee; Graham from Walsall advised against sleeping next to the wall. But most found that the combination of the situation, the damp paper, and the dried-up biro reduced them to a few incoherent words. A small waterfall of drips splatter onto the ledge outside. Tendrils of mist waft through the blue light of the Coleman stove. I go to the entrance to see the lights of 38

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Penrith – and see a huge black figure lurking in the air. A Brocken spectre, twice lifesize, is being thrown onto the mist by the candle at my back… I stand for three minutes, arms outstretched, while the camera tries to take a long exposure of my spectre. But the spectre is shy, and the film will show only black. We sleep well, lulled by the splatting of the raindrops a few feet away, the cool draught over our noses and the fragrance of the blankets. We lie late, till half-past seven, shake the tealeaves into the abyss, and 30 minutes later we are standing on the top of Fairfield. A shaft of sunlight catches us on Cofa Pike, Grisedale Tarn slops around vaguely in the mist, and we come down Striding Edge in rain that puddles in the gaps in the rocks and streams down the handholds. Coming off the ridge we encounter a human or two, and down by Lanty’s Tarn they’re pottering around in plastic macs, poking at the mud with orange walking poles. ‘Are you really enjoying yourselves?’ they ask us. With the Priest successfully slept-in, Striding strode, and the car just 10 minutes away across the river, we have no trouble in saying we have been.

BIVVY NIGHT 5: A bedroom in Borrowdale I clambered uphill through a wood that seemed to be getting steeper and steeper with every step. That may have been an illusion due to the fact that with every minute it was getting darker and darker. What wasn’t an illusion was the loose moss under my fingers, and the brambles around my ankles. I ducked under another dead branch and the head torch flicked sideways to reveal, right beside my foot, the black pit of an ancient quarry working. Somewhere behind the tree trunks, or back inside the holes of the hill, a voice from 50 years before was laughing at me… Crawling on Castle Crag in the dark may seem an odd way to behave. But this is Lakeland, where odd is ordinary. Wordsworth striding the lanes of Grasmere, waving his arms and shouting poetry. Wainwright tasting sheep droppings on Skiddaw (see The Northern Fells: Skiddaw Little Man, page 8). Wrestlers wearing flowery knickers on the outside of their tights. Gillscramblers carefully selecting the wettest possible way up Great Gable. You have to be weirder than that to raise a Lakeland eyebrow. One man who did manage to be weirder than wrestlers, waterfall-scramblers, Wainwright or even Wordsworth was Mr Millican Dalton of Castle Crag. Born in 1867, he led a fairly ordinary life as an insurance clerk. His Christian name, designed by fate to rhyme with ‘billy can’, was actually the surname of his wealthy grandfather. But in 1903 Millican abandoned his terraced house in Chingford and went with his billy can to live as a nomad in the Lake District.

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Millican Dalton’s Cave

It was around the start of World War I that he moved into the two-storey quarry cave high on the side of Castle Crag. But exactly where on the side of Castle Crag? For the third time I returned to the path at the foot of the wood. Perhaps I’d been seeking too far south. I headed towards Hollows, then tried another faint path up into the darkness. At the top of a steep bank it levelled below a quarry wall streaked with the red and ochre of iron-rich groundwater. I’d been here before, on my previous time getting lost looking for the cave. Following the cliff uphill, I heard the splashing of the water falling across Millican’s entrance. A scramble up some loose slates, and there before me stood the dim quarry wall, complete with its two inviting black holes. Officially, the upper cave is the ‘bedroom’. My previous time in this overnight, some other Millican re-enactors had been occupying the downstairs ‘living area’. Smoke from their fire drifted up the connecting passage and out across the cave roof. But the ‘bedroom’ is floored with angular slates, so this time I pulled up my hood and stepped through the waterdrop curtain into the downstairs living room with its smooth dirt floor. Millican Dalton lived here from spring to autumn for over 30 years. He grew potatoes outside the cave and gathered hazelnuts from the woods. He set himself up as ‘Professor of Adventure’ – in effect one of England’s first outdoor pursuits professionals, though with a refreshing disregard for health and safety as well as for human comforts. Activities on offer included rock climbing, caving, night rambles and waterfall scrambling: Stanley Gill and the Lodore Falls being at their best when in spate. His clients could expect to be shooting the rapids downstream from Derwent Water, or taking a midnight boat trip

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for an island picnic. And if the weather was accommodating there could also be ‘lost in the mountain mist’, ‘a thunderstorm on the mountain’, and ‘varied Hairbreadth Escapes (arranged by circumstances)’. And all this excitement and discomfort for just four shillings a day (about £20 these days) – food provided, and even cooked for you if you paid an extra penny-halfpenny. Many have climbed the Napes Needle since WP Haskett Smith soloed it in 1886. But only Dalton is recorded as having brought up his billy can, sticks and kindling, and settled on the summit to brew a cup of tea. A romantic gesture – but perhaps also a sign of serious addiction. Millican was a vegetarian before the word was even invented, and an avoider of alcohol along with almost all other comforts. And yet his mixed-sex camping parties were daringly immoral. Adventures in knee-breeches on lakes and rocks have been known to arouse romantic stirrings… The bureaucrats got Millican in the end, in the form of the wartime blackout rules. There was no cotton curtain big enough to stop Hitler’s bombers from spotting Millican’s candle – and so the Air Raid Precautions warden called at the cave in 1940. Millican wrote to Winston Churchill asking him to end the war forthwith. When that didn’t work, he blew out his candle and spent the long winter evenings gazing at the icicles. To reach Millican Dalton’s Cave In Grange, turn along the lane to Hollows Farm campsite and River Derwent. Keep left next to the river, on the wide path into the woods at the foot of Castle Crag. At a three-way junction in the woods, the unsigned path to the right is for Millican Dalton’s Cave.

Fallback bag You’re going to buy the bag, at the end of this chapter, for those midsummer sleepouts on the Carneddau. But the simple fact of having the bag allows expeditions to remote caves in winter. If night should fall with the cave undiscovered, it’s nice not to have to lie out and die of exposure. Equally, it’d be a pity to lug up a tent and find the pegs won’t go into the rocky floor. The unused bag comes into its own again on bed-and-breakfast journeys. Such journeys normally tie you to a schedule – but if it’s fine you may want to do two days at a time, or divert into the mountains. And if it isn’t you may want to linger a day and put your washing through the tumble dryer. With a bivvy bag, you can leave B&Bs unbooked. Turn up where you want, and if it’s really nasty one of the people who booked in won’t have arrived. So the odd night when you end up in the bag will very possibly be the nice-weather one. 4 Midlevel baggery

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Scottish bothies are romantic nightspots. However, sometimes you arrive in the dark to find you can’t find the bothy. Or it may be burnt down, or full of really unpleasant people; or the Mountain Bothies Association has moved in and taken the roof off. A bivvy bag in the rucksack means not having to worry about the bothy.

Bag and camera There used to be a motto of a factory that made matches in East Africa: ‘A good one in every box’. Pictures that look great through the viewfinder evaporate somewhere on their long journey down the lens, onto the electronic sensor, and through the mysterious vats of Adobe Photoshop. Landscape turns flat, telephone poles leap into the front of the composition, fellow walkers take on awkward and ungainly poses. Switching to digital hasn’t helped. We take 10 times as many pictures, and the result is 10 times as many poor pictures to delete when we get home. But place the feet in a firm yet comfortable position; breathe out, and relax; and then don’t press the shutter button. With experience we learn this simple sequence of movements. By not taking the hazy afternoon landscape, the harshly lit and squinting friend, the motor-car foreground, we can get the success rate up to where we can actually find the good ones among the fuzzy haystack of dross. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a single piece of equipment, costing £50–100, that could get your good-one count up to 15 or 20 per cent? If you could go into the shop and say, ‘I’m taking too many boring pictures and not enough good ones,’ and they answered, ‘Ah yes Madam [or Sir], a lot of people have that problem. What you want is a Binary Autofocus Grabber, or BAG.’ The BAG exists. It is made of strong, breathable Gore-Tex. It isn’t a bag for putting the camera in; it’s too big for that purpose, being two metres long. It’s the bag for putting yourself in. 42

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Lovely sideways light: evening on Ben Ime

One of the best times for taking pictures on hilltops is just before you get to the hilltops in the early morning. Another really good time is just after you’ve gone away in the evening. We’re not just talking sunsets and sunrises – although there is something very satisfying indeed in a matched pair. The sun goes down behind Arran, and seven hours later, up it comes again behind the Southern Uplands. During the main part of the day, overhead light does its best to flatten the landscape. Even if a good scene should appear, walking companions hurry you forward before you’ve had time to get it into the camera. During the hour after sunrise, the chilly air is crystal clear, and sideways light brings out the shapes of the hills. And no companions are going to hurry you forward, because nobody you know wanted to spend the night with you on top of Kirriereoch Hill. With nobody to put into the foreground, you may have to pose an accommodating sheep. There’s time to shoot off 20, very slowly (and 10 of them will be good ones), wander along the ridge, and shoot off 20 more. At high noon, the least uninteresting pictures are often those taken towards the sun – using a hand or even a companion to shade the lens. In the late afternoon I instinctively turn the lens side-on to the sun. This makes the most of the long shadows lying across the slope. Later on, even pictures directly away from the sun can be good because of the golden tones. As the daylight changes, the eye adjusts to compensate – but the camera doesn’t. Thus the photo can show a beautiful evening glow you weren’t aware of during the actual evening. And then it’s time to turn right round and start shooting into the setting sun. But why is the sunset when you’re in it so much better than the sunset your friends see when you pop it up on Instagram? The best sunset I ever saw was from Hallin Fell, above Ullswater. I spent the day on Helvellyn and came down Striding Edge in the snow. I had a nice hot meal 4 Midlevel baggery

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Crinkle Crags sunset seen from Fairfield; it helps if the scenery’s got some snow on, but even so, it’s best to leave most of it out

in Glenridding and walked that lovely lakeside path in the golden afternoon, then started up Hallin Fell. Halfway up I stopped to take pictures of the sky as it went yellow behind Helvellyn, and thought, ‘Great, that’s me got the sunset.’ So I went on, and then I realised that the sunset had finished going yellow behind Helvellyn just to give itself room to go red all over. It looked like the underside of a feather bed when a really large king has just been murdered on the top. And that black streak, heading up towards top right: that had to be the shadow of Grasmoor, thrown upwards from behind the horizon. Amazing! The best sunset I ever saw – but not the best I ever photographed. What went wrong? The eyes that look at my Hallin Fell photos on Instagram have not just done Striding Edge in the snow and gone rather fast up Hallin Fell. They haven’t got the cool evening air on their face, and aren’t wondering just how unbearably cold it’s going to be in the bivvy bag on Hallin Fell in February. All these factors help to make real life more interesting than photographs of it. When I sit on an evening hill, I see two beautiful things: the sky and the scenery. The camera, however, can only see one of those things at a time – electric sensors still aren’t such clever stuff as the rods and cones in the human eye. Cut my sunset along the skyline, and the bottom half is some poorly lit scenery, underexposed. If you can’t get sky and scenery, it makes sense to sacrifice the scenery. An automatic camera, left to its own devices, will do this for you: it’ll under-expose the sky, 44

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which makes the colours even better than they really were, and it’ll turn the scenery into a simple black bit at the bottom. Nature, out there in front of the camera, can be counted on to do something with the sky. This leaves you, behind the camera, to sort out the black bit at the bottom. It looks like scenery, but in the picture it’s just going to be a shape. If it’s an interesting shape, then you’ll get an interesting sunset picture. One way to make the shape interesting is to poke holes in it. A lake, if available, but any sort of peat-pool or puddle will do. If you’re a person, one interesting shape for the black bit below the sunset is another person. Get your fellow human to make itself into a shape with a hole in – push its knees apart, or poke out its poles. Position your person so that the bottom ends of the legs, too, stand out against the sky. Only a professional torturer really likes the shape of three-quarters of a person. Failing a hole, a pool or a person, another way of dealing with the black bit at the bottom is to leave most of it out. Horizon across the middle is a bad idea at any time of day, but if all that’s below the horizon is a whole lot of nothing, the horizon should be banging against the lower edge. Midsummer sun doesn’t set in the west, but in the northwest. Are you so presumptuous as to actually go out expecting a wondrous sunset photoshoot? Then bear in mind that if you want it to go down behind the Isle of Skye you need to be in Morar, not Applecross. Suppose you’ve any battery left after the evening glow and the sunset. You can have some more fun and take photos in the dark. You’ll need a camera that can expose for half a minute and more. And you’ll need a bit of luck. A tripod is a help, but who hauls tripods across the hilltops? So hold the camera down firmly on a rock. There’ll be some camera movement, but you expect things to be fuzzy in the dark. If your camera’s prepared to go along with you, set it to underexpose by at least one full stop – you want the picture to look dark, not like a very bad one taken at midday.

After sunset on Swirl How

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Digital cameras have an extra aid: the ISO adjustment. ISO 100 is the amount of light the sensor needs to make a decent image. ISO 200 is the camera making do with half as much, so you only need to expose for 10 seconds instead of 20. ISO 1600 is a magical setting that lets you shoot, hand-held, by moonlight. And when you look at the picture at home, it’s all covered in orange speckles. ‘Ah’, says your camera, with a shaky sort of grin. (Well, a smartphone emoji of a grin.) Random electrons do jump around in the circuits. At ISO 100 you don’t see them. But ISO 1600 gives you a really interesting picture of the quantum nature of the universe. The quantum nature of the universe has to be more interesting, surely, than same-old Snowdon in the moonlight. Any decent smartphone will get your night-time photo quite wrong for you without any human intervention. If you’ve got a docile camera that lets you take control and make your mistakes yourself, then after setting ISO no higher than 400, just guess. Set to maximum aperture: f/2.8 on most cameras. The moment the first star appears, try an exposure of 0.5 or 1 second. When it’s completely dark but moonlit, try 10–30 seconds. When it’s completely dark but starlit, try 5 minutes for a black sky, or even longer for a dark blue one with clouds. (If your widest aperture is f/4, double these times. If using ISO 100, quadruple them.) Then dawn – and the sequence unfolds again, in the opposite order, with the added complication of damp camera and frozen fingers. The pretty pink glow in the east; the sunrise; the low golden light. About four hours after it’s all over, the first fellwalkers arrive and take selfies in front of where it’s all stopped happening. Ice axe and crampons; backpack and mule; campfire, beer and guitar – these are some of the great outdoor combinations. To them I have to add: bivvy bag and camera. Nights in bags on hills are uncomfortable and inspiring. They chill the body, but set the spirit alight. They leave pictures embedded in the memory, and pretty good ones on the micro SD memory card as well.

BIVVY NIGHT 6: Man management An island is simply a ridgewalk with the sea at each end and also on both sides. A motorbike can get round the Isle of Man in 18 minutes. On foot there’s more to it than several very sharp bends and some cattlegrids painted gorse-bush orange (not just to match the actual gorse bushes, but to make it slightly easier not to crash). I had a day in hand for the spine of the island, and the spine of the island is 53km with several hills in. But the aeroplane didn’t leave till 11am. A bivvybag dawn would give not just a sunrise over the sea but five extra hours of morning to walk through. And

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On Lhiattee ny Beinnee, view to Calf of Man

a bivvybag rucksack makes 53km not at all too much for a day and a dawn and a morning. So with a shop’s worth of pork pies and bananas in the bag, six or seven hills behind, and a pale mauve sort of sunset on the right, I walked southwards towards the toe of the Man. The waves were too far down to hear, even though there was no wind; but the low sunbeams bouncing off the ocean showed the shoals and cross-currents in swirls of alternating shiny and black. A twiggy scent rose off the heather on one side, a cool draught off the sea on the other. Black choughs wheeled in the fading air. I stopped on Bradda Hill to watch the end of the day. Would the last sunbeams flash through the seawater horizon in the mystic phenomenon of the green flash? No, silly. The Mountains of Mourne are over there; and two inches above the sea, the sun slipped away behind a jagged horizon. I wandered up the stillvisible path, heather brushing bare legs, and found a fallen wall with a view of the last daylight and also eastwards towards the dawn of following morning. The heather was deeper than blankets, and scratchy against the green nylon of the bivvy bag like two-day stubble. Ears cooled in the night air below the woolly hat, but everywhere else was warm as I ate the bananas and the pork pies and watched the sea go purple. Then I leant back and went to sleep.

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Bag shopping What bag you want depends on what sort of shopper you are. Do you like to have the best and are you prepared to pay for it? My own disreputable principle is to buy the second cheapest. If it should fail me, then at least I know what I need next time. A featureless bag costing £50 or less will keep you alive through the storm, and keep you enjoyably alive on beach sleepouts and fine-weather mountaintops. It packs down light and small. When the mountaintops start to become a habit you may decide you need something a bit bigger and thicker. Then when they say you’re crazy up there, you can lend them the old bag and let them try it. Polybag Suggestions for polybag best buy (or best pick-up at field corner) are in Chapter 2. Basic bag For many years I used the Milair bag from Kathmandu Trekking. This weighed in at 400g and cost me around £45. Its only feature was a drawstring closure at the top end. Milair – polyurethane coated nylon – is rather less breathable than Gore-Tex. On the other hand it is a great deal less expensive. For a long time this was my only bivvy, and I still use it when I don’t expect severe weather overnight, as when sleeping on Lakeland summits, and for long-distance treks when weight really matters and nasty nights will hopefully be spent in bothies, bunkhouses or B&Bs. Nowadays, such simple bivvy bags are made by Alpkit and Rab, among others. Light on the back as well as the bank balance, they are less robust than more expensive options and need careful deployment. The slightly bigger bag My ‘new’ bag – the more serious one I’ve been using for about 15 years – is a Discovery from Terra Nova (650g, no longer available, recommended retail price was £130). Terra Nova called this their ‘entry-level’ bag, but for me the silage sack is entry level and this is expensive luxury. It is rather larger than the KT basic bivvy, and has a non-breathable, fully waterproof nylon base. These two aspects go together – a small, basic bivvy rolls over when you do, taking the underlayer to the top and spoiling the point. The TN bag stays the same way up; and now the waterproof underside really does make sense. The base layer is tough, and less likely to stop being waterproof when it meets thorns or pebbles. It’s easy to clean. It’s slightly cheaper. And you’re not going to breathe into the damp ground, so what’s underneath doesn’t need to be breathable. The other added feature at this level is the broad zip across the top, which creates a half-separate hood end. This can be closed completely during downpours and 48

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unzipped a little at either end for normal damp nights. On fine nights you bring your head right out on top of the hood to enjoy the moonlight, with none of the usual business of trying to keep the nylon stuff off your A double zip allows a breathing hole at either side of the bag; face. the rain flap keeps some of the rainwater off the zip The hood is also useful at breakfast time – place it over your head and gain a huge sheltered area in which to eat sandwiches, darn socks and study maps while the rain drips directly onto your knees. I’ve found the TN bag completely satisfactory. I’ve no reason to believe that more recent bags from other manufacturers such as Outdoor Research are any less good – I just haven’t been inside them in any thunderstorms. The TN happened to be the second cheapest in the shop I went into. (The next most expensive had a midge net entry, which would be useful if sleeping low in Scotland in summer.) Fancy bags Manufacturers always ask which features we would like – and they all seem quite likable. They don’t ask whether we like to pay an extra hundred pounds sterling and carry an extra one-pound weight. So now we get bivvy bags with extended head ends for rucksacks; internal poles (although in fact the humble KT has loops for a willow-twig to create a ventilated opening); even pegs. What you end up with isn’t an extremely luxurious and comfortable bivvy – it’s an extremely cramped and uncomfortable tent. One such weighed 1.25kg, and at £249 even the price was tentlike. Compare the Hex Peak F6E from Luxe Outdoor: a winter-spec solo tent at 1.75kg and £270. I have never owned or used one of these ‘luxury’ bivvies. So it’s only my prejudices that are telling me that it’s another case of paying more to spoil the point. But don’t they look silly in the campsite with their owners passing the evening in their cars alongside? How big a bag? A bag is too small if it’s stretched tight across any part of you. The sleeping bag below will be compressed, and a squashed sleeping bag doesn’t have any warmth. This is only likely to happen if you are a particularly large person (or perhaps two people). 4 Midlevel baggery

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If you’re tall and like to sleep with your legs straight, make sure the bag is long enough. It needs to come right over your head, without pulling, and flop down beyond to let the rain run down. After that it’s simply a matter of how much space you like to have around you. A bag with a cheap non-breathable base should be roomy enough to let you roll over in your sleeping bag while keeping the underneath of the bivvy bag underneath. A bigger bag has more trapped air inside it but this doesn’t affect its warmth or performance very much. A generously sized bag can weigh, and cost, twice as much as one that’s small but not too small.

Poncho, basha, tarp – and the groovy group shelter A remarkably impractical bit of kit, the military poncho combines the roles of cape and shelter without being any use either way. A reader of this book’s first edition (Chris Bolton) recalls the RAF poncho issued during the 1970s. Small enough to fit inside a mess tin, two could be combined, with the aid of some twigs, into a stout sleeping shelter for two. Reliably waterproof – apart from the line where the two were joined together. The army was an early adopter of the bivvy bag. The military kind are inexpensive, spacious, robust and heavy. The sludge-green Gore-Tex is good on both waterproofing and breathability; excellent for continuous use over long expeditions, provided your military-issue legs are used to heavy loads. A basha – perhaps the only English word derived from Assamese – is originally a bamboo hut thatched with jungle twigs. (I’m wrong about the linguistic heritage: there’s also the bhut jolokia or ghost pepper, certified in Guinness World Records as the world’s hottest chilli pepper.) More recently, the basha is a chilly sort of outdoor shelter, made from a rectangular sheet of waterproof ripstop nylon. The trick is to fold a pebble into each of the corners, then tie a cord around the pebble to form a guy rope. Renamed as a tarp for those of us who don’t speak Assamese, it becomes an ultra-lightweight tent lacking ends, sides or a groundsheet. Adapting it into a shelter requires ingenuity, patience, some string and a pair of walking poles. The result is superbly ventilated: there will be no problems with condensation. The clear sightlines – out of both ends as well as under the sides – give far more of an outdoor experience. You can see the bear out of one side of the tent, and run away out of the other side, without any fiddling about for the zips. Very slightly more sophisticated is the GoLite tarp tent shown in the picture. The GoLite is my go-to sleeping system – just so long as I happen to be in its homeland, the USA. In good weather we raised it as high as possible, both by extending the walking poles that support it and by raising the side guy-lines over suitable stones. In case of rain or snow we’d lower the walking poles, and bring the sides to ground level by putting the supporting stones on top of the guy-lines. 50

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Tarp tent, Utah Canyonlands

In desert climates, where you might be carrying 10 litres (10kg weight) of water, it’s surprising how the 500g reduction in tent weight still makes a difference. But in the UK, with plenty of water around (including in the ground I’ll be lying down on), my tarp tent gets left at home. Some people combine a small tarp, pitched very high, with a bivvy bag underneath. The same weight to carry, and much the same convenience, as a tent, but still with the bivvy level of outdoor ambiance. Given more than a couple of people, the multi-person shelter does offer a significant weight saving, quite apart from the conviviality. A typical 3–4 person group shelter weighs 600g and is made of proofed ripstop nylon. It costs about £45. These shelters are designed for sitting up rather than lying down and going to sleep in. They are excellent for emergency use; they warm up inside almost instantaneously, and the casualty has the comforting feeling of being ‘all in it together’ in the metaphorical sense as well as literally. They can also be used by those who, confronted with an amazing view from the summit of Fairfield, prefer to reproduce the atmosphere of a youth hostel boot room.

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Morning on Craig y Fan Ddu; the sandstone ridge stretches right across South Wales

5 TIME, THINGS AND MIGUEL My husband is a real outdoor survival expert. For the last three months he has lived in a den on the riverbank, and eaten nothing but fish which he catches himself by diving underwater. Mind you, he is an otter. Mrs Otter, River Exe, Devon (letter to Viz magazine, 1995)

A bivvy bag in some modern breathable fabric keeps away the rain and lets out most, or even all, of the condensation. It costs between £30 and £300 – later I’ll discuss whether you want to spend the smaller or the greater sum. Thirty pounds is the price of a night in a hillwalkers’ hotel, or two nights in a bunkhouse. For £300 you could join the Youth Hostels Association for the next 20 years. Alternatively, your £300 could get you a little tent. In your little tent you could cook suppers, undress indoors, and lie till 9am reading this book. A bivvy bag may not be all that expensive, but it’s not primarily a way of saving money. It is, rather, a new way of having fun. A bivvy bag isn’t simply an extra bit of kit that has the backwards effect of making the rucksack lighter. It’s a new attitude,

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a new way of being in the hills. It rearranges the co-ordinates of space and time and allows us to wriggle through the wormholes into a different universe.

Time Time is a tyrant. How often in a day do you look at your watch, or the clock on the town hall, or the clock on the computer? Ten minutes to catch the bus, two hours to knocking-off time… Even on the hill, there’s the four hours until it gets dark and the three hills we want to get over before that. There’s the bed-and-breakfast that expects us at seven, and the train we’re wanting to get at Achnashellach next Tuesday. A timepiece is as necessary to safety as is our bossy servant the smartphone. And in each case the outdoors is coming slightly closer to the office. Time may be a benevolent despot – as when you’ve started at six instead of nine, walked into the evening, and got yourself half a day ahead. Pleasant and lazy are the days that are half a day ahead, but then you spoil it all by deciding you could actually catch that train on Monday rather than Tuesday. And there you are again, half a day behind, pressing forward up every hill, irritable at every shut shop or unnecessary cup of tea, cross because the sun’s come out on the summit you left 10 minutes ago but you’re certainly not going back for that photo… A bivvy bag is the thing that lets you do without things, and one of the things that you could do without is a watch. Dispense with the timepiece and get – paradoxically – more time. Wander watchless until the sun sets, find another sleepy hollow and go to sleep in it. Will tonight be the one that rains and sends you back down into Sunset from Benbane Head, Antrim the real world where they wear 5 Time, things and Miguel

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watches? You can cross the whole of Wales this way if the sun shines. For me the wet night came on the Fforest Fawr; next morning I dropped off the ridge to the roadside wondering what day of the week it was. On ordinary hill days you need to know when you’re going to get benighted. With a bag that doesn’t matter. Walking watchless is one of those simple pleasures whose appeal is – obviously – timeless. It’s also one of those pleasures (like bivvybagging itself) that’s not altogether pleasant. For the first day you keep glancing at your wrist and worrying. Not knowing what time it is is a new level of insecurity and freedom. There’s no day’s target to achieve or fall behind when you don’t know when you are at the moment. There are more interesting things to think about than whether you can grab back five minutes on the ascent of Waun Fach. But time doesn’t give in so easily. Can you keep right on to St Davids without ever knowing how late it is? Or will you fall back into the valleys and have to stop at a clock?

Things You can spend many interesting hours deciding what items to buy, and many slightly less interesting ones earning the money. But, disappointingly, your fellow walkers aren’t going to go Gore-Tex-green with envy at your cool new bivvy bag. This is because the bivvy bag is the item that encourages you to get rid of other items. You’ve saved 2kg on the tent; why not save a bit more by not taking the cooker? The bivvybag attitude tends to disobey the Consumer Imperative. It doesn’t bother to shave, and keeps warm under many thin layers of worn-out stuff it should have thrown away four years ago. As you get further and further from the car park, the breathable jackets get shabbier, the hats are bobble instead of fleece, the boots are scratched and old. Four hours out you meet the breeches. Eight hours out it’s the rucksack fixed with string. And on the furthest, loneliest hilltop, as the stars come out, is the chap or lassie in the bag.

DIOGENES THE DOG A bivouac is defined as any form of shelter less than a tent. It could be breathable Sympatex, it could be sheepskin, it could be a woollen plaid. The only ceramic bivvy bag on record was inhabited by Diogenes the Cynic in the third century bc. He had to, as he was 2400 years before Gore-Tex. The pottery bivvy bag didn’t catch on, but Diogenes is still the founder of bivvybag philosophy. The treasures of this world – flashy jackets, walking poles, the GPS navigator – cause only grief and envy. The absence of a marble

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Diogenes the Cynic in his earthenware bivvy bag (Jean-Léon Gérome, 1882)

palace, or a flexible-pole domeline tent, may be more enjoyable than the proud possession of it. Sadly, only two lines of dialogue from this original master have come down through the ages. Alexander the Great came to visit the large clay pot. ‘Hi,’ he said, ‘I’m Alexander the Great.’ ‘And I am Diogenes the Cynic.’ A nasty smell came from inside the clay pot. The bed appeared to be a pile of old rope. ‘Ah – ahem. As the greatest emperor in the world so far, is there anything I can do for you?’ ‘Yes there is,’ said our hero. ‘Could you shift yourself a little bit to the side? You’re standing in my light.’ While on a sea voyage, Diogenes was captured by pirates and sold as a slave in Corinth. He was purchased by a rich man who found him amusing. But you don’t have to be rich to buy a basic Milair bivvy bag. You just have to find it amusing.

For this is the thingless thing, the genuinely money-saving purchase. By its aid you climb the Hill of Difficulty into the Cloud of Unknowing. Also, by the time you unroll the nice new bag, everyone who could have admired it has cleared off down to the pub.

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Miguel The bivvy bag, if it were alive, would be a Spanish mountain guide called Miguel. Miguel has eyebrows like thorn-scrub and a hat that has no shape whatever. Even if you could see in behind his black-and-grey beard you wouldn’t find any facial expressions. Miguel looks at my nice new rucksack (dynamic posturing adjustable strapwork) in a way that makes me wish I’d done a couple of thousand miles under it before letting him see it. He walks slowly behind at the beginning of the afternoon, and 2000m of hot contours further up, but half an hour below the hut, overtakes at the same slow speed. That hut is dark and timber-lined. The table is a massive plank. Wine appears in a battered aluminium flask. Outside, a mountain like a 300m tombstone – the Naranjo de Bulnes – is going bright pink all over. And Miguel speaks. ‘You will have the common cheese? Or you will have the Cabrales cheese?’ This is important. Is the Cabrales a joke? Or is it some form of ordeal? Or is it, simply, a cultural gulf between different racial tastebuds? The Cabrales when it arrives is mouth-shrivellingly awful, blue-brown in colour and tasting of goats and sump oil. And the reason this is important? Well, when I come back from dropping the Cabrales off a handy precipice outside the hut, Miguel will speak again. And he will say, with a vague gesture upwards: ‘Tomorrow, for us, the Naranjo de Bulnes.’ Joke – ordeal – or simply a jolly nice day on the mountain?

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Dawn mist over Grasmere, from Stone Arthur

6 SLEEPING ON SUMMITS Now for our mountain sport. Up to yon hill. Your legs are young. Shakespeare, Cymbeline (Act 3, Scene 3)

The weekend! Time to head out to one of those top nightspots. A hot floorshow – flashy lights – a packed throng of young people in groovy Lycra gear with their hands in the air. And perhaps the extra stimulation of life-enhancing chemicals surging through the brain. Such places as – let’s say – Scafell Pike? Its red and yellow sunset flashed like a mirrorball off the surface of Wast Water 900m below. The streetlights of Sellafield and the pale glow of the North Sea came and went behind that mist-imitating dry ice vapour effect – except that this was actual mist, not a technician with a cylinder and a squirter nozzle. Okay, the cool young folks were only there for a few minutes at four in the morning, on their Three Peaks outing. So I got woken up – my fault for choosing Scafell Pike to fall asleep on. Scafell Pike’s not a place for peace and quiet, daytime or night.

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But most other UK summits you’ll have to yourself. Halfway through the afternoon the walkers walk off down the hill, leaving you with six hours of evening ridges to enjoy. The sun slants lower and the curvy hillslopes fling out their limbs under the perfect lighting conditions like models posing for a photoshoot. On Beinn a’ Ghlò above Blair Atholl, at 8pm on a summer night, there were hills all the way to the horizon and not a single person on any of them. Along the ridgeline to the final Munro, Càrn nan Gabhar, the evening breeze was drying away the sweaty ascent, and that would have been just right except that the night-time breeze was getting set to reverse it with chilly drizzle flying sideways. Càrn nan Gahbar is an eastern hill, smooth over the top and stony. The slightly sheltered side of the summit knoll is a boulderfield; everywhere else was in a wet wind that was getting stronger. No summit sleepout tonight; I set off down the long north ridge towards the warmth and cosy heather of Glen Tilt. Two minutes later, I stopped. The wind and drizzle were coming from the left – the west. On the right, the ridge dropped in a steep slope of stones to the economically named Loch Loch. But there’d been a little landslip. At the very top of that slope, just one metre down from the ridge top, there was a sort of shelf. And being one metre down below the weather meant it had grown some comfortablelooking grass. By the time I got down to the Tilt, I’d be well wetted. For now, though, I was dry even if the weather wasn’t. ‘Let’s be sensible about this,’ I thought. Or as sensible as a well-chilled person can be when they’re standing on the 1000m contour in a stiff breeze just as it’s getting dark. Suppose the wind shifted in the night. Was there some boulder or peaty bank to wriggle behind? There wasn’t any. If the wind shifted, I’d have to curl up small and shiver. But if it didn’t shift, I might get quite a nice night. Càrn nan Ghabhar means Cairn of the Goat. I decided to go for the Goat. Sitting up to eat supper meant my head was in the weather. But so what? My jacket had a waterproof hood. And then, rolled up, that jacket would make a waterproof pillow. At about 2am the sky cleared – which I noticed because it got quite a bit colder and the cold woke me up. About 3am was the start of the sunrise. Down in the blackness below, the River Tilt began to pick up the lightening colour of the sky. The dark land separated into mauve and blue-grey curves of hill, one behind the other. The wind still blew from behind the ridge, with black rags of cloud trundling forward into the greenish sky. I watched it all happening, then slept a bit, then watched it all some more. I’d had to carry water up anyway. So, for luxury, some of that water was combined with added protein and sugars in the shape of blue-top milk for the morning muesli. And who needs fresh orange juice for breakfast when there’s a big, juicy sunrise spread all across the skyline?

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A thousand metres up, in early summer, meant a whitening of frost on the rucksack cover. But one shake got rid of that, and in 15 minutes I was walking and warming up, heading down a dewy ridgeline bathed golden in the early sunlight.

SUMMIT BIVVY RULES Any sport requires rules, so here are a few for bivvybagging on the UK’s hills: § You must be on the actual summit for sunset, or sunrise, or both § You must bivvy close to the summit, but a reasonable descent of 30m vertical (three contour lines) is allowed § You must actually fall asleep § Tarps and tents don’t count § Bar meal beforehand is a sign of sophistication

Wilderness is all very well, but there’s also something to be said for urban streetlife. The orange glow of Manchester seen from Kinder Scout; aeroplanes descending like small shiny dragons into the inferno. The rustle of wind in the dark grasses interrupted only by some dumper truck down in Hayfield village, beeping backwards like a grossly oversized grouse chick. Then there was the night we’d meant to bed down in the oakwoods below Ben Ledi, but starlight and a full moon tempted us onwards and up. Soon we were looking out across the eerie streetlights of Scotland’s Central Lowlands, oil refineries and a distant twinkling motorway. The orange urban glow competing with the moon to show us the trig point at the top. It was late March, and a cool breeze was arriving out of the night sky. A slight fold in the summit plateau gave us the amount of wind we wanted: enough to activate the microporous membrane and carry away the overnight damp; enough to give that outdoor feeling across our faces; but not so much as to bang and rattle the nylon against our ears. Walking uphill in the dark is a good way to get warmed up as well as well tired out. There was a little time to marvel at the strangeness of it, up in the darkness above the orange neon sea. But even on the hard ground, sleep came quickly. By first light, though, the world had shrunk to a few metres around the bivvy bag. That small world around me looked strangely grey, not quite like moonlight. And what was the slithery sound on the outside of the bag? As the light strengthened, it became apparent: we were sleeping in fresh, wet snow.

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Breakfast was unpleasant, fumbling with muesli spoons in gloved hands – gloves that were soon soaking wet from the snowpack. Even while eating, damp snow gathered in my lap. Then boots and belongings had to be sought out under the slush, feet inserted into soggy socks. Damp bivvy bags weighed heavy, stuffed anyhow into the rucksacks. But who cared: at least we were moving – in half an hour downhill, we would start feeling almost warm… The thing about the perfect summit bivvy is this: there’s no such thing. Every top sleepout has two or more forms of drawback. A high top, up at the 1000m contour, has high drama and wide views – but the vegetation is low or not there at all, with only stones to sleep on. A cosy little hollow keeps out the wind – but also excludes the view. Remoteness adds romance but doesn’t have a bar meal at the bottom. Above all, there’s the weather trade-off. A cloudy sky means no sunset colours; a clear one offers the stars wheeling overhead all night long, but also sees any shreds of warmth stream away into the black spaces between those stars. Waterbottles become bricks, frost forms outside the bivvy bag. And at 3am, just as you finally get to sleep, the sun shines straight in your eyes and wakes you up again. But the principle that nothing is perfect also applies to the statement that nothing is perfect. Just once, in a lifetime of nearly a hundred summit sleepouts, there

Sleepy hollow: dawn over Ullswater from Sheffield Pike

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is indeed the top summit – the epitome of bivvy. And it’s on the eastern flank of the Dodds, on 675m Sheffield Pike. Sheffield’s 675m are low enough to yield thick squishy grasses to lie down on; high enough for a view all along Ullswater and out to the Pennines. Its hilltop hollows are deep enough so the wind passes over the top, with a faint backdraught to caress the cheeks and keep away the frost. But those hollows still let in the Ullswater view. And that view is angled to the northeast, so the sunrise bounces in all the way along the lake. The top sleepouts tend not to happen halfway down the side. In all those slumbered-on summits, dozens have been wonderful. Several have been a bit chilly (but if you’re asleep all the time you’re missing out on the views) and only two have been altogether unpleasant. As well as Ben Ledi, there was a wet, windy night on Ben Nevis. The smooth place to sleep was the rotten planks in the ruins of the observatory. The damp brings out the aroma – and, well, you can work out why people sneak off into the observatory ruins on the summit of Ben Nevis.

BIVVY NIGHT 7: Great Gable My plan had been for a bivvy at Foxes Tarn – but my feet in their little blue Walsh running shoes hadn’t kept up with my mind. Night caught me on Great Gable. Gable’s sides are too steep to sleep on, and the scree on top is altogether too stony for one travelling light without a mat. Sadly, I turned my sore toes towards the Breast Route’s 400m descent of steep, wet boulders. But in misted torchlight, even the Breast Route can be lost. I found myself standing below a small crag on a patch of lumpy lawn. My body fitted among the lumps like a ski-line through a mogulfield. Low cloud and a sheltered site meant warmth: I could enjoy the luxury of removing the wet waterproofs before getting into bed. I drew the bag over my head and draped it so that the raindrops trickled down the far side of one of the turfy lumps. A last look outside showed dimly dripping crag and boulder – but also a brief parting of the clouds. There, for 10 long seconds, was the Great Gable view, down over the tops of the Napes buttresses to the field patterns of Wasdale Head, and the gleam of Wast Water below its Screes. That lumpy lawn is somewhere within five minutes’ sorefoot stumble of Gable summit. But going back in daylight, I have not been able to find it.

Walking on the wet side I have argued that bivvybag sleeping really isn’t a form of masochism. This argument is undermined by the fact that the original masochist, Count Leopold von SacherMasoch, was himself a keen bivvier. When he got tired of being humiliated in the 6 Sleeping on summits

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bedroom, there was nothing nicer than an overnight ramble through the Carpathian mountains. With him he had a donkey, to carry his wine and cigars; and a roomy and luxurious bivvy bag. A fur-lined bivvy bag? The very idea induces a delicious shiver… Wet snow on Ben Ledi, damp planks on Ben Nevis – these are part of the point. The best porridge has a pinch of salt in it. What is fish and chips without the vinegar? Even the smoochiest pop song can’t stay in the key of G major all the way. There are few nights nastier than a really badly sited bivvy when the weather goes wrong on you. And on all the other nights, as you lie looking at the stars circling overhead – raise your head to see the Isle of Rum going from silvery-grey to mauve to purple as the evening fades towards midnight – spot the sudden stag outlined against the sea loch far below – all this is even better for knowing just how much less nice it could so easily have been. You can’t have fun unless there’s suffering lurking around the corner. And if you can bring yourself to believe that last statement, then hilltop bivvying may be for you.

INN – AND UP There are two benefits of the bar meal option. It’s a shame to walk 15 vigorous hours, rise onto Gibson Knott as the light goes golden, carefully choose a grassy hollow with a view of the lake – and then fall asleep within 10 seconds. The supper stop in the pub slows you down.

Scafell Pike and Scafell, evening, from Middle Fell

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The other advantage is moral and social. From Diogenes onwards, those who sleep out of doors in small containers have been seen as austere nutters who don’t have any fun. But if you stop to spend good money on beer – when you could be in a breeze even more bitter than Jennings or Coniston, nibbling muesli bars in gloved hands – the world will almost start describing you as sensible. While only one of Lakeland’s inns (the Kirkstone) is usefully high, lots of Lakeland’s hills are usefully low. Gowbarrow Fell is only 40 minutes above the Royal at Dockray – hardly far enough to warm up. Any bar meal, followed by any hilltop, makes an excellent evening. However, connoisseurs will want to discriminate between the good and the altogether excellent. A hill high enough above the pub to get you warm going up it, but not so high as to get sweaty. A lake to the northwest, for the sunset; or to the northeast, for the dawn. An easy path or a grassy slope for the approach. And in case it gets nasty in the night, either rocky hollows for refuge or an easy lee slope to flee down. Water is not so important. You can carry up a litre for overnight, and walk downhill to breakfast. Burgundy with the steak, dry white with the fish, a good port with the Stilton. Here are a few classic combinations of inn and up… Dining room

Bedroom

Notes

Fish Inn, Buttermere

Haystacks

Excellent heather

The Royal, Dockray

Sheffield Pike

Daylight needed for Glencoyne Head

Kirkstone Pass Inn

Red Screes

Get up the steep path before dark

Horse & Farrier, Threlkeld

Clough Head

Sheltered mini-terrace just down to N

Wasdale Head Inn

Scafell Pike

Summer daylight needed

Strands/Screes, Wasdale

Middle Fell

Seeing the Scafells at sunrise

Keswick (any)

Skiddaw

Easy climb but hard bed

Traveller’s Rest, Grasmere

Easedale Tarn

Waterfalls in the dark

Tan Hill Inn, Yorkshire Dales

Nine Standards Rigg

Good peat hollow at summit

Kingshouse Hotel, Glencoe

Beinn a’ Chrulaiste

Down to Kinlochleven for brunch

Sligachan Hotel, Isle of Skye

Glamaig

Escaping the midges

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An ideal peat bank high on Great Shunner Fell, Yorkshire Dales

7 THE COMFORT ZONE In the eating of coarse rice and the drinking of water, the using of one’s elbow for a pillow, joy is to be found. Confucius, Analects

A comfy bivvy is like a short long-distance walk, or a non-intoxicating beer. Comfort isn’t what it’s about. It’s about having your head out in the wind and your nose pointing straight at the stars. If you want to be asleep and snoring as the red deer passes in the night, as the slow brown sunrise creeps between two tufts of heather – then you need to be somewhere that isn’t a bivvy. Like a hostel, or a bothy, or safe at home in bed. Okay, so you’ll enjoy the experience even more if you’re not completely cold and miserable. Two kinds of comfort therefore offer themselves: the synthetic sort, and the sort with feathers. The interesting decisions are the ones where both options are wrong. Nature’s feathers come with a self-contained, biological maintenance module to keep them oiled and waterproof – that maintenance module being a bird. For vegans, the argument ends there: feathers belong on the bird. But for those of us wrapped in feathers 64

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without being a bird, the non-waterproof nature of the bedding is a bad thing. When feathers get damp, they stay damp. And when they get wet, they stop being warm at all, while becoming about as heavy as two full waterbottles in your backpack. Add to that the fact that, as a natural material, they aren’t manufactured out of plastic – so they’re about twice as expensive as the artificial alternative. Synthetic sleep wrappings have a quite different set of disadvantages. Birds, unlike backpackers, are expected to fly across the hilltops, and nature has had 50 million years of development into their super-lightweight thermal covering. Humanity hasn’t quite caught up. Dry, the plastic option is roughly twice as heavy as the system worked out by Evolution back in the Jurassic. It also takes up about twice as much space in the sack – and that’s serious, if it means you have to get a big, heavy backpack with all those special backpacker (backacher?) straps and buckles. The advantage is that when it gets wet, it doesn’t get quite so wet as the feathers do, and it still retains some of the warmth. Enough warmth, anyway, to just about keep you alive. My fellrunning friend Glyn has a third alternative. An ultra-lightweight option with a total mass, in grams, of nothing at all. Why carry a sleeping bag when you can simply put on all of your clothes? And a set of breathable waterproofs on top is a bit like a bivvy bag. Plus you avoid the hassle of having to take your boots off. And I have to say that at Snowdon summit, during the hottest spell of weather for many years and temperatures that were melting the UK’s railway network, this system did seem to work.

On Sgòran Dubh Mòr, Cairngorms; the slight hollow provided some (but not enough) shelter from a brisk wind

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When I formed my bivvying habit it was with a lightweight synthetic bivvy bag designed for mountain marathons. It weighed 350g and had special straps to squash it down to the size of two bags of sugar. It wasn’t very warm at all – but after 30km of running about in the heather, you’re going to sleep okay anyway. It was about 10 years later that something happened that was a bit like Hans Andersen’s ugly duckling. I woke up wrapped in feathers. By my middle 50s I had lost some of my delight in being damp and miserable for more than 24 hours at a time. If your sleeping bag, wrapped in two layers of plastic, is damp, the likelihood is that you, out in the rain, are very wet indeed. And that makes it time not to reassess the value of your sleep system, but to head for a handy youth hostel, or at least for a bothy with space for everything to hang up and drip. And then, with winter coming on, the world was going to be frozen rather than sodden. Plus the clincher: with winter coming on, the three-season down-filled sleeping bag was half price in the sale. A second or third night in a down-filled and also damp sleeping bag is bivvy fun of the nastiest sort. But a first night can be reasonably bearable. The cunning that comes with maturity also means knowing where water might trickle through

BIVVY NIGHT 8: Up Base Brown in down A short midwinter afternoon, the morning frost still lying on the north side of every boulder. One of those boulders, on the slope above Seathwaite, is a historic bivvy site. Millican Dalton, the eccentric Professor of Adventure, had his residence at the Castle Crag cave, 8km down Borrowdale. But his holiday cottage was this angular boulder, shaped like a sleeping rhinoceros. Under its projecting neck is a hollow just big enough for a curled-up person. Without an actual overhang, the rhino rock won’t keep away rain; but the overhead rock mass will keep off the frost. Ignoring the chance to sleep under this historic rock, I headed higher. Base Brown has a pleasing feeling of commitment. The last light lasted just long enough for the steep, airy slope above the top of Sourmilk Gill. I wasn’t going to go back down that in the dark. A mean little wind was blowing across the ridge, and the dip I found to lie down in was smooth and aerodynamic so the breeze pretty much dipped in and then went up and out. And yet, my threeseason sleeping bag – at that point brand new – was so warm and cosy that I left my face out in the open for the first half of the night, watching the clouds scurry across the moon. As the night passed, frost silvered the grasses and my waterbottle became a brick. In the morning, it wasn’t until I got down to Styhead Tarn that I found unfrozen water to pour into my muesli mug.

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Borrowdale daybreak seen from Base Brown – with a frozen-up waterbottle in the backpack

the zips; it means breathing out into the open air; it means keeping your knees and elbows from poking out coldly. A brand new sleeping bag repels the first few drops of dampness with its waterproof coating. This can be restored with a wash-in proofing (sold by the likes of Nikwax). Washing feathers is a trickier business, although you could have this done professionally.

Sleeping mats Having saved a few ounces (as well as spending quite a bit of cash) on a down bag, the logical next step is to put that weight back in the rucksack, plus quite a bit more, by way of a mat to sleep on. A mat is useful for softies to protect their poor bones from the hard ground. However, the one place where the fine new feathers won’t keep you warm is where you’re lying on top and squashing them. So a mat to sleep on isn’t just a matter of comfort – comfort is for people who sleep in houses. It’s the essential underside of your insulation. That being said, a lack of mat makes things more exciting. Finding the perfect heather-filled hollow – the one on Bowness Knott with the view all along Ennerdale to Pillar Rock – is more rewarding than typing in your card number and hauling an extra half-kilogram up the mountain. The heather, if you can get it, does a better job of insulation as well. And if you don’t find the heather – well, not knowing is what makes it an adventure. If you’ve walked a proper distance, you’ll sleep anyway.

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But yes: at about the point in my maturing lifespan where I switched to a downfilled bag, I also acquired a sleeping mat to slide in underneath. Having decided that the mat is where it’s at – should it be closed-cell foam, or something modern and semi-inflatable? The basic foam mat has advantages. It’s very cheap, so when you find you don’t like it you can use it as a carpet for the back of your car and buy something better. At around 350g it’s not too heavy. And it’s indestructible. If the mice chew a hole in it, they’ve helpfully saved you some weight. It protects your fancy bivvy bag from the sharp stones. On a soggy evening you can unroll it straight away as a dry baseplate for unpacking all your gear and afterwards for sitting down on. Then on the damp, dewy morning you can spread it as a dry baseplate again for packing all your gear back up. When a drizzly evening above Wasdale turned, at midnight, to torrential rain, I simply rolled my whole setup upside down. Instead of raindrops like tiny pebbles bashing the nylon an inch from my ear, I had a protective roof, 5mm thick, curving overhead. But the foam mat also has disadvantages. Rolled and tied above the lid of your sack, it catches every breeze that blows, making you unstable in even half a storm. Worse, it makes you look like one of those overburdened young people on the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme. The alternative is to pack it inside the rucksack – where it takes up most of the space and means you have to buy an even bigger sack. So if you’re going to carry 350g to make you a bit less cold and miserable, it makes sense to carry 450g to make you almost warm and comfortable. The airbed sort provides a clear 5cm of luxury between you and the cold, cold ground. That is, until it gets a puncture. Luckily there’s a little repair kit for when that happens. But in the middle of the night, in a thunderstorm, I don’t want to be trying to find the hole in my airbed, or trying to remember where I packed the little repair kit. This is why the mat I carry has some foamy insulation of its own, as well as blowing up quite a bit bigger. It ends up about 2cm thick, which is thick enough. So you’ve got into your dry nightwear and your precious dry socks. You’ve wriggled into the sleeping bag, and arranged things so the zip of the bivvy doesn’t dangle in your face. After the chill of clambering into long johns in the chilly evening air, the warmth is building up again quite nicely. You watch the first stars coming out. And that’s when you suddenly think about your mat. Wouldn’t it be better having it outside the bivvy bag? Or, if you’ve got the mat outside the bag, wouldn’t it be better inside? There’s one occasion when the mat’s better on the outside, and that’s when it’s the robust, closed-cell sort and you’re sleeping on stones. The mat stops the stones from poking holes in your bivvy bag. Otherwise, if the mat’s on the outside, you’ll slide off it in the night. And then it’ll blow away. That’s sorted. You can sleep peacefully now… 68

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THE IDEAL SITE Continuous interaction with the surroundings – walking in them but also absorbing and being absorbed, giving and taking in return. This is the point of being outdoors. And so, half an hour before dark, you start to eye up the On High Spy, Borrowdale; bivvy bag in a sheltering dip, damp boots up in the breeze boulders, lie down and get up again, stand on one foot and see how much water seeps into the footprint, feel the wind and assess the quality of the light. Do I want to be romantic, or do I want to be comfortable? This dip is out of the wind, but am I prepared to sacrifice the streetlights as they come on across the Vale of York? The six essentials of a bivvyplace are set out below. It’s impossible to have all of these on the same night as some of them contradict each other. This is why you need to spend lots and lots of nights in your bag. 1 The view Hilltop or clifftop is best – except if the hilltop’s a flat plateau, when it’s better to be a little way down the side. But the sunset side, or the one facing the sunrise? 2 Shelter Wind comes suddenly in the night. The bag isn’t going to blow down, of course, but when wind moulds it against the body it gets very cold. So it’s good to have a hollow below a rock or a clump of trees close enough to wriggle into. 3 Warmth The clear starry nights are the really cold ones. Anything at all between the sleeper and the night sky helps here – even the leafless twigs of a thorn. 4 Softness Dry dead grasses and heather – they don’t just add to the comfort but also to the warmth, as most heat is lost into the ground. Really tufty heather is luxury enough to sacrifice even a hilltop view for.

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Soft-looking moss can have rocks beneath it. Lie on the ground before deciding to make a bed of it. Once you’ve changed into the dry socks it’s a bit late to discover you should be lying in a larchwood rather than poplar. (Twisty roots and lack of leafmould is why poplar should really be renamed as ‘un-poplar’.) Backpacking rucksacks are well padded, and an empty one makes a partial mattress. This means taking a large plastic bag or sackliner for all the stuff that would otherwise be in the rucksack. 5 Flatness You’re not pegged down, and bag-fabric is slippery. So if there’s a slope you may end up at the bottom. 6 Privacy ‘Those who go to sleep in a field,’ says the Chinese proverb, ‘will be found in a field, asleep.’ But nobody notices a bivvy bag.

Dew process And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord: and the Lord delivered them into the hands of Midian seven years. And because of the Midianites the children of Israel made them the dens which are in the mountains, and caves. The Bible, Judges Chapter 6

Gideon is sleeping out of doors on the airy threshing floor near his home. Given the Midianite raiders are in the land, it must be the harvest season – so this will be a hot July night, when the dews are heavy in Palestine. Existing as he does some 2500 years before the bivvy bag, Gideon has with him a fleece – perhaps his sheepskin cloak with the wool on it. Seeking a sign from God, and also being something of an amateur meteorologist, Gideon spreads out the fleece beside him, with a special request to God. Would He arrange dew on the fleece but not on the ground? In the morning, the ground is dry while Gideon squeezes a whole bowl of water out of the fleece – a heavy dew fall of 0.5mm on 1m2 of fleece would yield half a litre. That’s also the amount of water that could be soaking into your rucksack, your bivvy bag and you.

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And Gideon saith unto God, ‘Ummm, actually, doth not the dew fall on the fleece first anyway?’ And God saith unto Gideon, ‘Go to, thou silly boy – it usually happeneth the other way around. For lo, preferred objects of dew formation are poorly conducting or well isolated from the ground. Which is why thin blades of grass gather dew but the bristly heather twigs do not so. And the plastic cover you put on your rucksack will be soaking wet all over. But I can do it the backwards way if thou wilt.’ Next night, God arranges dew on the ground but not on the fleece. Gideon’s sleeping area is surrounded by wet vegetation. His feet and trouser bottoms get damp, and his bivvy bag doesn’t dry out before he unrolls it again next night. Marek’s diagram is called a tephigram. The lines of equal temperature are slanted to the right, so that up-and-down represents (close enough for most bivvy purposes) the pseudo-saturated wet adiabat, which is to say the natural temperature drop of a soaking-wet lump of cloud as it goes up the air column. The diagram shows a cloudless early summer night ideal for bivvying, as cold damp air sinks under its own weight into the valleys. On this particular night the cosiest level to sleep at is around 1250m – the summit of Ben Nevis, say. This takes advantage of the high-level temperature inversion caused by a high-pressure zone and its descending air. For those not in Scotland, 450m (the Skirrid, Winter Hill or Binsey) is also a good place to be. And that is high enough for a dry and dew-free morning. Either way, the ‘dew process’ is simply to head uphill. Which you were going to do anyway to get away from the midges.

Dew diagram by Marek Szpek (adapted by Ronald Turnbull)

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Rossett Pike after a down-filled bivvy in late winter

WHEN WILL THERE NOT BE DEW (OR IN WINTER, FROST)? § Dry barren landscapes not in the UK § Cloudy mild nights – water vapour at altitude makes air more opaque to infrared, so less surface cooling § When wind disrupts the separation of air layers § Higher up the valley side, or on a summit above the inversion § After the passing of a cold front, when air moisture has already been dropped out as rain

But even if you now understand how it works, there’s still very little you can ‘dew’ about it.

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ROUTE 1

Merrick two-day trip Start/finish Distance Ascent Approx time Terrain Suggested bivvy

Bruce’s Stone, Glen Trool (NX 415 803) 18.5km (11½ miles) 1100m 7hr (over 2 days) Well-made path; rough grassy slopes; granite slabs Merrick (843m)

This could start like a Star Wars movie. Far, far away, in a corner of Scotland that nobody goes to, there’s a little mountain range where wild goats bound across granite slabs, red squirrels run through ancient oakwoods, and half a hundred white-sand lochans sparkle under the sun… The Galloway Highlands are to the Southern Uplands what the High Tatras are to the Carpathians – they’re the exciting bit where the granite pokes through. (Complete transparency here: Rysy, high-point of Poland, is even more exciting than Merrick. By quite a margin.) Tucked away in Scotland’s southwest corner, perhaps even assumed to be somewhere in Ireland, the Galloways are little visited by most. But they’ve been well loved by a select sort of discriminating hillgoer. The outlaws and vagabonds of the 18th century loved to lurk here on the fringes of civilisation. The fastnesses of Dungeon were just right for raiding the small farms of the lowlands, or grabbing passing hikers and stripping them of their expensive Gore-Tex gear before dumping them in the swampy corner of Loch Neldricken. Before that, outlaw Robert the Bruce hung out in these hills with his 200 mixed mercenary warriors. The convicted murderer and newly crowned king relaxed on a comfy boulder on the Rhinns of Kells while planning how to lure the English into an ambush at the shoreline of Loch Trool. Even John Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay, pursued by the police, a band of ‘sinister foreigners’ and a 1914-model light aircraft, ‘fixed on Galloway as the best place to go …’ It was in the spring of 1307 that English general Aymer de Valence marched along the edge of Loch Trool, as Bruce’s hillmen lurked high on Mulldonoch ready to roll down the rounded granite boulders. Aymer had the right idea, even if his timing was a bit off. Loch Trool is the finest start-point, and the walk over Merrick and Craignaw allows the full hit of this distinctive hill range. No need to make a night of it unless you really do need to watch the sun rising over Loch Enoch from the summit of Merrick. 7 The comfort zone

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Gala Lan e

400

0

50

696

0

60

466 597

50

0 400

Mullwharchar 692

Merrick 843

600

0

50

Dungeon Hill

Loch Enoch

700

300

600

0

50

0

300

Saugh Burn

400

Kirriemore 456 Hill

40

50

0

718

400

40

B

0

Loch Valley

300

400

Bennan

Loch Neldricken

40

360

0

20

0

0

20

Bruce’s Stone

Craiglee 531

300

300

Loch Trool

0

10

Glen Trool Lodge

l

roo nT

Southern

100

500

400 300

Upland

Way

N

0 50

30

0

20

0

Gle

Devil’s Bowling Green Craignaw 644

500

Culsharg bothy

uc ha nB urn

50

0

Benyellary

300

366

0

Lamachan Hill 717 600

40

0

1

2

km 0

40

600

74

400

400

786 Kirriereoch Hill

500

300

600

500

300

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50

0

Loch Dee

I really did need to see the sun rising over Loch Enoch from the summit of Merrick. I’d driven in along the lonely glen of Trool, not seeing the hills for the trees. Around the southern edges of the Galloway range the original tree cover is Atlantic oak. Chunks of this remain, and these are being infilled with the aim of a single, lovely oakwood all the way down the Cree to the sea. No longer harbouring ‘red-handed men, outlaws and aliens of all this realm of well-affected men’ (as one 19th-century fan of the Galloways described us), it’s still a stronghold for the native red squirrel. Roe deer also roam here; your best chance of seeing them is if you’re the first along a forest track early in the morning. But my two-day plan had me arriving mid-afternoon. At Bruce’s Stone overlooking Loch Trool, a sleepy green haze hung about the oaks. Where Bruce once heard shrieks and battle cries across the water, there was no sound but a few buzzing insects. The main Merrick path has one uncharacteristic (for Galloway) feature: a path signboard at its foot. Well built by the Forestry Commission, it takes you quickly up through the band of Sitka spruce. Lower ground around the Galloways is rather overgrown with these future loo rolls. Appropriate, in a way, as some of that surrounding ground is indeed rather brown and soggy. This boring bit under the conifers counts as the shuffling around of chairs, as it were, before the commencement of the gourmet feast – which is what this walk is, for us Galloway fans. But a gourmet feast does tend to be mainly cream and asparagus, and some of us require some added roughage. This can be supplied by a tree-free start over the Fell of Eschoncan. Small but strenuous, the Fell of Eschoncan rises in steep bracken immediately above Bruce’s Stone. The small path was created with a strimmer for the very first Merrick hill race. Over the years the trainer-clad feet of the runners have kept the route open, although it’s still tricky to trace in high summer until the bracken gets squashed back on the mid September race day. Once on the flat felltop, the peaty little path continues upwards by various viewpoint cairns and small peaty pools surrounded with bog asphodel and cotton grass. Bennan’s top is surprisingly rocky and rugged for such a very flat place. Slabs of ocean-bottom greywacke are tilted at about 30 degrees. You walk through a gap in a line of low crag and find 5m of downhill bare rock. Step onto it and run down, counting on the softness of the bog at the bottom. But it’s at Benyellary, back on the main Merrick path, that the walk assumes classic status. The high-level ridge wander along the Neive of the Spit gives views one way across the Ayrshire plains to the distant sea, and the other way into the granite heartland of Galloway with its little lochs. Another reason for messing about on Bennan was to delay my arrival onto Benyellary until the sun was nice and low. A golden haze hovered in the air alongside, like a kindly waiter with a bottle of some 7 The comfort zone

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Merrick from Neive of the Spit

sweet and rather rich desert wine, perhaps a muscatel. And on the right, the Gloon corrie slowly filled up with purple shadow – not unlike a gently poured glass of good claret. There’s only one Merrick, and the hill is referred to locally as ‘The’ Merrick. This is reflected on the larger-scale Explorer map, where the slope to the summit is named ‘Broads of the Merrick’. The Broads needs to be gone up slowly. Not because it’s steep – which it isn’t – but so as to arrive at the trig point at the perfect sunset moment. From Merrick top, we’re told, it’s possible to enjoy the UK’s longest view: 224.5km (139½ miles), all the way south to Snowdon. But there was no time this evening to fire up the phone in order to look at what was only visible inside the computer. Not when the sun was about to go down behind the Isle of Arran, lighting the Firth of Clyde in tasteful shades of purplish grey. And even more important was the view the other way. I put a couple of large stones on the bivvy bag and strolled down the slope for a better view of Loch Enoch. Open out the Galloway map and the place is an accident in a blue-paint factory. For its size, this area is more lake-infested even than the well-known bit in the northwest of England. Best of a damn good bunch, bang in the middle of the huddled hills, Loch Enoch sprawls like a roadkill toad across a square mile of granite bedrock. Its little beaches are silver granite sand. That sand is pure quartz, the crystals sharp, so that it was once gathered to make into whetstones for scythes. The loch is bottomless, it never freezes over, and the largest of its islands itself contains a small peat pool – the Loch in the Loch. The first of those statements is unlikely, but the third of them is true. From Merrick, the loch on its own island adds one extra sparkle to a view that’s already a piquant mix-up of land and open water. The second of the three statements is definitely false. I’ve crossed the ice of Loch Enoch to visit that island with its lochan. So has someone I met at Merrick summit one autumn on a final trip before the deadline for my Galloway Hills guidebook. 76

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People have also swum Loch Enoch to the island. The Loch in the Loch is reported as being pleasantly warm on a summer’s day; but the swim back will quickly cool you down again. (Please note that these crossings are not being recommended to readers of this book: both the swim and the ice-walk have obvious dangers.) I dragged my campsite a bit further downhill, so as to be looking at Loch Enoch while I slept. And as the light and the colours changed like a slow-motion disco show, it was the easiest thing in the world to mount the tripod over the bivvy bag and take a picture from in bed. Having seen Loch Enoch all night, it was time to be at Loch Enoch. After a long lie-in until 7am (tut, tut – a full three hours after sunrise!) I continued down Redstone Rig. It was a grey day, and the loch was slaty among miles of grey-green grassland. As I went down, I crossed a crucial junction. Somewhere in the grassy hollow between one dark grey knobbly outcrop and the next, the bedrock changed utterly. The next outcrop wasn’t knobbly at all, but a smooth and rounded slab. And not dark grey, but pale grey and speckled. Granite cools slowly in big lumps called plutons (the word means something like ‘deeply underground thing’). It has time, as it cools, to form crystals several millimetres across. They are of three sorts: tough, glassy quartz; white or grey feldspar; and a dark iron-rich mineral. The dark minerals and the feldspar rot away in the wind and rain, leaving the sharp-cornered quartz to give a superb grippy surface. This active weathering also smooths everything’s edges off, giving the nicely rounded sculptural boulders that decorate the hillsides. Meanwhile the eroded-out quartz crystals make the pale, gleaming beaches of Loch Neldricken and Loch Enoch. It’s a fair summary to say that what makes Galloway Galloway is the granite. And what the Galloway granite makes is the hill called Craignaw.

Galloway Hills and Loch Enoch from Merrick, late evening

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Don’t be misled by the fact that Craignaw is 198m lower than Merrick. Craignaw is the one that rises in bare, glacier-scraped granite slabs. Craignaw is the one where the goats go, where the tussocks are green and grim, where the Devil plays at bowls with boulders on a ‘lawn’ that’s bare rock. A narrow and rather rocky col called the Nick of the Dungeon leads up to the Devil’s Bowling Green (or as it should be, the Bowling Grey). Above it, Craignaw, so flat on the map, rises in little crags and big half-buried boulders. There is a way, easier to walk if trickier to find, contouring out to the west then up the gentler slope above Loch Neldricken. Straight up involves a bit of clambering about; but for those on Craignaw, clambering is the appropriate way to go. As the underground granite lump – the pluton – cools, it shrinks into big, regular blocks. The main cracks form parallel with the top surface of the pluton. So the granite breaks to smooth, near-level slabs – as walked on at Craignaw. Rising out of the grass and peat, those grey slabs make great, easy going; and from Point of the Snibe in the south over to the Brishie ridge on the Dungeon, one step in two on this hill will be on that naked granite. Because I’m a guidebook writer, I sometimes go to places just because they need going to for a guidebook. To update a bit of route description, I now headed on south, over the granite slabs, aiming for a tough and tufty crossing of a lesser hill called Craiglee. This is not the nicest way; and perhaps this is the place to admit it: quite a bit of Galloway’s lower ground is the ground that grinds you down. Tussocks can be knee-deep; old boulderfields are an ankle-grabbing mesh of holes hidden under the heather. All this can be challenging and confrontational – and thrilling, for the sufficiently fit. After the crossing of Craignaw, and with an overnight backpack on my back, I would normally choose to be unchallenged and non-confronted (or yes, okay, but only a little) and instead trickle off the side of Craignaw to the welcoming shores of Loch Neldricken. At Loch Neldricken there’s a burger van, and a pub with picnic tables and a range of authentic ales and whiskies, and a wide, smooth path built by the ranger team. Well, there would be if Loch Neldricken were 100km to the southeast, within an ice-cream van’s tinkle of Keswick town. The convenient facility that Loch Neldricken actually has is its Murder Hole. ‘It never froze; it was never whitened with snow. With open mouth it lay ever waiting like an insatiable beast for its tribute of human life; it never gave up a body committed to its depths, or broke a murderer’s trust.’ Okay, so readers of The Book of the Bivvy probably aren’t lugging along any looted victims that need to be disposed of. Especially given the 800m of height gain you’d have to haul them over on Merrick. It’s in SR Crockett’s The Raiders that the fierce tribes of Macaterick and Faa drop off unwanted dead bodies in this strangely circular, rush-girt corner of Loch Neldricken.

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On the west ridge of Stob Ghabhar; when wind and drizzle came in the night, I moved in behind one of the granite boulders

A peaty path passes an old stone sheepfank to the next in the downhill sequence. Compared to Neldricken, Loch Valley is somewhat more busy and civilised – last time I was there, there were two fishermen there as well. Next down after Loch Valley, you’re back at Loch Trool. And a few kilometres down the road there is – yes – a little café, and they do sell ice cream. It’s made in Gatehouse of Fleet and it’s called Cream o’ Galloway. But the real cream o’ Galloway is this outing over Merrick and Craignaw. The ancient oakwoods of Loch Trool; the airy ridgeline of Neive of the Spit. Loch Enoch, high and quiet among the peaty wilderness. Craignaw, with its granite slabs and small grey crags. Why spend a day there – when you could spend two half-days, and the night-time in between?

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You haven’t really been in Upper Eskdale (below Scafell) until you’ve lain in a bivvy bag eating frozen muesli

8 BUT WHAT IF IT RAINS? Most people get used to the English climate eventually Instructions for American servicemen in Britain, 1942

It wouldn’t be fun if it was easy Jamie Andrew, Life and Limb (Jamie Andrew of Edinburgh returned to rock and ice climbing after losing both feet and both hands to frostbite while bivvying for four days and nights in a storm on the summit of Les Droites)

BIVVY NIGHT 9: Wet under thorns in Belfast It had rained, and it was going to rain. After three fine far-seeing nights on the summits of Mourne, I was in for a wet one. Time to look for a place with a roof on. But this was Northern Ireland, where the walking is unwalked. Youth hostel? Well, yes – two days behind or a day and a half ahead. Camping barn? Not on the edge of Belfast. So I started trying the places listed in the Ulster Way guide. A £50 single room in a walkers’ listing: golly. Next one: £60. Then a small B&B in a side street wanted to know where I was from. I was a bit clueless here. I should have announced confidently: ‘I’m from Scotland and I’m an atheist, madam.’ Instead I mumbled something about being on the Ulster Way, and she said she hoped I’d enjoy it but she was full.

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But above the city are the Belfast Hills: basalt covered in heather is an excellent bed, with a sea view over streetlights. What could be nicer? Well, the people of Northern Ireland are very friendly. They slow their cars beside me, slip clutch alongside for 10 minutes to talk to the walker, are genuinely pleased that a Scottish atheist wants to hike to the Giant’s Causeway, and discuss – in a concerned and friendly way – the Belfast Hills. I should get myself through them before the marching season, and I should get myself through them before dark. Statistically, non-Irish come to arbitrary harm less often here than we would in Glasgow. But two who did were murdered in their tent right here on the Belfast Hills. So I stopped short, and found a nook sheltered by weeds below a thorn tree in a Belfast park. You stop walking, lie down in the bivvy bag, and gradually the shaken brain settles and starts to think. What I was lying on must have been very close indeed to the line between the Protestant bits of Belfast and the Catholic west. As I was drawing these mental maps, someone started riding a motorbike up and down the path alongside my thorn tree. Or rather, several people did. This was a year before the Good Friday Agreement. Would the next amusement be a semi-automatic weapon, and firing at random into the undergrowth? It didn’t seem likely. But it did seem possible. So I was glad when it started to rain. The scramblebikers didn’t want to scramblebike in the rain, and bikered off. It got dark. The rain continued. It dripped through the thorn branches, and I made a sort of tent end to my bivvy by bootlacing it to a twig. A pungent aroma arose from the weedbed around me. Water puddled in the hollows of the bivvy bag, flowing off when I moved. And gradually but inescapably the inside of the bag was getting damp. A short time later it stopped getting damp and started getting wet. My gloved hands were wrinkling as after a long washing-up. The rain pattered on the weeds, dripped on the twigs, and made a continuous soft rustle of the surroundings. Even through the sleeping bag I could feel the lumps of water as they came down off the twig-ends and onto me. It was actually quite warm. At grey dawn I arose, squeezed out my clothes – and immediately got soaked again pushing through the wet weedbed.

Further suffering Those monks who used to live on the tops of pillars in the desert, ruthlessly abstaining from everything – one St Simeon Stylites is in the Guinness World Records for his 45 years up one. Were they just showing off, or were they actually having fun? You really can’t tell until you’ve tried.

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Well-equipped walkers can enjoy the waterfalls; the rest of us just get wet – Gleann Bianasdail, Loch Maree

Part – and it’s a large part – of the pleasure and satisfaction of climbing rocks is to be confident and safe in a place where if you weren’t so confident and safe you’d be a trembling wreck and shortly afterwards dead. To have the belay device in its crack and know that it’s going to stay there; to put the foot on the very small hold and step up with 150m of air below 95 per cent of the bootsole. Again, to be on hilltops in sleet and low cloud, knowing that the Gore-Tex garments and the compass bearings are going to get you down again. There are those who enjoy the adrenaline experience of being scared in the face of death. Thirty metres up with the rope hanging free behind, the scrabbling on the sloping rock, the lichen flying from the footholds, the last-chance handhold that just has to be there beyond the bulge. Adrenaline is addictive, and the adrenaline life, though brutish and short, may be a happy one. But adventure has been defined as being just on the near side of fear: to be confident and in control in a situation where things could get very nasty, but aren’t going to. Such situations do not occur in computer programming or taikwondo. You don’t have to be a theologian to see that in our cushioned world, a little bit of physical discomfort isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Dawn is fine from between two boulders at the summit of Kirk Fell, but far better when that new sun is not just brightness to the eye but also the drying out of the sleeping bag after a night of shivering misery. And the day when you park at Pen-y-Pass, walk gently up Glyder Fawr without any blisters, and eat a sandwich in the sun – this is not the day that burns afterwards in the memory. 82

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Accordingly, the following paragraphs on how to diminish that misery are heretical. They should be taken out of the book and burned.

What if it rains? ‘What happens when it rains?’ asked the man in the Feshie bothy. I was halfway through walking across Scotland, and not altogether lucid. So when I got home I started writing this book. The answer is surprisingly simple. What happens is, you get wet. Belfast’s rainwater fell on the outside of my bag; the inside of the bag got wet; accordingly, I decided it must be leaking. And who wants to walk on across Ulster with a wet sleeper and a leaky bivvy? The errors were falling thicker than rain on the Emerald Isle. The sleeping bag was not wet. If you get picky about your personal surroundings and decide to wash your sleeping bag you discover that a wet sleeping bag is so heavy it pulls your arms down. It certainly doesn’t come dry in half an hour when the sun comes out in Belfast Harbour and you hang it over the ship’s rail in the breeze. And the bivvy bag was not leaking. In fact, as I’d treated it with a tent waterproofer, it was not-leaking even more seriously than it was designed to not leak. For moisture to pass across the breathable membrane of the bivvy bag it needs to: § be warmer on the inside than the outside; § be more humid on the inside than the outside; § have a breeze across the surface. If none of these is the case, then you might as well be lying inside that impermeable orange plastic of Chapter 2. I hadn’t been sleeping in Irish rain but in Scottish condensation. And worse, I’d failed to believe in my bag. Even the tent waterproofer – as we’ll see below – had been a roundabout way of getting me wetter. There are basically two sorts of breathable material. A microporous material, such as Gore-Tex, has billions of tiny holes. The holes are several thousand times smaller than a water droplet, but still much, much bigger than a molecule of water vapour. A hydrophilic material, such as Milair, works in a different way. It is completely waterproof, but the long molecules it’s made of can pick up a single molecule of water vapour, pass it along the chain, and shrug it off at the other end. The hydrophilic molecule can be simple polyurethane, as in household varnish. Microporous material is made up in three layers – it needs an inner lining to hold in place the Teflon with all the tiny holes in. So, although it is somewhat more effective than hydrophilic material, it is rather heavier and quite a bit more expensive. To determine whether your bag is microporous, just examine the price ticket. A breathable membrane can pass water at a rate of 200g per square metre per hour when the temperature inside it is 30°C, the temperature of the air outside is 21°C, the relative humidity is 60 per cent, and there’s an air flow outside of 2m/sec. 8 But what if it rains?

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(That’s an MVTR – moisture vapour transmission rate – of 2400g per square metre per day.) This figure is for the thicker sort of Sympatex, but other breathables will be only slightly worse or better. For a person in a breathable jacket, brisk walking will produce the 2m/s of air flow, and Britain’s climate will produce the necessary temperature difference. So most of your personal dampness will pass out through the jacket except where you’re wearing a rucksack on top. A sleeping person produces less personal moisture (especially if they got into the bag slightly cool rather than all hot and sweaty). The chill of night may offer an even more beneficial temperature difference – although wet nights are also warm nights. However, in order to keep warm, that sleeping person has chosen a sheltered corner with as little flowing air as possible. And a sleeping person isn’t nearly so efficient at shaking standing water off the outside surface of the membrane. The net result is that your bivvy bag won’t be as efficient at breathing out moisture in the night as your breathable jacket was during the day. One remedy, then, is to move higher up the mountain, for a better temperature gradient across the membrane, and use a thinner sleeping bag for the same reason. And for airflow, sleep out on a small knoll. As you fall asleep you’ll be pleasantly dry all over – and an hour later you’ll wake up shivering. For this is the basic law of the bivvy: The warmer the wetter. Or to put it more bluntly: Shiver – or drip.

Look after your bivvy and your bivvy will look after you A bivvy really is not at all a tent. A tent is a thing. You pitch it at nightfall, and if the rain comes in you complain to the shop and get your money back. A bivvy bag, we recall, is not so much a thing as a surly Asturian person called Miguel. If Miguel approves of you he’ll take you to some wonderful places. If your behaviour is inappropriate – you’ve made some approving remark about Mont Blanc or Snowdon, you’ve been rude about the food – he’ll desert you in the middle of nowhere and let you cope on your own. Or worse, he’ll walk just a little too fast, and take you somewhere that if you weren’t such an overcivilised wimp you’d really enjoy, and laugh behind his tangly beard. It’s important, then, to retain the respect of your bag. We none of us like to be sniggered at by our equipment. Like a tent, it must not be stored wet. Unlike a tent, it’s pretty quick and easy to dry. Ten minutes in a brisk wind will do it. The people who made your bivvy bag say it should be hung up in a wardrobe. The people who made your sleeping bag want you to hang that in your wardrobe as well. Even without the rainbow selection of high-performance outdoor outerwear 84

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Rainbow over Glen Etive

that I don’t possess, my wardrobe is full of my clothes. The manufacturers grumble but give in: the bag won’t come to much harm provided I don’t stuff it in the stuff bag. Roll it up gently from the toe, bend it in two or in three, and slide the stuff bag over it. Don’t lay it on scree or sharp stones. You wouldn’t want to anyway; but if you’re on the summit of, say, Ben More on Mull and you have a foam mat, put the foam mat underneath the bivvy bag. (On soft grass, on the other hand, it’s better to have the foam inside the bag – this keeps it from sliding away in the night.) Keep it clean, as dirt blocks its microscopic holes and smothers it. Wash the bag gently in soap flakes by hand. Do not use detergents, as these interfere with the mystic chemistry of the hydrophilics. They also sabotage the expensive coating you’re about to spray on. If you’re really fond of your bag, give it Nikwax Tech Wash – this removes detergent residues from when you washed it wrong the last time. Don’t waterproof the bag with waterproofing as this too will smother the pores. If you believe the bag is leaking, I’ve just carefully explained that it isn’t. The time that it needs re-proofing is when it’s wetting out: moisture is penetrating into the material, making it heavy when wet and difficult to dry. Re-proof it with a product such as Nikwax TX Direct Wash-In, or with Grangers Clothing Repel – these are specifically designed for breathable fabrics. The effect should be to make water falling on the fabric roll into droplets and fall off. After washing, and after applying any coating, gentle heat treatment is supposed to improve the ‘roll into droplets and fall off’ effect. Julian Miles suggested for his Milair bag that it should be ironed from the outside with a very cool iron (well below the nylon setting) to revitalise the coating. A different manufacturer suggests ‘steam iron warm’ for its Gore-Tex bag. But only if you really think it needs revitalising: there’s a risk of sticking together the front and back if it accidentally folds under the iron. A warm but not hot tumble-drying has also been suggested. 8 But what if it rains?

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The best source of information is the swing ticket that dangled from the bag when you bought it. But as you’ve lost the ticket, you’ll have to switch on your search engine and find the bagmaker’s website, or those of Nikwax or Grangers (currently www.nikwax.com and https://grangers.co.uk). The instructions above are for when your bag’s so ancient that you can’t remember who made it and the label’s rubbed off. They may also reassure you that when you find a care label with an ironing temperature, this isn’t so silly as it seems. If the taped seams have broken down, a phone call to the manufacturer will reveal that it could be repaired but will cost so much you might as well replace the whole bag. In which case, you risk little by attempting to apply cloth-backed tape (hot-melt tape) with a hot iron. Pennine Outdoor is one supplier for this. Use the tip of the iron until the hot glue bubbles out, being careful not to scorch the bag fabric. Less excitingly, you can try applying waterproof (rather than breathable) sealant to the outside of the leaky seam. Any glue suitable for tents would do. Apply this before applying any coating to the bag as a whole, as it won’t stick if you do it afterwards. If the bivvy bag has been stored wet it will start to degrade. First it will wet out, but after that its inner coating may start to blister or peel away. Get a new bag and this time store it dry. Midges All worthwhile tents are screened and netted against the evil insect. Some bivvy bags are too. But if there are midges then it must be summer – so shouldn’t you be further up the hill? A bivvy at 956m will usually be midge free and has other advantages too; daybreak, Sgùrr nan Coireachan

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Midges rarely annoy above the 600m contour. But in a zipless bag in a damp wood at the foot of Ben Nevis I made a strange discovery: when I scrunched everything up to leave a very small breathing hole, the midges did not come in. Perhaps the air was moving in and out rapidly enough to scare them off. Which leads to the next technicality: How big a hole? In a tent, you simply go to sleep. In a bag, you’re constantly interacting with the surroundings in an interesting way. Would you like to be slightly warmer? Or would you prefer to be slightly drier? To a certain extent this can be controlled by the size of the breathing aperture. In a well-maintained bag it is possible to zip yourself right up inside and still breathe. From the outside you will resemble a large green slug, but if you care about appearances you are perhaps not a bivvybag person in the first place. Some find it unpleasantly stuffy. More seriously, however: while you are retaining all the warmth of your breathed-out air, you’re also retaining all its moisture. Zipping in completely makes you a bit warmer, but quite a lot damper. However, it’s good to do the zip right up during a vicious squall while the wind and rain gust from all directions. Total closure gives a slight but pleasant sensation of shelter and security. When it eases up a bit, unzip enough to let out one arm, and grope in the rucksack for a pork pie and an old sandwich. Then, as soon as the squall’s passed over, it’s better to keep open a small hole to breathe through. Enjoy fresh air, and avoid challenging the micropores or the polyurethane with the extra dampness from the lungs. You can arrange a sort of chamber so that outgoing breath mixes with and warms the incoming fresh air. But at the start of the night, when it’s still slightly warm, it’s best to have the head right out and enjoy the sunset. One authority suggests that zipped right into a hydrophilic-type bag, it’s possible to suffocate to death. Even, perhaps, in a microporous one if it’s really dirty. But I don’t believe this. Certainly it’s never happened to me so far.

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Badenoch birchwoods: a good place to be, even when it isn’t raining

9 ACROSS SCOTLAND BY BAG Better a thousand times that he should be a tramp, and mend pots and pans by the wayside, and sleep under the trees, and see the dawn and the sunset every day above a new horizon. Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

Wetness and weight: cross-Scotland constraints And yet, with all the excitement of being out there in the environment and the weather – the moral benefits of a bit of misery – the second night in a wet bivvy can get depressing, and also rather smelly. So for a serious crossing of Scotland I like to

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have some sort of a roof, not necessarily on my route, but somewhere near the route that I could divert to if I had to. This means a bothy or better. Or else, if tonight isn’t within reach of a roof, and things turn nasty, then tomorrow night could be within reach of not just a roof but a drying room: a youth hostel, say, or a five-star hotel. (I expect five-star hotels have drying rooms.) And there’s no point carrying a light pack if it’s full of heavy food. Rough calculations suggest that it’s worth walking an extra couple of kilometres to avoid carrying a day’s food (1kg) for one extra day. Take a hill stint of six days: if you walked out to a shop at the end of the second day, that would save carrying an extra four days’ food for each of the first two days. Thus it’s worth 8 x 2km, or around 16km detour to get to the shop. A simpler rule – for Scotland, anyway – is that more than three days’ food is too much.

GIMME SHELTER § For every bivvy night, either a roof (bothy or better) as a fallback option – this may involve a diversion into a nearby valley – or on the following night a roof plus dry-out (bunkhouse or better), again possibly involving diversion § For every high-level day, a foul-weather alternative low-level route that’s enjoyable in itself (paths and passes, not roads or trackless bog) § At least twice: a long stint (two or more days) through roadless country § Ten Munros close enough to include, plus some Corbetts § One really nice inn along the way

Etive range: Ben Starav to Stob Ghabhar – one of the great east–west ridges of Scotland

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ROUTE 2

Acharacle to Aberdeenshire Start Finish Distance Ascent Approx time Terrain Highest point

Acharacle, Moidart (NM 677 688) Collieston, Aberdeenshire (NK 042 286) 400km (250 miles) 15,000m 10–15 days Hill slopes and ridges, often pathless and sometimes steep; lanes and farm tracks for final day Creag Meagaidh (1130m)

The best-laid plans of mice and men… and there’s something definitely mouselike about a man or woman in a bag huddled down among the stalks of grass. Back in 1999 my whole bivvybag cross-Scotland scheme fell to pieces. High pressure settled over the UK; it was far too hot to sleep anywhere below the 600m mark. The routeplan floated away like a buzzard and vanished into the blue. Five days later, when it started to rain, I had to wonder where I was meant to be… The Moidart Corbetts have grassy ridges, steep stony sides, and lots and lots of lochs to look at. The rucksacks were fairly heavy – mine contained four days’ food – so we hauled them a little bit at a time over Rois-bheinn, dropped them for an outing to An Stac, and wandered on over Sgùrr na Bà Glaise. The air was warm and windless, the sea glittered under the afternoon sun. It was still only 6pm, but Colin wanted to turn back to his car next day and be up slating roofs on Monday. So Druim Fiaclach had to be it for the day. When there’s time to kill at day’s end in May, Druim Fiaclach is the place to kill it. There are grassy corners, little rock-walls and little pools. We found an ideal grassy corner for the bivvy, sheltered by one of the little rock-walls, a little pool nearby. But the rock-wall interrupted some of the sea view – so we spent half an hour finding an even better grassy corner. And then another half an hour scrambling over the rockwalls and looking at the lochs. Then we did it all again, this time taking photos. And then it was time for tea. Colin, turning back earlier than me, didn’t mind luggage. And it was a warm evening. So we used a stove and had hot food, sitting on our grassy ledge, with our feet dangling into the deep hollow of Glen Aladale. This was Colin’s first attempt at tentless outdoor living. He couldn’t believe that you just lie down on the ground, stare up at the sky till you’re tired of it, then shut your eyes. Meanwhile I was still up taking pictures of the sunset. That far north, at that 90

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time of year, sunset lasts for two or three hours. The sea was striped by islands into bands of different sorts of orange. Long silvery lochs divided the black land. White fluffy clouds formed out of nowhere, rushed towards us on the wind and then dissolved. Like the waves of a rising tide, the next band of cloud came further up, then the sunset came back, and finally a wave of white surged through the gaps of the ridge and broke over our heads. Colin, happening to open one eye, was surprised to see no stars or dark mountain outlines. ‘Hey – what’s happened to my view?’ On the second day I pushed on alone over clouded Corbetts. Glenfinnan – with its tempting sleeping-car bunkhouse – was to be the first drying-out point. But I wasn’t wet yet, and neither was the weather, so it was on onto more mountains. At 6pm the cloud broke, at 6.30pm the sun came out, and at 7pm I was on top of Sgùrr nan Coireachan. Bonnie Prince Charlie spent a night up here in 1746 – damp, midge-bitten, but consoled with whisky. Most Munro-baggers since have simply touched the cairn and away. But the bonnie prince had the right of it. Coireachan was even better than Moidart. There was a grassy nook right beside the cairn, so if I should get bored of the Rum view westward I would only need to turn the bed around to receive the Glen Dessarry view to the east. Not that the Rum view was at all boring. The sunset this time was delicately tinted in pink and grey; as well as Rum there were the Outer Hebrides drifting along the horizon like spacedout whales; and on the right, the multicoloured sky ran down to black Skye. The sunset moved gradually round into the north and became sunrise. A chilly little breeze flicked around the summit cairn and down into my hollow. The new day’s weather was cruel. I wanted to leap out, roll up the bag and warm up Rum from Sgùrr nan Coireachan at 7pm and again at 10pm with a brisk stride down 9 Across Scotland by bag

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A8

LB

32

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35

Kinlochewe

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31

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Loch Mullardoch

A8

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A82

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61

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A85

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57

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Stonehaven

Inverbervie A92

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4

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On Gulvain; most of the hills seen behind have already been crossed

the ridge. But that cold air was also crystal clear, and Ben Wyvis was poking up in the far northeast behind all the main mountains of Glen Affric. Which meant careful work with exposures and tripod, and then leaping up and down a little to stop shivering before pressing the shutter button. Photography’s a matter not just of the best equipment, but also of creativity and an eye, and not making a mess of the exposure. On the other hand, you can get quite a long way simply by being high at the right time of day. The fluffy clouds were back, but not in the sky: they filled the valleys, surged over the passes, and made my morning ridge into a series of pointed islands. Low sun, and clouds underfoot: it was so obvious there was going to be a Brocken spectre that when it suddenly arrived I had the camera out ready to take its picture. Until they develop a digital reference library small and waterproof enough for the rucksack, the wonderings one wonders across Streap and Gulvain will remain unresolved, mostly. I was doing this walk within The Great Outdoors Challenge, which is a slightly organised way for 250 people to walk across Scotland by many routes in the same two weeks in May. Is there any Munro in the Challenge area that hasn’t been crossed on the Challenge? Perhaps Ben Lomond – briefly in the late 1980s within the southern boundary – but perhaps again not. Which is the most frequently Challenge-bagged Munro? Mount Keen, easy. But somewhere, lurking among the statistics, there may be one or two un-Challenge-bagged Corbetts. Beinn Bheula, by that wandering southern boundary. Beinn 94

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Bhàn of Applecross. Perhaps even Beinn Bhàn above Gairlochy, I thought, as I wandered towards it in warm but fading evening light. Well, I’d be the only one this year, that’s for sure. And in the boggy bit after Meall a’ Phubuill I entertained myself by composing a money-back demand to Challenge Control. The Great Outdoors Challenge is supposed to be a social event. I hadn’t met a soul since I started at Acharacle.

THE GREAT OUTDOORS CHALLENGE This route is one of uncountable coast-to-coast lines through the Highlands. I walked it within the annual Great Outdoors Challenge, sponsored by The Great Outdoors (TGO) magazine. This takes place every May, with a basic set of rules stipulating one of a dozen west-coast start points from Loch Fyne to Torridon, a finish anywhere between Arbroath and Peterhead, and any route you like in between. In exchange for a fairly modest fee, it offers a pre-walk route vetting service, a check on your progress as you go along, and companionship at various overnight stops. See www.tgochallenge.co.uk.

With the approach of bedtime it got colder, and clearer. Low sun from the north fell on Ben Nevis and briefly warmed the fingers of any late climbers there before their short benightment. Loch Linnhe glittered, and the stony plateau of Beinn Bhàn was, at only 796m, the top of the world. I trotted down to the first cosy peat hag and unrolled the bag. Spean Bridge with its hordes tomorrow: but for tonight, at least, a bedroom to myself. The overnight view had no sea in it, and only a single loch. Apart from Ben Nevis the hills below the sunset were rounded ones of the central Highlands. This was not a night of wild horizons. This was a night of comfort. Wind whispered in the grass but didn’t get down into my peat hag. Dry peat was softer than any man-made mattress and smelled nice as well. I was warm enough to leave my face out in the fresh night air all night long. I almost overslept – but sun shining straight into the eyes is better than any man-made alarm clock. At 7am I set off downhill. At 7.03am I saw a strange yellow shape. Something to do with sheep? No. It was, of course, Challenger Number 17, Han Bakker of Holland, smiling from his tent and offering cups of tea. I learnt my lesson. Càrn an Fhreiceadain is a Corbett that’s nowhere in particular rather to the east of the Monadh Liath. Was it Challenger-free? Was it Fhreiceadain. That one had Number 247, Jonathan Worters of Scarborough, in from Torridon over Loch Ness. ‘Is that northern Monadhliath better than it looks on the map, then?’ ‘No,’ says Mr Worters, ‘it’s worse.’ 9 Across Scotland by bag

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On the Challenge, it’s almost eccentric not to be an eccentric Corbett-bagger. And probably, after a long trawl through the route-plans, you’d find none within the boundaries unscaled. The hills of the west are steep; the Cairngorms are rounded, but big; elsewhere in the east, the hills are merely rounded. Section Nine of Munro’s Tables is, some would argue, the least thrilling section of them all. (Others fiercely contend that Section Five, the A9 Hills around Drumochter, is less interesting even than Section Nine.) When the hills won’t co-operate, you just have to make your own fun. Walking has something to do with feet, certainly, but mostly it takes place in the mind. Thus, above Glen Roy, one climbs up the rough grasses of Càrn Dearg; and then one climbs up the rough grasses of Càrn Dearg; and then one climbs up the rough grasses of Càrn Dearg. Càrn Dearg means ‘Reddish Heap of Stones’, and three hills – all of them Corbetts – carry this distinctive name. Was this just a muddled mapmaker, one reddish pile being much like any other? Or is it more sinister – a cover-up: the denizens of Section Nine trying to pretend that is has fewer dull hills than it actually does? The civilised amenities of Spean Bridge, slight though they be, had unstiffened my high resolve. I stopped short of the stony reddish tops and slept in deep heather beside a stream, almost too low on the hill for a proper view even. It didn’t matter. Tramping that deep heather with a sack full of food meant that this fourth night was one for simple sleep. At dawn, haze and horizontal sunbeams turned the rounded lumps into a succession of pastel blues, fading and receding. The soft-focus composition needed a sharp accent somewhere; so an obliging eagle rose from among the Càrn Deargs, almost at my feet. There are five Munros around Creag Meagaidh: five in a long line between Loch Ness and the A86. At noon I stood on the western one. There followed seven hours of gentle grassy slopes and gravel plateau. Creag Meagaidh itself is not all that boring – its plateau is amoeboid, a thing of many blobs. You walk a lawnlike curve and suddenly there’s a drop of crag and old snow and a huge corrie with a lochan in it. The corries come at you from all directions, and it’s a tricky place in a blizzard. The long ridge of Càrn Liath (grey pile of stones) ran eastwards into the evening. These smooth hills have no rock hollows, but a little dip and a rucksack to windward provided just enough shelter – and a chill breeze passing a few inches overhead meant none of the stuffiness associated with zipped-in tent living. Moonlight shivered across Loch Laggan. On a nearby ridge at midnight, a stag stood against the silvery background. The sixth dawn was a grey one, with rain on the way. My boots were wet from snowfields of the previous day, and I felt I was displaying real strength of character as I rolled away the dry nightsocks and got back into the damp footwear of the new day. The Monadhliath Munros comprise a Càrn Bàn (white pile of stones), a Càrn Dearg (red stones, remember?) and a Geal Chàrn (pile of stones of off-white colour). 96

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Walk them as fast as you can, driven on by the odd sharp shower; descend over an afternoon’s worth of deep heather on defeated feet – and really appreciate the bar meal and bunkhouse at Kincraig. In those days there was a shop there as well. I looked out of the bunkhouse at the wind whipping the birch branches, and the clouds above them intent on breaking every Great Outdoors Challenge rule by running across Scotland coast-to-coast in under three hours. It didn’t seem to be a day for the Braeriach plateau, it really didn’t. Being part of a great project like the GOC carries rewards, but also responsibilities: it would be disgraceful to spoil the event’s no-fatalities-so-far record simply for the sake of mopping up four Munros. So I opened up my map and looked south. That seemed like a very long way – and besides, everybody goes up Glen Feshie. So then I looked north, and there was the Rothiemurchus forest. After a few nasty experiences involving twigs and ditches we learn to avoid the map’s green patches with the little Christmas-tree markings. Rothiemurchus, though, is not a wood-pulp factory. It hasn’t been grown simply to be torn down and made into – let’s say – the next 100,000 copies of A Walk in the Woods. Hillwriters like me tend to think rather frequently of Bill Bryson’s book, about a long-distance walk that he didn’t even complete, that somehow managed to slip out of its boots and hop from the category ‘Outdoors’ across to the category ‘Bestsellers’. Well, the bit about getting torn to pieces by bears is genuinely amusing. But I can’t help wishing I could have invited Bill Bryson along with me through the Rothiemurchus forest. The Appalachian Trail has 370 sorts of tree – Americans do tend to overdo things – while Rothiemurchus has just three. But how many different things Rothiemurchus can do with Scots pine, birch and juniper! There are the thickets where the pines stand close and dark and straight, with the occasional white birch trunk as surprising as a nude in a nunnery. There’s the recolonised scrub, where the three trees grow so close that you can see only a few yards of sandy path in front and the high heather cone of Lurcher’s Crag overhead. And there’s the clearing, floored with grass and bright bilberry, where pines are old and twisty above what is no longer the little wooden bothy of Scottish Natural Heritage. For this is managed land, carefully crafted into a synthetic wilderness that never was, haunted by beavers but also by backpackers, by mountain hares and mountain bikers, by the pine marten and the person with sandwich and plastic mac. Wilderness is all very well, but give me the sandy, stony path and the Cairngorm Club footbridge on a nasty day when the wind lashes the treetops and makes white waves on the lochans. The Appalachian Trail is 3500km long (Americans really do overdo things); the paths through Rothiemurchus are just 25km, and then it’s time for something completely different. I followed the track out past the Reindeer Centre and through the narrow Pass of Ryvoan into the bare hills, with their granite boulders and their

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heather and a lot of wind. (There’s also an off-route bothy a couple of kilometres off to the north, should it be needed.) Sun-patches and sharp squalls chased each other across the brown slopes, and down the hill came a hillwalker. The wind had picked him up off Bynack More and hurled him against a boulder, and he was pretty sure he’d cracked a rib. The bad weather had already done me some good in terms of Munro-count: four not ticked off on the Braeriach plateau would be a real help when it came to having some good ones left to do in my 70s. Now, though, it could confer a Corbett benefit. For when, to defer the evil day of Munro Completion, one turns to the Corbetts, how sad to find the 50 real goodies already done (such as Merrick and Morrone, Goatfell and the Cobbler and Beinn Dearg of Torridon) and only the dun humps of the east to console one’s declining years. Invest, then, in the future: do a dun hump today. Except that it didn’t work like that. Every Corbett must drop at least 152m to some defining col. But it was almost naughty to be crossing that defining col anyway – it leads to Fords of Avon. And to snatch a whole Corbett with only 165m of added climb was as pleasing as stealing sweeties. But pleasure of a more solid sort was at the top of the 165m: the summit of Creag Mhòr is proper Cairngorm plateau, with pink gravel and granite. Most of the full-size Cairngorms have flat tops, but here one of the granite hummocks is the actual summit. I stood on the rough granite, leaning into a wind that was just not strong enough to be scary, with one of the bursts of sunlight sparkling on the crystals of the rock. Cloud streaked and striped across the blue, and swirled in the hollow of Loch Avon. Between the clouds the sun was low and turning yellow. And it was one of those mountain moments when you thank God – or geology – for making Scotland the way it is, and the size it is. How right it felt to be a human being, in a decent breathable jacket, in Rothiemurchus in a gale and on the hummock of Creag Mhòr at sunset. Just to put the icing on the cake, on the way down to Fords of Avon it started to snow. Sometimes the bad-weather days can be the best days of all. The night when it snows on your bivvy bag isn’t one that you enjoy at the time. Somehow it doesn’t feel right to have a clammy wet weight lying on top of you, so you knock it off, and then when you roll over the clammy wet is all underneath. Then in the morning the wet breakfast eaten in wet gloves; the boots with snow in; the semi-frozen waterbottle. Nasty to live through, these nights are the ones you look back on with vivid memory and affection – the surprising white surroundings, the snowflakes in the eyebrows, the rapid warming induced by the day’s first steps through the slush-covered heather… On the other hand, there’s the metal box left by the Fleet Air Arm at Fords of Avon. When it comes to choosing between memories later and a metal box for the night, the metal box has it every time. (This refuge – it’s not a bothy as such – was rebuilt in 2011 and is now a wooden box rather than a metal one.) Decomposing 98

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Fords of Avon shelter, late May; despite the damp snow, the other two walkers there preferred their tent

heather made a soft if soggy bed, and the place warmed up even further when two more of the Challenged arrived with a bottle of whisky. The weather carried on being rather nasty, so I stayed at the bunkhouse that in those days leant against the rather grand hotel in Tomintoul. The following night, deep heather on a grouse-shooters’ hill in unknown Aberdeenshire offered an even more comfortable resting-place. And the night after that I lay among the sand dunes and watched the sun rise out of the North Sea. I lay late to let the bag dry and then wandered back inland looking for a café with proper coffee, and a train heading south.

DREAMING A LONG-DISTANCE WALK A walk is a story. And a good one needs as much plotting as an Agatha Christie. Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. When it’s a walk, the beginning needs two things: to be easy to get to, and easy to get away from. That’s what makes the West Highland Way’s Milngavie so satisfying: easy in to the train station, easy away down the steps from the shopping street to 10km of riverside woods. But a good ending needs more thinking about. Somewhere inspiring and beautiful like the summit of Mount Whitney? Or somewhere like Fort William…

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For a touch of subtlety, end should be somehow contained within beginning. A seashore to a different seashore. An abbey to an abbey. Saas Fee at the start of the Monte Rosa circuit to… Saas Fee at the end of the Monte Rosa circuit. A story needs a climax, and yes, the climax should be in the second half. This could mean doing Wainwright’s Coast to Coast westwards towards the Lake District, instead of eastwards away from it. Almost as important is the anticlimax: the quiet steps to the finish. After two weeks along the Cape Wrath Trail, the easy clifftop day to Cape Wrath is just perfect. After 10 days across the Highlands, the 50km of agriculture out to the east coast is less so. Don’t even mention the West Highland Way’s roadwalk into Fort William. Jeopardy. Any scriptwriter will tell you it’s essential – whether it involves rattlesnakes, midges, or map-reading across a high moorland. So head upriver to Loch Avon, sleep at the Shelter Stone, and wonder just which of the 1100m Cairngorm mountains you’re going to get out of there over. It’s a trick that works even better when you wander into Loch Coruisk for a necessary exit across the jaggy Cuillin Ridge. Suspense comes in the form of something you’re not quite sure you can do. The big river at the other edge of Rannoch Moor, or the tidal mudflats to Holy Island on St Cuthbert’s Way, or the 3000m glacier pass high above Zermatt on the Tour of Monte Rosa. Disappointingly, the glacier turns out to be an easy ski piste. But by that time you’ve already enjoyed the days of uncertainty leading up to it. Misery and the possibility of failure: doesn’t every story need these? So, give some thought to the fallbacks. Deep, soft snow and a nasty bit of wind drove me down off the Helvellyn range – for one of the most interesting days ever: a tough and dramatic crossing of the 520m Scandale Pass over to Ambleside. Dare to dream and get creative. And may all of your walk stories have a happy ending.

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Crossing Lowther Hill; the Southern Upland Way makes a great first-time backpack trip

10 THE ART OF LIGHTWEIGHT LONG-DISTANCE Ex-husband Paul (on phone): ‘I’m sorry that you have to walk 1000 miles just to…’ Cheryl: ‘Finish that sentence. Why do I have to walk 1000 miles?’ [pause] Wild, dir. Jean-Marc Vallée; screenplay by Nick Hornby from book by Cheryl Strayed

Bag and baggage This section appears to be about being mean and stingy. In fact, it’s about practicalities. If there was a £120 emergency layer that wrapped up smaller and weighed less than a binliner with three holes cut out, then I would be telling you to spend that £120. However, there isn’t: the choice is simply between the binliner in damp-ash grey or classic black. It’s an odd fact that as equipment gets lighter and lighter, the weight of the rucksack stays the same. The Roman legionary carried the same load on his back as the para in the Falklands in 1984 – that load of 35kg being the most a man can actually carry and still function in mud.

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FIVE RULES FOR COVERING COUNTRY 1 Travel light A sack below 12kg (before food) is the one luxury that matters. 2 Start early Why waste batteries at night, then spend good morning daylight lying in bed? Shift to Central European time: get up at dawn and fall asleep at what we call 8pm but Ukrainians call bedtime. 3 Start slowly When I set out over all the hills of southern Scotland, I was chasing a record set by Colin Donnelly. Donnelly was at that time one of the fastest hill men in Scotland and roughly twice as fast as me. Each day he ran – very fast – from 9am till 5pm. Each day I ran – rather slowly – from 5am till 9pm; and I ended up two days ahead. You don’t go far by going fast. Going fast just gets you tired. You go far by going for a long time. 4 Finish late Which also solves the problem of how to pass the evening in the confines of the bivvy bag. Don’t get into the bivvy till the evening’s already over. 5 Eat, drink and be considerably less miserable Travelling a long distance fairly quickly is as much a matter of eating as of the feet. The section below suggests 900g of food per day, which is rather a lot. Little and often is a good rule. Often and quite a lot is an even better one. A good Stilton is nothing without a glass of vintage port. And a dried-out old sandwich with trail mix needs a good swig of stream water to go with it. That tired feeling in your legs could be because your legs are tired, but it could also be because you need a drink of water.

It takes real creative effort to take things out of the rucksack and leave them behind. A pair of dry socks for the morning? You’ll enjoy them for about 10 minutes, which is how long it’ll take them to get wet just like the others. But you’ll enjoy not carrying the extra 250g of weight all the way across Scotland. Our legs and shoulders vary as much as our personalities. For me there are two rucksack thresholds. Below about 9kg the rucksack doesn’t really matter, whereas above about 16kg it matters every step of the way. Nothing except food and water 102

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Old path alongside Loch Hourn on Scotland’s Atlantic coast; it’s about two weeks’ walking to the North Sea on the other side

justifies taking the sack above the upper threshold. Rigorous deniers of the flesh – such as hillrunners – can take a three-day journey while staying below the 9kg. This means that the walking holiday will be stripped of any pleasure it might have contained, apart from one: that of walking, unburdened, from dawn to dark through the wilderness. The man who cuts my hair told me he was going to take up hillwalking, for the sake of his heart. Excellent idea: not just good for the heart but good for the soul as well (though somewhat damaging to the soles of the feet). I was in again six weeks later. He was very pleased: he’d made a start. He’d been down to Ambleside and spent £300. The jacket was a fairly cheap mid-price sort of one; I told him yes, even the fairly cheap mid-price ones are good enough for the Himalaya up to about 6000m. The boots – those made by Mr Brasher – were perfectly good. And then the gaiters. I always get embarrassed about gaiters. They’re very useful items – ornamental too, in a heavy-legged sort of way. It’s just that I’ve never had occasion to own a pair. There’s a definite pleasure in having equipment that looks good and is good; that really does keep the rain out, or the heat in, your feet on the rockface or the correct trail. And if it doesn’t, you can take it back to the shop and they’ll hide it behind the counter and give you a new one. There’s a contrary pleasure: in having stuff that looks as if you’ve been out on the mountains for a long, long time. Stuff that if it gets annoying you can stick in a litter bin. This is the bottom gear. If you lose it you don’t mind because the replacement is 10 The art of lightweight long-distance

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going to be better. It doesn’t matter if it gets dirty; it actually can’t get dirty because it already is. This section is about that contrary pleasure. It’s about the charms of dispossession, about having a lovely light rucksack during the day and an austere and funless evening. Many walking handbooks list the things to take. Here is a list of things to leave behind. Spare clothes: suppose all of your clothes were wet and all of them on. If that’s enough to let you survive the storm, then those are the clothes you actually can’t do without – three wet layers and a waterproof. No dry clothes for next day? Well, if it’s raining next day then those dry clothes would very soon be wet ones. And if it isn’t raining, then these wet clothes will very soon be dry. Waterproofs: a substantial breathable jacket in cheerful crimson or purple, with armpit zips, useful pockets, taped seams and all, weighs a bit over 1kg – and when it isn’t raining, all that weight is in your rucksack. Worse, when it has been raining, all that weight is in your rucksack wet. Wear a single-skin waterproof (which for some reason always comes in green) and a fleece underneath. When it isn’t raining the waterproof (500g) stuffs away in the lid rather than filling half the sack, and the fleece is still on and drying in the breeze. And then in bed you can keep the fleece while dispensing with the damp crackle of the waterproof. Sleeping bag: down or feather bags are light and very warm – until they get wet. Bivvybagging involves condensation at best, and getting into bed in wet clothes at worst – so for extended trips I take a lightweight synthetic sleeping bag. As with the clothes, there should be sleeping bag enough to keep you warm at night when it’s completely wet and you’re wearing all your clothes inside it and they’re completely wet as well. It makes more sense to carry 200g of clothes, which can be worn day or night, rather than 200g of extra bag. Thus we arrive at the one-season synthetic bag. Those designed for mountain marathons are tight-fitting, not terribly sturdy in construction, cost a bit over £100 and can weigh as little as 250g. Sleeping mat: in terms of warmth for weight, a sleeping mat is possibly worth the extra ounces. It comes into its own after a week of hard going when the bones lose their nice squashy layer of body fat. But there is also no mat at all. Walk far enough during the day and you won’t need comfort at night. If you take the time to find deep dry grass or heather, that will insulate as well as any closed-cell foam. For nights on the wooden shelves of bothies, however, some mat is essential between the bones and the timber. You can’t always count on finding a sheet of bubblewrap along the shoreline at Sourlies.

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Actually, bubblewrap is excellent – especially the sort with really big bubbles. But if you roll over, your bed may blow away on the breeze – so put the bubblewrap inside the bivvy. There’s more good padding in your rucksack. Empty its contents into a big plastic bag, then put the rucksack under the bivvy bag as a mattress at hip or shoulder level. Boots: a hundred grams on the feet has the same effect as 500g on the back. Therefore, the boots should be the lightest the walker feels comfortable and safe in. If the walker is a runner the boots will, accordingly, be shoes. Runners regard ankles as their most important organs: they train themselves to fall painfully onto the stones rather than put weight on a wrongly placed foot. On the principle of ‘buy the second cheapest’, I once experimented to see just how inexpensive a boot could be and still get me across Scotland. I worked my way down to a pair at £19.99 from the Sunday market. These did absorb rather a lot of water when wet, and the treads weren’t deep enough for downhill grass. So you probably do need to spend more than £19.99. I became fed up with the way fabric boots come apart after a single season and am now using the lightest kind of leather ones. But the right boots are the ones that don’t give the person inside them a blister. Cooker, saucepans and fuel: you could eat the same dehydrated savoury rice night after night. On the other hand, you could enjoy something really nasty one night – a meal of dried-milk muesli, pork pies and custard cream biscuits – and a delicious bar meal the next. Cooking in a bivvy bag cools you down more than the hot food ever warms you up. So just snuggle down inside the zip with those biscuits… Book for evening reading: leave the book and just walk further. Walking keeps you warm.

Advantage of an early on A’ Bhuidheanach Bheag, Atholl 10start: The dawn art ofmist lightweight long-distance 105

A few little luxuries Having gone through the list, hard-heartedly leaving behind anything that was there merely to add enjoyment to a long trip across Scotland, you’ve lightened the sack by at least 3kg. Which should allow a couple of little luxuries to go back in. Dry socks at night-time allow the feet to turn back from flabby fishes into things reasonably feetlike. This helps prevent blisters, or at least unwrinkles the skin enough for the sticking-plasters to stick to it. Plastic bags, worn between dry socks and wet boots, mean those socks remain dry and can be worn at evening as well as in bed. More plastic bags let belongings stay out in the cold rather than in the rucksack (as the rucksack is busy being a mattress) or in the bivvy (where Robert Louis Stevenson found Pastors of the Desert such an awkward bedfellow). Bothies often have firewood, so a little packet of dry newspaper and matches lights the fire; and the newspaper, if sufficiently interesting, provides bedtime reading as well. And wouldn’t it be nice to have some scanty garment to wear in the bar, rather than the wet thermals you just washed? Even no-nonsense types in the special forces have found that a light tarp or basha, stretched above the head end of the bivvy, allows everything to stay quite a bit drier while still not really resembling a tent. A basha (basically a rectangular cloth of 2.5 x 1.5m with holes at the corners) weighs 250g, with an extra 150g for pole and pegs. Old men should be explorers, says Tennyson. They should also be cunning and comfort-loving; and most important of all, rich. Now that I’m old and rich (well, 20 years of royalties from The Book of the Bivvy) I haven’t upgraded my bivvy bag to make it heavier, but I have upgraded to a cosy down sleeping bag after all. A really warm down bag weighs no more than 1.8kg. Dry socks, a little cooker, a tarp cover: in no time at all those 3kg are back in the sack.

RUBBISH GEAR Rubbish gear doesn’t just mean a downmarket logo and an outdoor jacket that only cost you an arm rather than the leg as well. Real rubbish gear means picking up something that someone else has thrown away. Plastic bottles: not only lighter than aluminium, but with a handy fullness/ emptiness visual inspection system (they’re transparent). As a bonus, when empty they can be compressed to save sack space. (An appeal here to litter louts: before flinging the plastic bottle out of your car window, would you put

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the top back on? In the White Peak when I needed an extra bottle, it took half a mile of road verge before I found one that still had its lid.) Bubblewrap: another miracle material of today. Mallory and Irvine might be only recently dead if they’d had this stuff on Everest. Commonly used as groundsheet and rucksack padding in mountain marathons, the way bubblewrap really scores over the ThermaRest is that you can spend those long boring bothy nights popping all the bubbles. Hats: for hats, we’re just a handy transportation system to move from head to head around the mountains. Half the hats in existence are lying around on hillsides waiting for their next wearer. It’d be irresponsible to add to the pile by buying one in a shop. Binliner: simply cut three holes for the ultimate lightweight waterproof. The garment should be worn large, for ventilation, as this reduces condensation. Another garment over the top helps to muffle the extremely annoying rustling. This form of clothing does remain seriously unstylish due to the limited colour range. Some gear company needs to market these in pink and lime green at £59.99 as the ‘supa-light emergency tabard’. For a touch of luxury they could even add some sleeves.

The fuel on the hill Hill life is life at the limits. So it’s only appropriate that hill food should be food taken as far as it’ll go – and sometimes a bit further than that. Take a humble sachet of cup-a-soup (Golden Chicken flavour is good), but serve it at the Shelter Stone. The Shelter Stone is a boulder weighing 3000 tons or so, 30km Bengore Head: why be self-sufficient when Antrim’s Causeway Coast has youth hostels and ice-cream stands?

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from anywhere, in the middle of the Cairngorms. Drink the Golden Chicken soaking wet and shivering under some unexpected June snowfall. When I tried this myself I was unable to believe that so much pleasure could be had for the cost of just nine new pence. Two days earlier we’d walked into Ballater along the old railway, planning our campaign against Ballater’s shops. Me to the chemist, because that might shut and we needed sticking plasters more than anything; my companion David to the supermarket with a list – for we meant to get to the youth hostel, get fed, get slightly washed and get, most importantly, into bed. Planned supper for next Sunday night at the Shelter Stone: rice, dehydrated curry, Mars bars. Two days later we reached the Shelter Stone in a shower of sleet. Soup supped, still shivering, stove a blue homely glow under the big boulder – David held out what looked like a lichened lump of Cairngorm granite. David had purchased no dehydrated curry. He had got us a haggis. It made sense. The supermarkets of Ballater are like any other supermarkets, only less so. But the butchers of Ballater are the best in the world.

HAGGIS SHELTER STONE A food section needs a recipe in it. Here is the recipe for Haggis Shelter Stone: § Per person: 450g haggis (2.9 cal/g) § 200g dried mashed potato § Butter § Boil the haggis gently (over a nearly empty gas cylinder, perhaps) for 30 minutes. Lift the haggis out and stir the dried mash into the cooking water. Add butter for extra calories.

None of the high-calorie grease that floated out of the haggis was lost. And if you eat the grease then you don’t have to wash it up. When washing-up is with a heather twig in a freezing stream, in the snow, in the dark, anything that makes it easier is appreciated. This was eating at the extremes – but which extreme? My wife, who wouldn’t ever eat anything at all under a 3000-ton boulder, considers this a bad food story. She’s wrong. Here is a bad food story: Because of the bar meals, I never carry cookers in Lakeland. The campsite shop at Langdale has long hours and friendly service – but fairly limited stock. Coffee, perhaps; one could make it up with hot water from the tap? Ingenious – except there is no hot tap at Angle Tarn. What we ended up with, at six the next morning, was little 108

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packets of butter and marmalade, fall-apart white rolls, and plastic cheese, manipulated with a super-lightweight plastic knife, and eaten lying down in two inches of cool water. Drink? Just stoop and suck. Now that’s a bad meal story. At 2am in an Alpine hut in the mid 20th century you groaned, and looked at the weather, and unfortunately it wasn’t bad enough to justify going back to bed. You put your feet into wooden ‘hut slippers’, and ate French bread that squeaked when you bit it. And if you did ever manage to swallow the bread, it was time to face the terrors of the outside toilet… The Austrians have made an institution of the hut breakfast; they serve it in hotels. It consists of small cups of coffee, stale bread, smoked cheese and salami. There’s a choice of bread: you can have stale white bread, or, for the echt Bergsteiger or real mountain man, stale rye bread. This menu is designed to get you out and onto the mountain really quickly. Of course, there’s also the science side of it – so let’s get that out of the way with a small table of contents. Food, for hill people, is fuel, and what counts is calories (or joules, if you’re really metric – 4.2 kilojoules is a calorie). Food group

Calories per gram

Carbohydrate

4 cal/g

Sugar

4 cal/g

Fat

9 cal/g

Alcohol

7 cal/g

If you’re pulling a month’s food behind you on a sledge then you want a high-fat diet. The rest of us can’t quite stomach stirring an ounce of butter into the evening cocoa as Scott did in the Antarctic. Our diet will consist of carbohydrate (fairly slowrelease fuel), sugar (quick-release fuel) and as much fat as we can bear. When it comes to food, it actually doesn’t matter how much or how little cash you spend. The intensively researched, marketed and packed sports energy bar really does have almost as many calories as the same weight of custard cream biscuits. Leaving aside obviously wet food such as oranges, most of the things you put in your rucksack come in at between 4 and 5 calories per gram. This applies to dehydrated suppers and cheese sandwiches, powdered soup, oatmeal, apple tartlets, pork pies, and muesli bars. A long day of hard walking requires 4000 calories (with some variation depending on age, sex, and body size). If you start off unfit and with unsightly personal bulges you won’t need so much as that to start with – although on the whole the bulges are just going to slip down into the backs of the legs. So the convenient calculation is: something close to a kilogram of food a day – or, in old-fashioned, 2lb.

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Don’t wait till you feel hungry. Tell yourself that if you don’t eat this food you’ll have to carry it even further. Have muesli and Mars bars in the bumbag to nibble as you go along. Slow down, and put more effort into the eating. Slimmers pinch flesh at the side of the waist to see how overweight they are. This also works in reverse. About 2cm of pinchable body is a healthy minimum. When, after five days, you find nothing between skin and ribs, you’re about to flake out. You may have walked far and fast but you’ve failed at the eating, and the rest of the journey is going to be less fun-filled. A stove is a luxury. You’d get more heat into you by eating the fuel blocks. As water is abundant on British hills it need not be carried in the form of lunch. Sugar should not be the staple food: large chunks of chocolate lead to sudden energy surges followed by famished reaction. Healthy food with vitamins is heavy and doesn’t travel well: I do a lot of healthy eating on shop doorsteps. Suitable food for carrying will be starchy carbohydrate in a fairly dry form at four calories per gram, with some sugar and fat to improve the ratios. Which means almost anything, really.

Fast food The famous fellrunner Joss Naylor did Lakeland Hills in clumps of a dozen powered by his wife’s rock buns. Martin Moran, who held the record for the Munros in winter and also for the Alpine 4000m peaks non-stop, favoured honey sandwiches on wholemeal bread. My running companion Glyn Jones has cleverly calculated that custard cream biscuits have the same calories per gram as Mars bars at a quarter of the cost. Anne Stentiford was not just the fastest woman over the 47 peaks of the Paddy Buckley Round in Snowdonia – she was the fastest person. She did 100km and 8000m of ascent in 19 hours 19 minutes, on satsumas and Mr Kipling Bramley apple tartlets. Satsumas are just wasteful water, but then she wasn’t carrying her own luggage. Mike Thompson, food mastermind on Everest 1975, says simply: ‘The most important thing about food is that there should be some.’ However, almost as important is that you should be able to eat it. Malcolm McLachlan attempted a nasty but instructive run: the self-supported Southern Upland Way, carrying food for the entire route over the length of the entire route. His schedule and food supplies were for three and a half days for the 340 fairly hilly kilometres. He made a slight mistake with his bivvy bag: its bright orange colour attracted the young people of Melrose, who wondered if he was rubbish that ought to be thrown into the river. His more serious mistake was his food: ready-wrapped meals of oatmeal muesli (400 cal/100g, fine so far) with a little dried fruit, rendered tempting and flavoursome with – nothing at all. After two and a half days he couldn’t face it, far less stomach it, and ended up throwing away food that he had carried 240km and that he needed. The only successful unsupported Southern Upland Way has been a winter one, by Glyn Jones. Glyn takes the pleasures of abstinence further than most, and 110

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The two-day Saunders Lakeland Mountain Marathon in the Howgill Fells; hillrunners minimise overnight gear for the sake of speed

a full account of this particular journey makes distressing reading. He did not carry a sleeping bag, reckoning that the same weight in extra clothes would be just as warm at night and more useful during the daytime. He did not carry a bivvy, by the same reckoning: an opened-out fertiliser bag could be both bivvy and daytime cape. Afterwards, however, he conceded that a proper bag ‘would have made the nights bearable’. He started with 6.5kg of high-calorie food, which he supplemented with rose hips gathered from the November hedges; and finished six days and five hours later with just 50g of oatmeal and cheese. ‘Being a back-to-basics man I wanted to prove that, even at the end of this most technological 20th century, a journey in winter could be successfully made without high-tech gear. I hoped it would also illustrate another of my favourite tenets: you can still obtain some of the atmosphere of 19th-century exploration in tame old Britain if the criteria are stern enough.’

High cuisine At 7000m on Annapurna, Bonington and Whillans found their snowhole larder stocked with whisky, sausages and – that’s it. Whisky and sausages. After two days they came up with the obvious recipe: sausages flambéed in whisky. Here’s an even sadder story. On an earlier trip Glyn ran out of custard creams under Ben Alder, but that didn’t matter. At Dalwhinnie is a lovely shop run by Mrs McLean – she once sold me a whole smoked chicken. Glyn ran out along Loch Ericht for 20km to find – no shop. Mrs McLean had died two months before. Dalwhinnie is the highest village in the Highlands, and also the most dismal. Rain thrown off the A9 by large lorries scoots across the moor for hundreds of yards before spattering into a peatpool. In all Dalwhinnie, Glyn managed to find (or scrounge) a kilogram of white sugar and half a loaf of sliced white bread. On these he

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crossed Cairn Toul, Braeriach, Ben Macdui and Cairn Gorm. Two days later he turned the sugar bag inside out to lick the corners and trotted down to Donside. These were meals of inconvenience; given the choice, what Bonington goes for is the bar supper at the Mill Inn, Mungrisdale. However, diets just as dodgy have been taken from conviction and personal taste. Hugh Symonds ran the Munros in 66 summer days on Christmas puddings mostly. But on Kanchenjunga, in 1930, a climber called Irwin Schneider… You aren’t going to believe this, so I’ll look it up. It’s in Frank Smythe’s The Mountain Scene (Adam & Charles Black, 1938) on page 110; the expedition was led by Professor Dyhrenfurth, the man who favoured the 6kg pair of boots. Mr Schneider used to eat Christmas pudding dampened down with Worcester sauce and mayonnaise. He would eat this for breakfast. Frank Smythe took a picture of him doing it. I prefer not to linger over a material called ‘pork block’ included in army Compo rations in the 1960s. An early experiment in dehydrated food, this could be nibbled straight from the packet, when it tasted like cotton wool. Alternatively, it could be reconstituted in hot water for five minutes, and then it tasted like hot, wet cotton wool. Likewise let us pass over pemmican (a form of leather supposedly edible) and settle for a moment on tsampa. I suspect that tsampa is actually a result of Sherpa ingenuity. Instead of saying: ‘Sorry, that’s what happens when you accidentally drop a rucksack into the Dudh Kosi torrent,’ a wily porter came up with: ‘But this is what we eat in Nepal. Speciality of the region. You don’t mean to say you actually meant me to keep the tea, the butter and the oatmeal in separate packages?’ And then came one of the great throwaway lines: ‘Of course, it ought to be rancid yak butter really…’ Optician Karl Blodig of Vienna studied the calorific figures given above and came to a starkly simple conclusion. A kilogram of butter has 50 per cent more calories than a kilo of sandwiches. Dr Blodig was the first person to ascend every one of the Alpine 4000m peaks, and he washed down his all-butter diet with neat alcohol (at 7 cal/g). Let’s slip in another simple recipe. Glacier sorbet. Ingredient: a little plastic tub of Swiss jam. Hero brand, black cherry, is a good one. Method: empty the jam onto a snowfield, carefully avoiding crevasses. Using the spike of an ice axe, stir the snowfield. Simple but effective. Mountain meals are food with altitude. The compacted cheese-Marmite-honey sandwich. Sausages fried with tinned pineapple in a lay-by on the A9. The night my father returned to the Lagangarbh hut from the Kingshouse and found the stove red-hot, with his stew a layer of black grease on the walls of the hut and his sleeping bag. At the same time there’s the two inches of whisky left by some booted philanthropist at the Feshie bothy. There’s church hall fruit cake served at midnight by the Long Distance Walkers Association. Or there’s an orange against a deep blue sky, as it passes in a high parabola across a frozen Perthshire bog from my friend Colin’s dry boulder to my dry boulder 10 metres away. 112

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Breakfast, Jonsong Glacier, Kangchenjunga 1930 (photo: Frank Smythe)

And just sometimes, on a sunset summit, there’s the mashed potato of the gods. Ben More on Mull, it was, and we’d climbed with our bivvy bags into grey drizzle expecting a night of interesting misery. Fifty feet below the Cioch we emerged into evening sunlight, and scrambled the rock-ridge looking down on swirling cloud and the Atlantic. The mash was the sophisticated sort, with little green bits, and we sat and ate it with plastic spoons as the lighthouses came on from Oban to Benbecula. Iona swam away in a silver haze, the sea went purple and so did the sky, and the moon came up from beyond the other side of Scotland. We finished up our potatoes, left the washing up for a lower altitude and unrolled our bags within the stone ring of the summit cairn. It’s not what you eat – it’s where you eat it. 10 The art of lightweight long-distance

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BIVVY NIGHT 10: A peat-hole on Bowland For a full November day and several hours of wet November night I walked across limestone grasslands under limestone crags, and then dried out at Malham youth hostel. After limestone, Lancashire. The rain continued and so did I, across the stony moorland of the Forest of Bowland. Bowland is bare peat, stonefields, small heather and cushions of crowberry. Rocks poke up here and there, and so do fence posts, and a couple of deserted roads lie across the moor like dead snakes. A patch of watery sunshine lingered over Yorkshire, picking out the Yorkshire Three Peaks. After eight hours of singularly dismal day, the last light showed a strange cairn, rising out of a pool of bogwater. There was a peat hole to clamber down into in the dark, then up out of again, and a tussock to twist the ankle. For the night-time, first priority was to get down out of the wind; but almost as important was to find somewhere that, if I sat down on it, wasn’t going to splash. But where I now stood, below the final peatbank of White Hill, didn’t even squelch. It was night-time in that it was altogether dark; on the other hand it was only 5.30pm. Could I go to bed at 5.30pm? I certainly could. As it was November, I’d brought a several-season sort of sleeping bag. That bag was filled with feathers. Feathers are warm (I’ve slept in them through hard frosts), but they stop being warm when they get wet. The clothes I was wearing were wet – all of them. With a bit of writhing about I could’ve got out of the wet clothes inside the bivvy, except that the feathery sleeping bag was inside the bivvy and the feathery bag had to stay dry. I undressed in the rain. Bogwater is refreshing between bare toes. In the 18th century, people would wrap a woollen plaid around their head. To render the plaid windproof and waterproof they had to swell the fibres: they would simply dip the thing in a bog pool for a couple of minutes then wring it out. From time to time I woke to re-thread myself between the tussocks and shiver a little. There was a coldness next to the ground – should I have brought a foam mat? The trig point stood against the stars, then against cloud painted orange underneath by the cities on either side. Later there came mist, and more rain. In the morning I discovered (by putting an elbow in it) that the cold below was caused by bogwater seeping between the tussocks. The bivvy bag, nibbled by mice in my attic and repaired with spinnaker tape, had still managed to hold the water away from the feathers. Otherwise I might have passed a rather uncomfortable night. In the morning, Bowland got slightly stonier; the fence turned left and staggered like a one-legged drunk onto the plateau of Ward’s Stone. Ward

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Stone’s a mild scramble, and you can sit on the top and let the black mud drain out of your waterproof trousers. Another half-hour and I was looking down to the coastal plain with its green unfrosted fields, the sea, and Heysham Power Station squatting black against the gleam.

The importance of water My first ever running race was a linear thing, from the castle 10km down the river back to my home town. (In those days of youth and ignorance I thought road racing was fun. I was wrong. Racing on hills and mountains is fun.) On the bus to the castle, a fellow runner told me that halfway through a half-marathon he’d been rather tired and decided to drop out at the next drinks station. At the drinks station he had a drink (well, obviously) – and found he wasn’t tired after all. It happened as quick as Clark Kent taking off his shirt in a phone box. After walking for 10 hours along the Etive range under a heavy rucksack, in the rain, you come to the 200m climb onto the western end of Stob Ghabhar. And you have an unpleasant tired feeling, of legs that don’t really want to do 200m of steep grass onto the western end of Stob Ghabhar. Well, you tell yourself, suffering is part of the fun. Meanwhile the answer to your problem is dripping off the brim of your hat, and trickling down the back of your collar… Your legs are powered by internal combustion, like your car. However, the fuel isn’t hydrocarbon but carbohydrate: a sugar chemical called ATP. For those who hate three-letter acronyms, that’s adenosine triphosphate. Brought to you not by petrol tankers or high-voltage pylon wires, but by your bloodstream. When your bloodstream gets sticky and thick, this crucial leg-fuel simply doesn’t arrive. The other organ that helps you up the hill is your brain. When the fuel stops arriving properly, the brain goes into simplified low-power mode. Zip getting sticky? Just give it a big yank. Not sure which way? Leave the map-reading till later. Your friend wants to stop for some water? Shout rude words at your friend. When you hear yourself swearing at your outdoor equipment – it’s time to think drink. Water you know you oughter

Some walkers are concerned about the risk of bacterial infection when drinking wild water from hill streams. They will either carry enough water for a full day’s walking and then a bit extra, or else employ one of the various sorts of water filters. When walking in the UK, I don’t myself carry a water filter.

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Dollywaggon Pike starts an overnight walk over Helvellyn

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Red Cuillin, Skye, heading to a bivvy on Glamaig

11 MOUNTAINS UNDER THE MOON Darkness is a link between life and death, between the seen and the unseen. It is a quality that stimulates thought and inquiry, and that indirectly renders visible the mysteries of space and the glory of the entities that exist therein… The moon does not rise and set in a riot of colourings, yet its beauty strikes deep into the hearts of men. Frank Smythe, The Spirit of the Hills (1935)

It’s very natural, when you’re young and inexperienced, to be afraid of the dark. As a cold spring afternoon turns slowly colder and surrounding mountains take on the golden glow of departing day, you hold up fingers between the sun and the horizon and realise that three fingers times five minutes means only another quarter of an hour. At this point you start to walk rather fast. Fast walking is enjoyable in itself, when you’re only doing it for another half-hour and speed doesn’t mean sweaty shirts but only a toasty glow in the ever chillier air. With the grey spectre of night-time creeping up out of the valleys, friends stop wanting to hang around working out which is Yr Aran – no I meant the other Yr Aran. For once they’re quite content to join you in the 118

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sort of vigorous walking they’d normally sneer at. You bundle down the path towards the car park, slightly out of control, inflicting a bit of a bashing on toes that, after all, won’t be needed again till next weekend. You arrive at the Pen-y-Gwryd panting and smiling. Look out through the steamy windows and the world outside’s gone quite dark. You may be congratulating yourself on having used up all the day there was. Then one day you’re with an older, supposedly wiser, walker – and the wiser walker says it’s such a lovely evening, why don’t we wander off over Yr Aran itself on the way down? Well, because it’ll mean rather a lot of vigorous path-bashing to beat out the ending of the day; but if the old fellow’s game, then why not… But the old fellow ambles on the same as always, and once on Yr Aran wants to sit around on that handy fallen wall identifying the lighthouses of Anglesey. So you point out that if the lighthouses are alight it must be night-time, but he tells you not to worry as there’s going to be a moon, and what’s this – you don’t have a torch? What an odd thing: if you can afford that fancy jacket and the GPS and all, you ought to have been able to fix yourself up with a torch… There are certain thresholds in hillwalking: you step across them into a new world. There’s the day when you say stuff the guidebook, even stuff dear old Alfred Wainwright himself, and set off on a route you’ve made up yourself off the map. There’s the afternoon when the cloud drops but you find your way down to Edale anyway. There’s when you decide to do Sharp Edge the rocky way above the frightful drop. And there’s the day when you deliberately walk on into the night. Dark is certainly different. Dodgy? Not if you’ve got a bivvy bag. But is it fun? Because it wasn’t fun at all when I left it too late coming down off Beinn Ime, and the slope just got steeper as the light went, and I could see all the cars with their headlights and heaters on driving over Rest and Be Thankful towards teatime. The ground was frozen, and the downhill in the dark was making my toes hurt, and I couldn’t work out which way was the ridge. And then there was a black place at the other end of my torchlight and I was at the top of some cliffs. To left here, or to right? Maps are hard to read in the dark, and it was going to go on being dark for another 12 hours, so I headed right, towards the sound of the rushing stream. And those crags were still down there somewhere, so I dug the ice-axe into the wet grass in a nervous, unhappy way. In the darkness this side of the rushing stream was brushwood from a former forest. Once I’d fallen over twice in a single step I needed out of the brushwood. Stoneto-stone in the dark is pretty silly, so it was thigh-deep through the stream very slowly with the ice-axe. And down at the bottom there seemed to be a river between me and my car. This sort of fun can only be enjoyed afterwards, and is hard work even then. But it’s quite different when you do the darkness deliberately and towards a bivvy. For one thing, you aren’t doing it downhill… 11 Mountains under the moon

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You could be coming up out of Eskdale with a Woolpack bar meal inside you. There are a few larch trees along the near horizon, the stars are above and the squelching boot-sounds are below. And then it flattens and goes snowy, and there’s the view down on Wast Water. On no other lake is there quite such a diving-board viewpoint as Whin Rigg. From the summit to the water’s edge is 600 yards sideways, and over 1500ft of drop. (Writing it as 550m sideways and 450m down doesn’t make it sound nearly so steep as it is.) Up on Whin Rigg, on a February teatime, you discover why writers 200 years ago found Wast Water the scariest lake. Snow lies along the ridge – snow that’s crisping up as the day’s warmth streams into the night. The Wasdale mountains stand sharp against the stars. Down through the gaps of Broad Crag are concentrated glimpses of Wast Water. On the land, no lights show, and the lake is black. There’s the youth hostel, shut till springtime, its lawn pale in the moonlight. Two steps sideways, though, and you’re looking down onto the black tangle of Low Wood. To zoom in on that view you could just take a short walk to the northwest: exactly 10 seconds later you’d see Wast Water in intimate close-up. Snow under the full moon hardly counts as night-time at all: it’s a sunny afternoon, except that the snow’s crisper and the scenery’s in black and white instead of colour. Rather different is when there’s a cloud across the moon, and stones rather than snow underfoot. Rather different, but still, rather enjoyable. For a long time the stones are pale blobs that you can weave your feet around and not bash your boot-toes at all – and you think, this darkness isn’t as black as it’s painted. Then you notice that although you can see the stones you can’t see the path. So you switch on the torch, and here’s a black soggy spot that’s been trodden on, and scratched rock beyond, so that’s okay. And let’s not worry about what happens if the path disappears again and doesn’t come back; let’s not worry about whether we packed the spare batteries… Earlier you were trying to get across Hart Crag rather fast during the last of the daylight. And it may still be only 6pm, but when it gets dark the human brain starts to think sleepy-time. Which may be why the brain strangely doesn’t want to worry about those worrying things. It’s quite content to occupy the centre of a small pool of torchlight, watching the grass stems go by, looking out for trampled bits of peat and scratches on the rocks. Lakeland, at night, in winter, is not a busy place. Every 10 minutes a car wanders along the valley floor like a questing glow-worm. The lights of the inn reflect in Brothers Water, and far away is an orange glow that has to be Penrith. And then, before you really wanted them to, leaves are rustling overhead, the path is broad and easy, and a black hump ahead is the last car in the car park. Climb in, switch on the heater, switch on the stereo. Switch on, with real sadness, the headlamps. That’s Lakeland away for another weekend.

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LARKS IN THE DARK When the sun goes down, do you have to as well? § Do it alone for the full effect of the primal terrors, but take a friend the first time. § On a clear night you’ll see more with the torch off. Otherwise, use the dimmest possible setting so as to still see the surroundings. § But pack some spare batteries anyway. § To save shining a torch on the compass, steer by the moon or a suitable star. Check against the compass every 30 minutes. The pole star is fixed; the moon or other stars move up to 15 degrees every hour. § In mist, a headtorch worn on the head just shines back glare. Carry it at knee-level.Uphill is generally okay unless it’s boulders or scree. But choose easy routes for the descent (grass or clear path). With the bivvy bag, you can sleep on top and leave the downhill till tomorrow. § Quite big paths can vanish in the dark because of the lack of colour clues. § There’s no point in hurrying; you just fall over. But then, there’s no need to hurry. In the daytime you were hurrying because you wanted to get off the hill before dark.

Eildons post-sunset from Hownam Law, Scottish Borders

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§ With ground dimly lit, walking poles are very helpful. § Nightwalking is both slow and cold. Wear extra clothes. § Understand the moon. The full moon rises at sunset and is in the sky all night. In the week before the full moon, it’s usefully bright and is in the sky during the first part of the night. In the week after the full moon, it doesn’t rise till partway through the night. During the week either side of new moon it’s either unhelpfully dim or not there at all. Day of lunar cycle

Moon

Time

Luminosity

Day 0

Full moon

In sky all night

Bright

Day 7

Third quarter

Sets at midnight

Fairly bright

Day 14

New moon

Rises at sunrise, sets at sunset

Very dim

Day 21

First quarter

Rises at midnight

Fairly bright

Day 28

Full moon again

The moon rises (and sets) about an hour later than it did last night.

Red Pike and Buttermere, summer night

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ROUTE 3

Coleridge’s Helvellyn overnight crossing Start Finish Distance Ascent Approx time Terrain Transport

Suggested bivvy

Threlkeld (NY 322 254) Dove Cottage, Grasmere (NY 342 070) – museum opens 9.30am (https://wordsworth.org.uk) 23.5km (14½ miles) 1400m 10½hr (full moon, clear sky) to 13hr (low cloud/moonless night) Grassy ascent of Clough Head; hill paths Frequent buses Keswick – Threlkeld and Grasmere – Keswick. Or start at Coleridge’s house: Greta Hall, Keswick (NY 265 237) and use the railway path to Threlkeld (reopened 2020). Grisedale Tarn, or Seat Sandal

Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark. Not the best ever lines of poetry, from one of England’s finest poets, and certainly England’s finest fellwalking poet. In July 1800, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, encouraged by his friend Wordsworth, moved into Greta Hall in Keswick. Over the next month he completed Part 2 of ‘Christabel’. The poem is weird, sexy, and – in both senses of the word – rambling. It was going to be the longest entry of the work the two friends were putting before the public. Their Lyrical Ballads would revolutionise English verse with a fresh and direct poetic language, and a new focus on the poet’s own feelings and inspiration. Romanticism, as invented by Coleridge and Wordsworth in the 1790s, involved experimental communal lifestyles, drug-taking, and verse. But also fellwalking – first on the Quantocks, and from 1800 in Lakeland. Over 150 years before Wainwright, Coleridge was the first, and is still to my mind the finest, fell-writer. By the end of August the first draft of ‘Christabel’ was done. Coleridge set out for Grasmere with the poem in his pocket. He set out rather late – his home life was messy and his wife Sara was eight months pregnant. At the foot of the Coach Road onto Clough Head it was already getting dark. Divert onto the road over Dunmail Raise? It was just three days short of the full moon; why on earth would he take a diversion?

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123

250

150

High Seat

Watendlath

Brown Dodd

Castlerigg Fell

Riv

Wescoe

er G reta

0

15

A

Great How

200

Calfhow Pike 600

Co

ks P a ss

Stybarrow Dodd

0

75

Old

0 25 300

LegburthwaiteStic

St John's Common

Guardhouse

0

600

Raise

550

Swineside Knott

0

25

Sheffield Pike

600

200

350

Little Mell F

Thackthwait

0

Glenridding

20

Ullswater

Place Fell 657

Green Hill

Sleet Fell

Dockray Gowbarrow Fell

Glenridding Dodd

92 A5

300 Ulcat Row

Matterdale End

Great Mell Fell 537

300

Round How

Dowthwaitehead

288

A66

Watermillock Common

High Brow

Hart Side

Matterdale Great Common

60

Old Coach Road

0

35

Flaska

Hutton Moor End Wallthwaite

Threlkeld Common

Ro ad

Dodd

ach

River Glenderamackin

66

St John's in the Vale

High Rigg (Naddle Fell) 357

Low Rigg

Wythburn Fells Dodd Crag

Brockle Beck

Castlerigg

KESWICK

27 A5 Chestnut Hill

Brigham

400

300

Latrigg

200

Ormathwaite

350

Threlkeld

300

650

Blease Fell

0

B5322 St Joh ns Beck

Doddick

700

500

Saddleback/ Blencathra

500

0

Lonscale Fell

65

50

500

0

0

55 0

65

700

300

0

250 40

300

0

250

50

0

0

9 B528

20

40

91 A5 450

0

The Book of the Bivvy 400

70

0

35

124 550

30

450

1 09

45

A5

45 0

0

600

A591

400

200

45

C

Green Combe

2

400

300

650

11 Mountains under the moon A591

0 Grasmere

15

100

Heron Pike

Rydal Fell

Rydal

400

350

ay W

125 0

Grasmere

400

750

Deepdale Hause Fairfield 873

Low Pike

350

Deepdale

20 0

25

0

High Pike

Black Brow

High Hartsop Dodd

Hart Crag

Gill Crag

Gavel Pike

Patterdale Common Birks Deepdale Common

Patterdale

35

0

Middle Dodd

0

0

40

0

200

25

763 The Tongue

0

Brock Crags

Water Angletarn Pikes

Hartsop

300

30

Patterdale Common

Bridgend

0

15

Rooking

Red Screes 776

20

Raven Crag 600

20

0

30

Fairy Glen

Silver Howe

Grasmere Common

Helm Crag

Far Easedale

200

Grasmere Common

0

The Cape

St Sunday Crag 841

300

B5343

km

0

30

Seat Sandal 736

55

0

35

Grisedale

0

35 0 20 0

500

0

Steel Fell

0 75 0 800 70

Nethermost Pike

Helvellyn 950

800

400

Glenridding Common

Dollywaggon Pike

550

0

1

35

Wythburn

Gibson Knott

0

45

Tarn Crag

Calf Crag

600

400

0 35

Brown Rigg

Lower Man

10

0

N

0

Ullscarf

50

Wythburn Fells

750

500

600

High Raise (High White Stones) 762

300

Stonethwaite

Knotts

Wythburn Fells

600

Armboth Fell

550

0

Launchy Gill

0

80

300

5

00

200 30

250 0

30

Watendlath

350

550

500

Walk ast Co 60

0

650 450

30

60 0

t to A 59 1 550

450 0

50

400

250 550

500

400

s oa 350

650

150

Woundale

450

300 0

550

0

450 850

600

35

00 650 70

300

500

A592

0

0

30

40

650

40 0

10 0

Twice already I’ve followed Coleridge in an August nightwalk over Helvellyn to Grasmere. But this time, in late April due to my magazine’s schedule, I was following not so much the poet as the poem in his pocket.

The thin grey cloud is spread on high, It covers but not hides the sky. The moon is behind, and at the full; And yet she looks both small and dull. The night is chill, the cloud is grey: ‘Tis a month before the month of May, And the Spring comes slowly up this way. Chilly? Yes indeed, as a late April airmass from the Arctic had coated the summit ridge with streaks of half-melted snow. But dark? Of course not. My torch was for mapreading – and for reading Coleridge’s fell notebook at the summit cairn of Helvellyn. Much better switched off for the actual walking, with the pale line of the path running down the grass of Clough Head towards the hunched black mass of Great Dodd. Hunched and black, but white across the top; the old snow had refrozen to give fine hard walking, apart from on the path itself, punched by footprints into holes. A faint coloured corona ringed the half-clouded moon – later in the night it would become a wide white ring, the 22-degree halo caused by ice crystals in the atmosphere.

On Clough Head, 9.30pm

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The Sticks Pass gets its name from the wayposts that once marked it. But Coleridge heard it as ‘Styx’ – the river at the edge of the Underworld. What a scene of horrible desolateness the ascent is, so scarified with peat holes, on its left running down with white cliffs – Whiteside I suppose – and its top so rugged with white cliffs. This place is evidently Styx Top …

Despite the gathering dark, he notices the ‘ragged stones on top, scorious as the dross of a smelting house’. They are in fact aa lava, the basalt rock named after what barefoot Hawaiians say when they tread on it. Once up Raise, he eyes up the Helvellyn ridgeline ahead. The evening now lating, I had resolved to pass by it; but Nature twitched me at my heart strings. I ascended it, thanks to her! Thanks to her, what a scene! Nothing behind me, as if it would be an affront to that which fronts me! Two complete reaches of Ullswater, then a noble tongue of a hill (Glenruddin Screes, where the King of Patterdale keeps his goats) … Away up in the mountains on the right two tarns and close on my right those precipices stained with green amid their nakedness, and ridges, tents, embracing semicircles. I front to them – there are two and a narrow ridge between them. I will go up it.

11 Mountains under the moon

127

Fellrunners with unnecessary torches descend from Helvellyn towards Nethermost Pike

On White Side in the moonlight, the two ‘embracing semicircles’ were clear enough: on the left Swirral Edge leading to Catstye Cam, and on the right Browncove Crag. Between them, the ridge up to Lower Man was almost alpine, with its snowy crest and steep, dark holes on either side. The snow was icy hard, but pocked with footprints formed when it was still soggy. Coleridge’s next thrilling description is sometimes taken as a crossing of Striding Edge; but Striding makes no sense as a way to Grasmere. What does make sense is the Lower Man ridgeline, the brink of Helvellyn’s eastern combes, and a final surprise view of Striding Edge seen from above. By daylight, Helvellyn’s flattish summit is slightly dull. A lot better beneath the moon… Travelling along the ridge I came to the other side of those precipices and down below me on the left – no – no! No words can convey any idea of this prodigious wildness. That precipice fine on this side was but its ridge, sharp as a jagged knife, level

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so long, and then ascending so boldly. What a frightful bulgy precipice I stand on and to my right how the crag which corresponds to the other, how it plunged down like a waterfall, reaches a level steepness, and again plunges!

At 2.30am, in drifting mist on Helvellyn’s snowed-up plateau, my mind was wandering along with my feet. Pausing for photos on Nethermost, I saw lights coming down the ridgeline behind me. Three runners, on an overnight recce of what would, at the full moon after next, be the night section of their Bob Graham Round attempt. Many a clockwise Bob Graham has been spoiled, not by going too slow but on the contrary by overdoing it along the temptingly fast grass of the Dodds ridgeline, with exhaustion to follow among the stones of Scafell. Doing this bit in the dark ensures a sensibly slow Stage Two. I suggested they’d see more – of the surroundings but also of the path itself – with torches switched off for moonlight-adapted eyes. But weren’t having any of 11 Mountains under the moon

129

that. Crossing iced-up Helvellyn overnight was one thing, but with torches switched off – that really would be a bit silly. And so the runners twinkled onwards like rather big stars along the ridgeline ahead. Indeed, high Helvellyn has a busy nightlife. In the Nethermost/Dollywaggon gap, a small tarp tent held a camper cosily snuggled up in some very solid insulation. It also held a defensive dog, discouraging any midnight chat. Above the dark water of Grisedale Tarn, the torches of the fellrunners were failing to find the steep little path up to the col of Cofa Pike. (Actually, you can’t see that path in the dark even with your torch switched off.) From somewhere about here, Coleridge made a nasty descent directly to Dunmail Raise. The moon is above Fairfield almost at the full. Now descended over a perilous peat moss then down a hill of stones all dark, and darkling. I climbed stone after stone down a half-dry torrent and came out at the Raise Gap. And O! my God! how did that opposite precipice look in the moonshine -– its name Stile Crags [Steel Fell].

On one of my previous walks, I’d been leading an organised group. That time, I’d included a bivvy beside the tarn. There’d been a complaint that in the survival bag it had been impossible to sleep a wink. At the same time, it was so strange that during the period of not being asleep the sky had got such a whole lot lighter… But chilly April wasn’t sleeping-out weather. And as the moon switched itself out by dropping behind Seat Sandal, I realised that light was now coming from behind. The first pink-and-grey of the new day was seeping in along the trough of Grisedale. The sky had cleared: from Seat Sandal top I should enjoy the sunrise. But from the top of Seat Sandal, the sunrise is blocked by Fairfield. Still, the first golden glow was caressing the Coniston fells as I ambled down Seat Sandal’s green ridgeline into Grasmere. Coleridge reached Dove Cottage at midnight. Dorothy Wordsworth was still up, enjoying the ‘still, clear moonshine in the garden’. They woke William, and chatted until 3.30am. Coleridge read a bit of his poem. The idea was that Wordsworth would use the new poetic language, close as it was to normal speech, to describe normal everyday affairs. Coleridge would use it, contrariwise, in ways that are rich and strange. So, for Volume 1 of Lyrical Ballads, he supplied ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. And for Volume 2, ‘I have again requested the assistance of a friend who has now furnished me with the long and beautiful poem of “Christabel”, without which I should not yet have ventured to present a second volume to the public.’ (Wordsworth’s draft Introduction, 20 September 1800). A couple of weeks later, this had become: ‘…furnished me with the poem of “Christabel”‘. And on 6 October, the poem had been dropped. Okay, the incomplete ‘Christabel’ does ramble away in several directions at once. But by 1800, the wild and irresponsible Coleridge had become the junior poetic 130

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partner. For Wordsworth had determined that the only proper subject for a poem was the terrifically interesting feelings and experiences of William Wordsworth. At the end of his walk, Coleridge had passed some ruined walls, the former Michael’s Fold; now ‘Christabel’ was out, replaced by the rather dull rhyme about that Michael – a shepherd whose son runs away to the city. After ‘Christabel’, Coleridge wrote very little verse, and nothing at the level of his best. He became a conversationalist, an opium enjoyer, and a lecturer on Shakespeare. But English Romanticism is also about the fells. And what Coleridge did write – on the summit of Scafell, and in a rock shelter below Moss Force, and all along the West Highland Way – were his mountain notebooks. Unpublished until 1895, the 72 summit-scribbled volumes are a profound putdown to anyone attempting to write about the fells of Lakeland. Coleridge did it first, and finest by far. A selection is in Coleridge Among the Lakes and Mountains, along with some of his letters and poems, published by the Folio Society in 1991 and available second-hand.

SOME COLERIDGE FELLWALKS § July 1794: 500-mile tour of Wales, including Snowdon, Cadair Idris and Plynlimon § October 1797: ‘Kubla Khan’ composed during a 40-mile walk along the Somerset/Devon coast § November 1797: three-day walk over the Quantocks and Exmoor, with Dorothy and William Wordsworth, during which ‘The Ancient Mariner’ was composed § May 1799: seven-day tour of the Harz Mountains, Germany § Oct–Nov 1799: tour of the Dales and Lakes from Sockburn-on-Tees to Keswick with William Wordsworth, including a crossing of Helvellyn in winter conditions § August 1800: the night crossing of Helvellyn § August 1802: nine-day solo backpack trip from Keswick to Buttermere, St Bees, Wasdale, Eskdale, Dunnerdale and Grasmere, including the first recorded rock climb – a descent of Broad Stand on Scafell § Aug–Sept 1803: walk from Loch Lomond by Glen Coe and the Great Glen to Inverness

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On Robinson, Lake District

12 BIVVYBAG ROUTES Victor the tramp: I can’t get to sleep unless I’m looking at the sky. The Brand New Testament (God exists: He lives in Brussels), dir Jaco Van Dormael

Crummock Water shore, evening

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ROUTE 4

Lakeland all the way Start Finish Distance Ascent Approx time Terrain Transport Suggested bivvies

Penrith Cockermouth 80km (50 miles) 3000m 2½–3 days Hill and valley paths Cockermouth has direct buses to Penrith (train station) Arnison Crag (or Dove Crag’s cave); Rannerdale Knotts/Low Fell

When I was a lad I was puzzled by people going backpacking in the Lake District. Backpacking, yes – I got that bit. Backpacking was when you carried a horrible heavy rucksack for the sake of walking three days through the middle of nowhere and sleeping at the Shelter Stone. But the Lake District? With its youth hostels, pubs and some of the nicest B&Bs in the known universe? And now, for the seriously impoverished, there are the camping barns. So why would you go backpacking in the Lakes? Since then, I’ve backpacked Lakeland edge to edge by seven different routes. Clearly I’ve got some explaining to do. First off, backpacking isn’t so nasty as all that. With modern materials, and hightech ingenuity, you can kit yourself out with overnight gear that weighs a couple of kilos more than a daypack and won’t set you back much more than a couple of thousand quid. Or else you can go to the Lakes, where you’ll find that no item of high-tech lightweight gear comes in lighter than the item that isn’t in your rucksack in the first place. It’s easy to live off the land when the land contains the Lakeland density of topclass tearooms. And rather than spending a rugged (but romantic) night in a rainsodden tent, wait for the weather forecast and go bivvybag instead. It’s backpacking – but without the backpack. Items, when in Lakeland, that you can leave behind include the cooker and the saucepans – and, indeed, the food. (If God had meant us to carry freeze-dried readymeals up Harrison Stickle, He wouldn’t have given us the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel.) Lakeland’s so small that you’re only out for two or three nights, and you already know the weather, so you don’t need spare dry clothes for night-time. But on top of all that – or rather, not on top of all that – you’re not going to take the tent. Okay, so backpacking across Lakeland isn’t quite so nasty as you thought. But that alone may not be quite enough to explain this odd activity, so let me take you for a walk. 12 Bivvybag routes

133

Crosscanonby

Plumbland Threapland Parsonby Bothel

n er Elle Riv

Crosby

Whitrigg

Ireby Branthwaite

Uldale

A5

B5 3 0 1

Gilcrux

9

1

Tallentire

Bewaldeth

Bridekirk

A5 9

94

Dovenby Great Broughton

Sunderland Blindcrake 5

A5

River

Papcastle Brigham

COCKERMOUTH

Derwent

Bassenthwaite

Dubwath Embleton

Skiddaw Forest

Wadcrag

Greysouthen Eaglesfield

Skiddaw

Low Lorton

Pardshaw

Branthwaite

High Lorton

6 A6

Deanscales

B5292

Ullock

Mockerkin

Braithwaite

A50 8

KESWICK

Thr

A59

1

6

Stair Loweswater

Lamplugh

289 B5

Asby

Millbeck Applethwaite

Thornthwaite

Rowrah Kirkland

Little Town

Buttermere

Croasdale

Grange

Dale Head

Ennerdale Bridge

Rosthwaite Seatoller Seathwaite

Copeland Forest

Watendlath

Stonethwaite LAKE DISTRICT NATIONAL PARK

Wasdale Scafell Head Pike 4 B53 3

Scafell Nether Wasdale Gosforth

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Elte

Ske

Inglewood Hutton End Forest

B5288

Mungrisdale

Greystoke

Berrier

Troutbeck

Hutton

Matterdale End B5322

Dockray

A68

Edenhall

Newton Reigny

PENRITH

A6 6

Stainton Dacre

A59 2

A50 91

Threlkeld

Wreay

Pooley Bridge

Watermillock Heughscar Hill

Legburthwaite

Eamont Bridge Yanwath

20

Clifton

Tirril

Melkinthorpe Askham

Lowther Hackthorpe

Helton

Dowthwaitehead Howtown Sandwick Martindale

Bampton

Great Strickland

Whale Little Strickland Bampton Grange

Dale Head

Glenridding

Langwathby 6

Newbiggin

Motherby Penruddock

A66

Scales

Laithes Catterlen Blencow

A6

Mosedale

Plumpton Head

B6412

Johnby

A6

Unthank Skelton Unthank End

M6

Lamonby Ellonby

Hutton Roof

North 13 Dykes Plumpton B64 Great Salkeld Little Salkeld Salkeld Dykes

River L ow th er

Millhouse

B5 3

30 5

B5

Hesket Newmarket Nether Row aite

Rosgill

Patterdale Bridgend

Helvellyn

Shap Hartsop

A5 9

2

Fairfield

Priest’s Hole

0

Grasmere Rydal Chapel Stile

2.5

5

km

Sadgill

Elterwater Skelwith Bridge

A6

A591

N

Clappersgate

AMBLESIDE

Kentmere

Bretherdale Head

Troutbeck A5

91

12 Bivvybag routes

135

LAKELAND PERMUTATIONS Any full crossing of Lakeland will be a worthwhile journey. These 13 start/end points allow a theoretical 156 itineraries. Heading westwards or northwards (rather than east or south) saves the most magnificent country for the second half. The classic crossing will be Penrith or Shap to Ravenglass or Cockermouth, through the high fells all the way. Starting from the shores of Morecambe Bay gives a longer trip of three days at least, with the first one through fields, woods, and smaller limestone hills like Hampsfell, Whitbarrow and Scout Scar. Location

Notes

Carlisle

Cumbria Way into the northern fells

Penrith

West Coast Main Line; quick access to Ullswater

Shap

Wainwright’s Coast to Coast, or back valleys Swindale/Sleddale

Tebay

For the remote southeast valleys

Oxenholme

West Coast Main Line; Dales Way to Windermere

Arnside

For guided crossing of Morecambe Bay sands to Grange

Humphrey Head

Access from Kents Bank station

Ulverston

Cumbria Way

Silecroft

For Black Combe

Ravenglass

Superb finish-point over Muncaster Fell

Seascale

Odd atmosphere due to nearby Sellafield, but a quick walk into Wasdale

St Bees

Wainwright’s Coast to Coast; clifftop start but a long haul into the hills

Cockermouth

Attractive town with good bus links

This time I started at Penrith. It’s got a mainline station with direct trains to most UK cities. And right across the road you’re in green space with a nice big castle in red sandstone. (You could equally start from Shap, or Oxenholme. You could start, as the Cumbria Way does, at Carlisle. Sometime I’ll start from Arnside near the border with Lancashire, on a day when there’s a guided walk across the sands to Grange.) After a couple of hours of field and riverside, I was on the small Heughscar Hill. Lakeland, as we know, has it all: lakes, of course, but also oakwoods, and crags, and waterfalls, and wee stone-built villages with painted pebbles and geraniums. The one thing Lakeland lacks, lovers of the Yorkshire Dales might remind us, is 136

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Ullswater shore

limestone. No underground caverns, no fossilised corals, none of that weird limestone pavement. Which is why, on a Lakeland crossing, I like to include a little of the Lakeland limestone. Heughscar Hill does indeed have its patch of limestone pavement. Even more importantly, it has a sudden view all along Ullswater, grey under the rain like a dead slow-worm. But why view it when I could do it? All along Ullswater is a view, but above all a walk: the loveliest low-level walk in Lakeland, says Wainwright – and Wainwright’s not wrong. (Okay, you could also bear left into Martindale, but let’s leave that for another weekend? Lakeland is never short on loveliness.) The lake water clucked and chuckled below the oak trees, the path ambled up and down over various rocky corners, and over three or four hours Helvellyn gradually got closer. I’d planned afternoon tea at Patterdale and then a night among Arnison Crag’s grassy hollows and great lake views. But I’d made good time along Ullswater, and if the Shelter Stone under Cairn Gorm is the ideal backpack overnight, even idealler is the Lakeland equivalent: the Priest’s Hole high on the side of Dove Crag. Up there, night-time showers would drip past, 2m from my bivvy bag. Boots could air out in the gently moving cave-scented air, and my start-point at Penrith, now 25km away, would serve for nightlight. But before all that, one part of the plan was non-negotiable: afternoon tea at the Patterdale Hotel. Lingering over the cream scones, and an hour’s walk up the stony tracks of Patterdale, was all calculated to exploit the special feature of the Priest’s Hole. Which is wondering whether you can find it before dark, up the shadowed hollows of Dovedale. (No real worries, as I’d been there before – hints on the Hole are in Chapter 4.) At dawn, mist clouds in Deepdale swirled as slow as the breakfast porridge I wasn’t boiling up on the stove I hadn’t lugged along with me. Muesli mixed with water from a beck makes for a good quick breakfast.

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137

As an experienced bivvybag inhabitant I know how to enjoy the patter of rain on green nylon an inch from my ear. Even so, I was glad I’d been holed up overnight. That made it much more of a surprise when I found that the last of the overnight showers had been a sprinkle of snow, all acoss the top of Fairfield. (And actually, the subtle pleasures of damp snow flopped down on the bivvy bag – those are ones I do have trouble finding fun in.) By 8am it had melted away – I may have been the only one to leave footprints in that particular snowfall. Then it was down the pitched path to Grisedale Hause above its tarn. Here I could have turned down left to Grasmere, for interesting ways onwards by Loughrigg and the Pikes, or by Coniston and Duddon, or Helm Crag, or Far Easedale, or… you get the picture. In Lakeland there are lots of places to go to. Today, though, I was dropping to Dunmail. A bit of sun broke through as I tracked an ancient path heading up helpfully past a ruined farm to Harrop Tarn. The tarn could be in an obscure foothill of California’s Sierra Nevada, with pines and crags and swampy bits – you expect to see beavers and a bear. I swerved the Watendlath tearoom as it was necessary to save space for the upcoming late lunch at Rosthwaite’s Flock In café. On the afternoon of the second day, even a backpack that wasn’t really a backpack at all started to feel a bit like a backpack. It’s a long, steep haul out of Borrowdale by Rigghead Quarries, with every step getting further above the fleshpots of Rosthwaite. But Dale Head has its own rewards, in the airy and empty ridgelines above Buttermere. People do walk along Hindscarth Edge from time to time – the monster path makes that quite clear. But those time-to-times all seem to be before 4pm. I’d planned a bar meal at the Fish or else the Bridge in Buttermere, to be followed by a night out on Rannerdale Knotts. But I must have coped with the climb to Dale Head better than it felt like. The evening was just turning far too lovely for sitting under a slated roof – even one belonging to a Buttermere pub. And there was plenty of time in hand for Crummock Water and a late supper at Loweswater’s Kirkstile Inn. The evening got more and more beautiful – and then the sun went down. Which was strange, as it wasn’t supposed to do that just yet. Turned out I hadn’t been going extra-quick up Dale Head; it was more that my watch had stopped. Happily, the Kirkstile Inn not only serves some of the best food in Lakeland – it also, for the benefit of backpackers whose watches have stopped, keeps on serving it until 9pm. Next, an experience of a very special sort which is only available to backpackers. And more than that, backpackers with stopped watches. Slowed down by the Kirkstile’s very fine food, and having walked in darkness along the silent lanes of Loweswater, I found myself ascending the steep, steep side of Low Fell. Crummock Water gleamed in the starlight, but the tangled bracken underfoot was completely invisible. It was a weird, out-of-body experience, but with the additional feature of sore feet. Plus prickled ankles, as bracken gave way to little tussocks of gorse.

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Low Fell lives up to its name (even if it did feel bigger in the dark). It’s a bootlace-thickness above the 300m mark, an outlier of (itself not terribly significant) Fellbarrow. But it’s ideal for sleeping, with its deep, comfy sedges and grass. And it’s equally ideal for waking up on, with its view northwards along Crummock and Buttermere, Great Gable poking up at the back and Mellbreak lurking like a sleepy lion that hasn’t got out of its bivvy bag yet. I could’ve been heading for an ending at Silecroft or St Bees or anywhere on the Cumbria coastal railway – over Muncaster Fell to Ravenglass is possibly the finest finish of them all. But today it had to be Cockermouth. It’s a lovely town, its red sandstone matching Penrith back at the beginning, and I hadn’t walked out to it before. Are you a literary pilgrim, for whom the walk will end at Wordsworth House at the end of the main street? Or a simple beer drinker, in which case the Jennings Brewery is a few steps closer? For me it was a little bookshop where I did a book launch talk a few years before, as it was just the place for a cup of coffee and a salad. Cockermouth is the sort of place where you don’t even have to ask if the bookshop has a café… I folded away my maps, finished off my coffee, and bought a book for the train ride home. So why should anybody want to go backpacking in the Lakes? Well now. There are the hilltop sunsets, followed by the equally enticing (but colder and rather damper) hilltop sunrises. The hill shapes which are even more wonderful in the dark. The going like an ant on the map, from somewhere in Yorkshire right across to the sea. Plus the special bonus for Lakeland: the peaceful scenery. From roughly 4pm to roughly 10am, you get the Lakeland summits all to yourself. Does that explain it at all?

BACKPACKING WITHOUT BACKACHE The English language offers various ways of covering the distance without carrying quite so much stuff: § Slackpacking – hop on a bus and go to a hotel § Trackpacking – using railway stations § Hackpacking – using a horse § Snackpacking – using bar meals § Yakpacking – making someone else carry the rucksack § Shackpacking – hut to hut using youth hostels § Crackpacking – overnighting in caves § Blackpacking – leave at sunset, arrive at dawn

12 Bivvybag routes

139

ROUTE 5

Rannoch Moor: the beauty and the bog Start Finish Distance Ascent Approx time Terrain Transport

Suggested bivvy

Kingshouse Hotel above Glencoe (NN 259 546) Corrour Station (NN 356 664) 37km (23 miles) 1000m 10hr (one short day, one long one) Tracks, peaty path, and pathless moorland over A’ Chruach Morning Citylink bus from (Glasgow or) Bridge of Orchy to Kingshouse; evening train from Corrour to Bridge of Orchy (or Glasgow) A’ Chruach (739m)

Buachaille 140 The Etive BookMòr of and theBeinn Bivvya’ Chrùlaiste from the track onto Rannoch Moor

In his book on the Glencoe Massacre, John Prebble tells of a MacDonald chieftain leading his first cattle raid across Rannoch Moor. As night fell, the men loosened their long woollen plaids and wound them around their bodies; and the young leader patted together a small pile of snow on which to rest his head. At this the clansmen began to murmur. Was this youth really suitable to lead MacDonalds, if he needs a pillow to sleep on? Techniques of winter bivvy have advanced since the 17th century. But Rannoch Moor remains – 23km of peat bog and lochans, and the lonely cry of the curlew. Returning with their stolen cows, those MacDonalds only had to step into the wide heather and peat hags, and pursuit became a waste of time. Over 10 or 20 years I’d looked down on Rannoch from Ben Alder and the Buachaille. It was time to get down among the tussocks and the cotton grass. Time to see the thin ice forming across the lochans, and frost on the tall grasses; to smell the death of the heather. It was time to hear the thrice-daily rumble of the train, and in between times to hear nothing at all.

12 Bivvybag routes

141

Abhainn Rath

N

400

400

400

km

0 40

500

500

Beinn na Cloiche 646

Leum Uilleim 909

876

60 0

Glas Bheinn 792

500

0

70

500

0

40

600

2

0

1 50 0

0

50

0

50

0 0

600

80

50

70

0

60

40 0

0

0

40

500 400

Blackwater Reservoir

376

0

40 400

500

60

0

708

500

yR

Meall a' Phuill

Stob nan Losgann

449

628 0

40

50

0

400

600

Milita r

50 0

705

a'Chrulaiste

558

Meall nan Ruadhag 646

300

oa d

300

Black Corries Lodge

R AN N

Kings House Hotel 0

30

142

The Book of the Bivvy

0

600

50

0

50

700

0

70

400

Carn Dearg 941

800

Corrour

700

Meall na Meoig of Beinn Pharlagain 868

0

60

60

oa

eR

700

Th

838

0

dt ot

0

he

40

807

Isl es

00

0

500

Allt Eigheach

70

400

Allt Eigheach

40

0

Sron Smeur 511

400

T he

ad Ro

Meall Liath na Doire

Leacann nam Fuaran

500

Rannoch

0 60

Stob na Cruaiche 739

637

500

0

30

Meall a' Bhùirich

ch a Loch A’ C h ru Laidon

Hotel

Isl e

300

s

Loch Eigheach Gaur Reservoir 300 300

300

M OO R

Abhainn Duib

he

12 Bivvybag routes

0

NNO C H

30

400

30

0

600

th e

to

an nn

Sgor Gaibhre 955

600

0

Loch Ossian

80

Loch Ossian hostel

143

Daybreak: Rannoch Moor and Schiehallion from A’ Cruach

The bus let me off at noon. It took a moment to adapt from the warm, jolting interior to the emptiness on the verge of the A82. A hot lunch at Kingshouse was tempting, but the cold night to come meant no time for hot lunches. I took the gravelled track into the red-brown moorland of the winter afternoon. The track might be thought to tame the moorland. But on the contrary. It adds to the wildness by tempting you in – and then dumping you in the middle of the 23km of granite hummocks, and peat banks, and slow, dark, winding rivers. Buachaille gradually got smaller with every mile into the moor. Golden afternoon faded to the pinks and greys of early winter sunset. Beyond Black Corries Lodge, gamekeepers on quad bikes had been using the old stalkers’ path, so that the black dashed line on the map still worked. The soggiest bits had been repaired with broken fence posts, rusty iron, and other useful debris. A’ Chruach (the stack) at 739m might be mistaken for a hill. It’s not a hill. It’s just where Rannoch humps itself up out of the peat. I reached the trig point under the dregs of the sunset. I wasn’t worried about shelter, as I’d noted a hollow in the peat a few minutes before. My down sleeping bag was going to keep me warm, along with

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my closed-cell sleeping mat. I wasn’t worried about operating the stove and saucepans with frozen fingers, as I hadn’t brought any stove and saucepans. What I worried about was the timing. It was night, but on the clock it was just 6pm, and I’d been walking only five hours. Was I tired enough to sleep 12 long hours until daylight? A couple of hours into the night, the moonlight was twinkling on frosty grass tips. An hour later, the frost was on the bivvy bag as well. As the bivvy bag stiffens, you can arch it to make air space above the sleeping bag. My peat bank kept me below the breeze, and also closed off part of that black night sky which sucks your warmth into the empty spaces between the stars. But the peat bank still left plenty of night sky. I gazed at shooting stars, every minute or so. Each time I opened my eyes, the moon had moved around the cone of the Buachaille, and the frost was thicker on the tussocks. I’d placed the waterbottles neck-downwards, so that the ice plug would form at the bottom. But the bottles were going to freeze solid, so I brought them into the bivvy bag. Then I brought my boots in too.

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The stars still told me it was the middle of the night, but my watch said 6am. Breakfast is essential, but muesli, mixed with teeth-chilling water, eaten with frozen fingers – this is not the fun part of the day. It was a slow, clumsy sack race between getting the boots laced up and the fingers freezing rigid. But up at A’ Chruach’s cairn, Schiehallion rose above a sea of grey mist. And above Schiehallion was coming the sun. Deer were picking over the frozen slopes above Rannoch Station. Long stems of grass, ice-white, arched through the sunlight. The single-track road starts here, and at once welcomed me to Perth and Kinross. Three kilometres down, the track turns off northwards, back onto the moor. This is the Road to the Isles – the old drove road, and at the time I walked it, a comfortable grassy track. (More recently it’s been sadly improved to lead lorries to some hydroelectric scheme.) Cloud was creeping across the flanks of Leum Uilleim, and the frost was going to hold all day. A couple of kilometres out into the moor, a train crept past; three hours later, it crept back the other way. The air was cold, the ground frozen firm, and Blackwater was blue water below the snowfields of Mamore. It was a wonderful day to be walking. After rambling above the moor edge for several miles, a clear stony path took me down towards Loch Ossian, its youth hostel black and shuttered under the sunset. A helpful track, pale under the moon, took me westwards to the station. What was less helpful was the train south being at 6.30pm, which gave an hour and a half to wait in the starlight. It was Saturday night and there were two other chaps, with torches, back from the nondescript Munros above Loch Ossian. Walking up and down the platform to keep warm, I passed one of them, who turned out to be in fact a third person, just arrived out of the night – everyone looks the same with a torch on their head. ‘I’ve had a bit of an adventure,’ he told me. After climbing Ben Alder at dawn he’d taken off his boots to cross a freezing stream. He’d dropped the boots into the water, and only got one of them back. Ben Alder is 16km from the station. I shone my torch onto an improvised right boot made of a nylon gaiter wound around the foot and kept in place by a crampon. Then there was a clatter down the track, and five minutes later the lit-up train arrived from the direction of Loch Treig. To our relief it slowed to a halt alongside our dark platform. One can imagine being too stiff with cold to raise the necessary hand signal – Corrour is a request stop. The train’s arrival across the dark, empty moor had been strange. Stranger still was the brightly lit inside, with nylon carpets and stuffy warmth and people in their shirts reading newspapers. It was especially odd for the chap still wearing his crampon. Just how was he going to walk home across Glasgow? We basked in the stuffy warmth, and peered out at the black moor, the white tops of the Etive hills, and the grey lochans in the starlight.

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BIVVY NIGHT 11: Helm Crag And so we come to my hilltop night number 85. Weather forecast: heavy showers, strong winds, possible thunderstorms – until 6pm. At which point the sun will come out and stay out. But 6pm is far too late for any hill trip. Well, that’s what everyone else was thinking, as I made my lonely way up the bracken slopes of Helm Crag. After the rain, the air was sparkly clean, and Easedale shone like a freshly waxed Rolls-Royce in the evening sunlight. A true summit sleepout is impossible anyway on Helm Crag (you’d have to sleep standing up), but the stiff breeze meant I would have to snuggle down low and miss out on the overnight view. However, it’s surprising how little ‘down’ you need to arrive at ‘snug’. A hollow no more than a metre deep, lined with rushes and moss, would do the trick. After an hour admiring the surroundings, I was ready to unroll the sleeping bag and enjoy a three-course cold dinner culled from the ‘meal deal’ shelf of the Grasmere Co-op. By the time I’d dined, green shadows had crept across Easedale, and Helvellyn rose above Dunmail Raise like a banana in a bowl of avocados. So it was time to put a stone on the sleeping bag and spend another hour out admiring it all. At 2am the moon woke me up by shining straight into my eyes. It also glittered on the Howitzer, Helm Crag’s summit rock, like a silver chandelier (except poking up from the floor instead of dangling from the ceiling). This did mean climbing back into the boots and another stroll along the ridge, to see what the ‘Old Woman Playing the Organ’ was looking like at the other end.

Evening bivvy, Helm Crag

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Mulhacén from Alcazaba

13 BUT THAT WAS IN ANOTHER COUNTRY What’s the difference between bivvying and camping? Well, you look forward to camping, don’t you? Who looks forward to dozing off perched above a huge void with only a flake stuck up one’s backside and a poor belay as insurance against never waking up again? Andy Kirkpatrick, mountaineer (blog post)

Foreign parts With some exceptions, such as Iceland, the climate of Abroad is just right for bivvy bags: warm or pleasantly cool at night, with bursts of heavy rain followed by nice hot sun to dry out again. Whenever I’ve taken a tent to foreign parts I’ve always wished it was a bivvy. Even on civilised low-altitude holidays, you never quite know whether the bus is going to take you to the right place. It’s a comfort to have your own green breathable bedroom. The one difficulty may be finding out in advance about mosquitoes. The bag I took to the Picos de Europa lacked midge-netting, but above 1000m it didn’t matter. And I did end up feeling over-equipped: Spanish rock-climbers were using foam mat and sleeping bag only. 148

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ROUTE 6

Sierra Nevada: the Spanish 3000s Start Finish Distance Ascent Approx time Terrain

Güéjar Sierra, east of Granada, Spain Lanjarón, south of Granada 75km (45 miles) 4000m 4–5 days Tracks and paths; rocky ridges, sometimes with massive boulders, sometimes scrambly; can be snow-covered until June Highest point Mulhacén (3479m) Map 1:40,000 Parque National de Sierra Nevada Season Mid to late summer. Or late spring for snow rather than stonefields. Route description See www.ronaldturnbull.co.uk/articles/s-nevada/route.html

The Welsh 3000s make a fine, fine walk. The Ruta Integral de los Tres Miles is the same thing in Spain – but in metres rather than feet. The 3000s of southern Spain form a ragged east–west ridgeline of 20km and a dozen separate peaks. You get to them from Granada. Yes, Granada is famous for the Alhambra palace, with the delicate stone screens tempering the sunblast and in every courtyard the music of flowing water. But in the high haze above the towers and gardens, the snowy Sierra Nevada are looming. Two days later, you’ve swapped sunhat for crampons, to look down on Granada from those snowy heights. (Okay, Llanberis is lovable too in its slaty Welsh way…) I started the Welsh 3000s from the Dulyn bothy at the northern end. Piedra Partida, at the eastern end of the Spanish ones, has the same stony floor to sleep on, and still fewer facilities – it lacks even the traditional bothy spade. But instead of green gloom and a black tarn below grey crags, the Spanish hut is high on a ridge of yellow stones, with warm sunshine bringing out the aroma of the ibex droppings (and some human ones too; they really should sort themselves a shovel…) Ahead, hill ridges fade into the sunset. I dozed on the doorslab, moving indoors at nightfall once the flies had fallen asleep. Dawn, and the light coming the other way showed those ridgelines as speckled with snow. Unexpected, at the end of June – except that the Internet means nothing surprises us anymore. I’d hauled along the crampons and the axe all the way from Scotland and up through the long, hot afternoon to Piedra Partida.

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cas lan as b u g A Río

Embalse de Canales

N Alto de Calar Ma

Güéjar Sierra

San Juan ode roy Ar

A-

395

Cerro de Trevenque

1

2

km

Piedra Partida Hut

Río Gen il

to Granada

i te n a 0

Puntal de Juntillas

Cerro del Mojón Alto

Sierra Nevada

PA R Q U E N A C I O N A L D E S I E R R A N E VA D A Pico Veleta 3396m

Mulhacén II 3362m

Carihuela Tajo de Hut los Machos

Alto del Chorrillo

Rio Poq ue ira

Rio C

hico

2721m

Río Trevé lez

Mulhacén I 3479m

Tozal del Cartujo Cerro del Caballo 3011m Caballo Hut

Puntal de Vacares

Caldera Hut

Trevélez

Prado Llano 2577m

Capileira Bubión Pampaneira Pitres

ón jar

R ío

Órgiva

adalfeo Gu Río

A-

346

150

Cástaras

Pico Cueva del Águila

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A

Gu ad alfe 8 o -34

Juviles

Busquístar

Rio Trevelez

Lanjarón A-

Río La n

Cáñar

Pórtugos

Almegíjar

34 8 A-

The ridgeline sharpened to a snowy crest, and then a short scrambly section on sun-warmed but slightly slippery schist. The bit after that is a tumble of giant boulders: slow clambering – or would’ve been, except there was a handy snowbank along the ridge rim. After that, a rocky tower. All of this at an altitude of 3000m, on no particular path, in a foreign land, on a foreign map with free-form, imaginative contour lines and a lax attitude to place names. And, despite these being the top summits of Spain, there was nobody else about. The ridge route onto La Alcazaba is a cliff. The wimpy way turns off left down a hideous slope of broken stones and scree. Well, it’s probably like that in other summers – but given this day’s covering of smooth snow, and given the crampons that had already weighed me down up 1200m of height gain, I scampered down the white stuff to the sprinkled tarns called Lagunillas del Goteron.

Bivvy below Lagunillas del Goteron

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In Wales this would have been sunrise to lunchtime, five or six hours’ worth of ground; here it had taken most of the day. Ahead was a four-hour crossing of La Alcazaba – one of Spain’s most serious hills. But here in the cosy corrie, the vegetation was flowery and a good inch deep. Ideal for a bivvy, apart from the clearing away of some sun-dried cow pats. On the green streamside, with a waterfall tinkling high overhead, I spent the rest of the afternoon eating some of the weight out of the sack, relaxing in the hot sun, and then eating some more of the stuff. My thin foam mat gave just enough comfort. The overnight surroundings were stones, and rockface, and the murmur of the waterfalls. The bonus, in the dry mountain air, was a dew-free breakfast: the morning campsite as bone dry as it had been the evening before. The central part of the ridgeline comprises three big hills. La Alcazaba – only the third highest – is the craggiest and least accessible of the range, and a worthy companion to Nanga Parbat and Lakeland’s Glaramara. (Aha! A day and a half always, many Mars bars and bananas, as a chap walks far Alcazaba. It does take a special sort of hill to do without all vowels except the letter ‘a’.) Avoiding a confrontation with the crags, a small cairned path slants out onto the southern ridge – Lomo de la Alcazaba. It meant 500m of height to gain, but with widening views, and ibex sauntering around the ridge, and wee cushions of gentian among the gravel. Mulhacén, mainland Spain’s mightiest, was a bit of a recap. Again I chose an easier way. The open gully below Peñon del Globo led me down to the floor of the wide Siete Lagunas (Seven Lakes) corrie; I crossed its snow and gravel, passing a tarn like a blue eyeball at the foot of Mulhacén’s east spur. Two parties were descending here: the only moving walkers I would meet on these mountains. We discussed routes and snow conditions with the aid of the mountain-man section of my phrasebook – until a faint aeroplane rumble broke the afternoon stillness. ‘¡Hay tormentas!’ I’d also been mugging up the phrasebook’s weather section. Tormentas aren’t miscellaneous discomforts such as stonefields and bad snow; tormentas are thunderstorms. But given the hot sun, still air and clear blue skies all around, I must’ve misremembered my phrasebook…? But no, the little green book had got it right. As I emerged to the high ridgeline, cloud swirled out of the northern corries and the thunder rumbled a whole lot closer and more thunderous. A dozen flakes of snow came down to show that the Sierra doesn’t just do sunny and hot. For 10 minutes or more I was walking in cloud along the boulders and jaggy rocks of Mulhacén. The summit shrine has candles, broken walking poles and votive ribbons. But would they provide spiritual solace against lightning strike? Instead I trusted in simple speed: a quick up and down to the survey pillar and off down the broad western flank. 152

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Dusk above Carihuela hut

Mulhacén to Veleta offered something different. The Sierra Nevada ‘road’ – a dirt track right across the range – made a break from the ruggedness of everywhere so far. Well, it would have, except that the road was covered over with snow. The snow was steep, smooth, and slippery-white, and it went a long way down the hillside. The first stretch had bootsole footprints, and puncture marks of poles above and below the trod. By the second stretch, the prints were spiked ones, and the little holes were above the path only, indicating the unstrapping of ice axes. I left my luggage in the Carihuela hut and rambled up the gravel to Veleta’s evening summit and back again. ‘Hut’ can be a misnomer. Your average Alpine Hütte, rifugio or chata is more of a small hotel, with waitresses in dirndl skirts and cream cakes on the veranda. The Carihuela hut is altogether more authentic. It’s made of concrete and stones, sunk a metre deep into the snowfield, with a slot around the walls filled with empty plastic bottles (litter makes excellent insulation). There’s one tiny window, a metal door that clanks like a dustbin lid, and on this particular evening a puddle of meltwater in the floor. Just an hour by car plus two on foot above Granada, the place was busy. Two enterprising Granadans were even using the hovel as a high-level love nest. The double sleeping bag on my right kept me awake with three hours of whispering and giggling, as well as a spell of heavy breathing.

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Then there came a whooping sound from outside the hut. After the day of grey haze, the sky had cleared to a splendid sunset. The rocks above the hut gave lineof-sight for mobile phones to girlfriends in Granada, and their raised position nicely silhouetted the caller for my photo. ‘¿Puerta abierta – o cerrada?’ In common with bothy-dwellers worldwide, they wanted the darkness, and the cosy overnight fug: they wanted the door firmly closed behind me as I departed, the first away in the dawn’s light. Outside, the snow was cold and crisp, and the sunrise was etching the folds and shadows of the Tajos de la Virgen. (Tajos are chasms, it would seem.) Two-thirds of my food was eaten; my waterbottles were empty; the kilogram of crampons was on my feet rather than my back. And with the crunch of those crampons into down-sloping snow, I felt myself a mountaineer rather than merely a load-bearing mule. Above, the pinnacles of Tajos de la Virgen have been described as ‘an easy ascent on good clean slabs and blocks’, as ‘particularly dangerous: I would highly recommend doing it with someone who already knows the area’, and as whatever’s Spanish for ‘scare-ey!!’. The cop-out option is the wide, well-made Verada path. The wide, well-made and shady Verada path. Shady meant it would have snow on. So this stretch offered ice-axe excitement. On the last afternoon the ridgeline involved more gravel and scrambling and some more of those jolly tiring big boulders, and then a truly scary rock tower. But an adventurous ibex was heading up the tower before me, evidently without needing to stop and rope up. The airy corner along the tremendous rim of the Lanjarón valley turned out to be a walkable little ledge. Cerro del Caballo was the last of the 3000s. A whole herd of the mountain ibex were lounging about, waiting to provide decorative foreground for my photos looking back along the ranges. The hut below Cerro del Caballo is roofed with a rough stone arch and sits beside a stony tarn. I’d planned this all out in advance. Overnighting there, fellow residents would drop me some hints on the best path down to Lanjarón (the guidebook gave just enough information to make it clear that the paths on the map weren’t what would actually happen). But the only fellow residents – the ibexes – had even worse Spanish than mine. Anyway, it was still only 3pm. Going down off the end of the range recapped my long first day up out of Granada – but with sore feet, southward views and a much smaller rucksack. The gravel ridges gave way to slopes of yellow gorse known as rascaviejas, or old-ladyscratcher; and old-lady-scratcher gave way to hawthorn bushes and cold, clear streams. Then the treeline, and an ancient highway of jammed-together stones. And after four or five hours, a lane where one hoped the evening pushchairs had good emergency brakes on them. Here was a fuente, or water trough, where I could wash and drink – having elbowed aside the small dogs.

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The first bus stop on the right would get me to Granada; the bar opposite it was full of expat Brits. ‘You look shattered,’ they told me kindly. The bus was airconditioned, and over the craglets and limestone gorges and Granada high-rise, the snowy tops looked a long, long way up.

BIVVY NIGHT 12: Cima Cadin Pre-dawn light on the Drei Zinnen/Tre Cime di Lavaredo (photo: Peter Elliott, www.pete-elliott.com)

The Fonda Savio hut, in the Sesto Dolomites, is one of the most photogenic in all the Alps. It perches below a line of five huge rock towers, and a nearby precipice offers great views eastwards into the sunrise. For photographers like Peter Elliott, the Savio hut makes a tempting nightspot. But not quite so tempting as the summit 400m overhead. Cima Cadin is a top-level Instagram hotspot, reached by an intermediatelevel via ferrata, or mechanised climbing route. In daytime the via ferrata is busy, but when Pete arrived at 6pm there were only a few frustrated clamberers descending in the last of the daylight: clamberers who, simply for the sake of not being benighted, had left the summit far too early for any summit sunset. Pete shared the heavy gear with his friend Heikki. As a proper photographer, he has to haul a tripod everywhere he goes. They headed up the cables to a series of rusty metal ladders pinned high across the near-vertical limestone. The via ferrata gear clinked against the metalwork, loud in the evening air. Soon

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they were surrounded by vertical rock-scenery, side-lit by the low sun (but with nowhere to plonk the tripod). Between their ankles they could see the cheerful red roof of the hut, hundreds of metres below. Under that roof, people would be drinking fizzy yellow beer and singing Tyrolean folksongs – possibly even with yodelling in the chorus. The summit is a rock platform, with room for a couple of human beings as well as the tripod. The sunset more than made up for not singing any yodelly folksongs. The Dolomite rock towers made jaggy shapes against the stars – ‘like the green line of a doctor’s graph,’ says Pete. They placed stones around the tiny platform – stones sharp enough, with luck, to wake them up before they slid over the edge into 400m of darkness. On top of Cima Cadin, in the dark, there’s a fine sense of commitment. Whatever the mountain throws at you by way of wind, snow or lightning, there’s no way you’re going back down those ladders with a head-torch. You can spoil the suspense with weather forecasts; but the ones in the Alps are still intriguingly unreliable. And if worrying about lightning strikes does keep you awake – that just helps with not sliding over the edge into the darkness. On the other hand, not worrying about lightning means being suddenly woken up by it in the middle of the night. The storm was several valleys away in Austria – too far to even hear the thunder. There was nothing to be done about it, anyway. Well actually, there was plenty to be done about it: set the camera on long exposure to try and catch the flashes… At 6am they checked to see that each other was still there, and put the tripod back up again. The time-lapse setting meant there was no need to leap about being a photographer. The camera clicked away every 30 seconds like a contemplative grasshopper. The two humans slid back into the sleeping bags and concentrated, through two hours of the sunrise, on just being there.

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Kathmandu Trekking basic bivvy bag; spare clothes wrapped in waterproof jacket for pillow

14 AND IN THE END In the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing the lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain! Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

Sheltered housing for the elderly Once there was a man called Ivan Waller. In 1931 he climbed behind Colin Kirkus on a seriously overhanging route called Mickledore Grooves in the days when falling off meant death, or severe injury if you were really lucky. What happens to mountaineers as they get older? They turn into older mountaineers. At the age of 70 Ivan turned to the Munros and climbed 140 of them in two years to become Munroist number 207. Three years later he backpacked across Scotland in the Ultimate Challenge event. Still in his 70s he completed the 70km walk of the Lakeland 3000s in a day, and climbed Tower Ridge on Ben Nevis in winter conditions without causing the slightest anxiety to my cousin, who was his companion. He also traversed the Cuillin Ridge twice, the second time escorting an older companion.

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He considered the Corbetts: ‘This may be beyond my span because I still have more than 160 to do at 81 years of age, but a man can always try.’ However, there might be some mileage in the ‘Metros’ – those hills that would have been Munros if Sir Hugh had started counting at 900m instead of the slightly higher 3000ft. This idea gathers in an extra 27 mountains, quite a few of which are really rather good ones. There’s steep-sided Streap, above Glenfinnan; there’s Sgùrr Cos na Breachdlaoigh, rough and rocky at the heart of Knoydart. There are also quite a few which really aren’t rather good at all. One such is Beinn Bhreac, in the Forest of Atholl. The Forest of Atholl has wide bogs, deep rivers and a lot of peat and heather. Beinn Bhreac stands more or less in the middle, slightly further from civilisation than Carn Ealar which is considered the remotest of the existing Munros. Ivan made an attack from a camp near Blair Atholl, but at 80 years old he found his lightweight tent too heavy to carry through the peat hags. After further attempts by bicycle from Glen Feshie and Glen Tilt, he learnt about the benefits of the Gore-Tex bivvy bag. For his fourth attempt he settled on the comparatively easy approach from Linn of Dee: a return journey of 50km. By early evening he’d reached the moorland ridge and was walking over rough gravel and grassland, lit by a savage sunset that beamed through the narrow gaps below a heavy cloud-layer at 900m. At the lowest point of the ridge he passed a grassy corner below a little rock wall: a fairly inviting bivouac site. The summit was reached at 8.30pm. On the way back to the bivvy-site which I had spotted in the pass, the price was exacted for the stupendous sunset, when the whole northwestern sky turned black and torrential rain poured down. I hurried down to the pass and arrived with the outside of my Gore-Tex garments streaming with water but beautifully dry inside. To have taken them off even for a moment would have seen me soaked to the skin in the deluge, but I had to get into my bivouac as it would soon be dark. I spread out my mat which instantly collected pools of water, removed my boots, and stood temporarily in a plastic bag to keep my stockings dry. Luckily my down sleeping sacks were already arranged inside the Gore-Tex bivvy bag and I now had no alternative but to get straight into them, dripping outer garments and all. Miraculously my Polarfleece jacket kept my body warm, and the two layers of Gore-Tex with the now thoroughly damp sleeping sacks between them kept me dry although I was lying in pools of water. My feet were warm throughout the night, but for the first two hours before midnight the wind and rain continued and my legs began to chill so I organised some leg exercises. The bending and straightening were too much for my old sleeping sacks and there were feathers everywhere, all wet and matted. By now I was beginning to ponder on the chances of an old man of 80 surviving this treatment, and then

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Back to the drizzle and boots pointing downwind, Beinn a’ Ghlò

there was the worry about the effect of all this rain on the already swollen burn which would have to be crossed on the way home. Optimism was getting sorely strained but around midnight I fell asleep. I woke up with the dawn, warm and comfortable soon after 4am and lay in for another hour. When I got up I found to my amazement that my bivvy bag and my rucksack beside me were covered in an inch of snow. The clouds were down but the wind had dropped. Snow covered the ground but I was away in a few minutes.

Later in life, Ivan took to smaller hills, seeking out those with silly or suggestive names: Great Cockup, Maiden Paps. And when my cousin set out on his own crossing of Scotland, Ivan was there with planning and advice. There’s no better way of walking eastwards than off Ben Nevis over all the Grey Corries. Into Atholl was the way to go, around the flanks of Beinn Bhreac. My cousin wasn’t quite certain about the three days of solo walking through the rough bounds of Knoydart, and invited me to accompany him for that bit. ‘Ah,’ said Ivan, ‘but if the weather’s right you’ll be wanting that bivvy on the Cìche. That’s all right: the lad Ronald shall borrow my own bag.’ Which is how I came to be sleeping in Ivan Waller’s green Gore-Tex on Sgùrr na Cìche on a summer night of 1992.

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Sunset moment in Coire an Lochain, high on the north side of Ben Lui

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161

APPENDIX A

Suppliers The first edition of this book was written up on an Amstrad PCW with a whole 0.25MB of memory, and submitted to Cicerone Press on a 3” floppy drive holding an amazing 360KB. The bivvying itself had taken place inside a bivvy bag sewn by Julian Miles in a shed in Wales using polyurethane-coated nylon, weighing 480g and costing £55. Since then, computers and bivvy bags have been getting cheaper and lighter. Computers, however, haven’t been getting any more breathable, and continue to be almost useless for sleeping under. Readers have probably twigged that when it comes to therapy, I look to the summits rather than the shopping mall. But here’s a roundup of some bags of today, whose weights and sizes can be compared with the two I actually sleep in. Kathmandu Trekking has ceased trading following the untimely death of Julian Miles. His work lives on on a thousand rainswept hilltops – but also in the fact that mainstream manufacturers have caught on to the basic bivvy. The UK manufacturer that has really got the message about simple, lightweight, inexpensive bivvy bags is Rab (www.rab.equipment/uk). Its Survival Zone is a ‘mummy’ sack, small and tight like a well-wrapped Egyptian laid out for burial. It weighs 420g, costs under £100, and boasts a simple pull-cord opening. Also well liked is the Alpkit Hunka 375g or XL 500g, with zip and minimal hood, at £50 (https://alpkit.com). I’ve now been using the Terra Nova (www.terra-nova.co.uk) ‘Discovery’ since 2002, and it’s slept on more than 50 summits, including several sub-zero ones (with

Ronald Turnbull’s Terra Nova bivvybag with zip and hood (above) and basic Kathmandu Trekking bag (see start of Chapter 14)

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down sleeping bag). At this level of luxury the Rab Alpine Bivy is perfect apart from the spelling and the price. It weighs 470g, in three-layer eVent, with zip but no hood, costing a bit over £200. For those with large legs but slender wallets, ex-army bags are roomy, rugged and simple. You get a full 800g of high-spec Gore-Tex for about £50. Just search for ‘army bivvy bag’ – www.surplusandoutdoors.com has a wide selection of sturdy, camouflagegreen kit. If you fancy the kind of hooped bivvy that’s pretending to be a tent, you could consider the Outdoor Research Alpine Bivy 907g: hooped, three-layer Gore-Tex, with sleeping-pad straps, internal mesh pocket, and midge net. Or the OR Helium Bivy is in lighter Pertex Shield+ at around 500g (www.outdoorresearch.com). Among the many mail-order retailers, www.backpackinglight.co.uk in the Malvern Hills is run by bivvybag sleepers, so its small range is carefully chosen. (They also have some bivvybag podcasts for free download – a possible added inducement.) Materials and patterns for making your own, and for repairs: Pennine Outdoor (www.pennineoutdoor.co.uk), or Point North (Holyhead – www.profabrics.co.uk). A very valuable repair material for small holes and tears is spinnaker tape, available from any decent online ship chandler. My attic mouse gnawed its way into my bivvy bag in 2002; the spinnaker tape is still keeping out the rain. Pennine Outdoor offers Tenacious Sealing and Repair Tape, which, unlike the useful duct tape, does seem to stick to silicone-proofed clothes and bivvybags. For cleaning and re-proofing, bivvy bags should be treated as breathable clothing, not as tents. Liquids and wax are available from Nikwax (www.nikwax.com) and Grangers (https://grangers.co.uk). A test of waterproofing treatments described in Trail magazine used Comfort fabric softener as a control, and found it outperformed many technical waterproofing treatments costing a hundred times as much. But even the priciest re-proofings are cheaper than a new bag.

Appendix A – Suppliers

163

INDEX A A’ Chruach (Rannoch Moor), bivvy on 144 adenosine triphosphate 115 Aiguille du Peigne, bivvy on 15 Annapurna 111 Appalachian Trail 97 Aztecs 20 B Base Brown, bivvy on 66 basha 50, 106 Beinn a’ Ghlò, bivvy on 58, 159 Beinn Bhàn (Ardgour), bivvy on 95 Beinn Bhreac (Atholl), bivvy on 158 Belfast 80, 83 Ben Ledi, bivvy on 59 Ben More (Mull) 12 Ben More (Mull), bivvy on 113 Ben Nevis, bivvy on 61 binary autofocus grabber 42 bivvy bag, mountain as 24 bivvy bag, rucksack as 31 bivvy bags, cart cloth 21 bivvy bags, ceramic 54 bivvy bags, fur-lined 62 bivvy bags, Gore-Tex 31 bivvy bags, motorbike cover 26 bivvy bags, rawhide 24 bivvy, spelling of 12 Blodig, Dr Karl 112 Bonington, Sir Chris 26, 111 bothies 42, 89, 98, 106, 149 Bowness Knott, bivvy on 67 Bradda Hill, bivvy on 47 breathable membrane 83 Brown, Joe 31 Bryson, Bill 97 C Cairngorms 98 caliga (Roman army sandal) 21 Càrn Liath (Creag Meagaidh), bivvy on 96 Charlie, Bonnie Prince 12, 91 Cho Oyu, bivvy on 32 Christie, Agatha 99 Cima Cadin (Dolomites), bivvy on 155 Coleridge, ST 123, 130

164

Book of the Bivvy

Confucius 64 Croucher, Norman 32 D Dalton, Millican (cave dweller) 39 Dalwhinnie 111 Death Bivouac 25 Diogenes 54, 63 Dolomites 155 Druim Fiaclach (Moidart), bivvy on 90 Dyhrenfurth, Prof. Günter 20, 112 E Eiger, North Face 25 Enterkin Pass (Dumfriesshire) 17 Eskdale (Lake District) 80 F Fast Castle 33 food 47, 89, 102, 107, 109, 147 food, unappetising 23, 56, 105, 108, 110 G gaiters 146 gaiters, disparaged 103 Galloway Highlands 73 Gideon (judge) 70 Glen Shiel 17 Gore, Wilbert L 29 Grandes Jorasses 31 Great Gable, bivvy on 61 Great Outdoors Challenge, the 95, 97 Great Shunner Fell, bivvy on 64 group shelter 50 H Hallin Fell 43 Harrer, Heinrich 25 Heaven, altitude of 10 Helm Crag, bivvy on 7, 147 Helvellyn 128 High Spy, bivvy on 69 I Isle of Man 46 J Jones, Glyn 18, 65, 110

K Kangchenjunga 31, 113 Kerouac, Jack 157 Kinder Scout, bivvy on 59 Kirkpatrick, Andy 148 Kirkstone Pass Inn 35, 63 Knoydart 159 L Loch Enoch 76 Low Fell (Crummock Water), bivvy on 139 M Marley, Bob 15 Matterhorn 28 Merrick, bivvy on 77 Middle Fell (Wasdale), bivvy on 8 midges 86, 100 Miles, Julian 4, 11, 85, 162 Millican Dalton’s Cave 40 moon 122 multi-person shelter 51 Munro’s Tables, Section 9 96

Scott, Sir Walter 20, 24 Sgòran Dubh Mòr, bivvy on 65 Sgùrr na Cìche 13 Sgùrr na Cìche, bivvy on 10 Sgùrr nan Coireachan (Glenfinnan), bivvy on 9, 86, 91 Sheffield Pike, bivvy on 60 Shelter Stone 107 sleeping bags 64, 104, 106, 114, 144 sleeping mat, rucksack as 70 sleeping mats 67, 104, 145 Smythe, Frank 112, 118 Snowdon, bivvy on 14, 65 Southern Upland Way 101, 110 space blankets 17 special forces 12, 106 Stevenson, Robert Louis 21, 23, 88 Stob Ghabhar, bivvy on 11, 79 survival bag, see polybag

N Naranjo de Bulnes 56

T Teflon 29 tent, disparaged 13 Thames, River 17 Tour of Monte Rosa 100

O Otter, Mrs 52

U Ullswater 137

P Packe, Charles 24 pack weight 101 Pillar Rock 67 plaid 114, 141 polybag 16 Priest’s Hole (Dove Crag, Patterdale) 35, 137

V Vörg, Ludwig (Bivouac King) 26

R rattlesnakes 100 Rébuffat, Gaston 29, 31 Rothiemurchus forest 97 Russell-Killough, Count Henry 24 Ruta Integral de los Tres Miles 149 S Sacher-Masoch, Count Leopold von 61 Scafell Pike, bivvy on 57

W Wainwright, AW 39, 137 Waller, Ivan 157 West Highland Way 100 White Hill (Bowland), bivvy on 114 White Spider, The (Harrer) 16, 25 Wordsworth, William 29, 39, 123, 130 Wye, River 29 Z Zdarsky-sack 28 zip 68 zip discipline 48, 68, 87

Index   – 

165

Evening on Middle Fell above Nether Wasdale

Notes

Notes

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Listing of Cicerone guides BRITISH ISLES CHALLENGES, COLLECTIONS AND ACTIVITIES

Cycling Land’s End to John o’ Groats The Big Rounds The Book of the Bothy The C2C Cycle Route The End to End Cycle Route The Mountains of England and Wales: Vol 1 Wales The Mountains of England and Wales: Vol 2 England The National Trails Walking The End to End Trail SCOTLAND

Backpacker’s Britain: Northern Scotland Ben Nevis and Glen Coe Cycle Touring in Northern Scotland Cycling in the Hebrides Great Mountain Days in Scotland Mountain Biking in Southern and Central Scotland Mountain Biking in West and North West Scotland Not the West Highland Way Scotland Scotland’s Best Small Mountains Scotland’s Mountain Ridges Skye’s Cuillin Ridge Traverse The Ayrshire and Arran Coastal Paths The Borders Abbeys Way The Great Glen Way The Great Glen Way Map Booklet The Hebridean Way The Hebrides The Isle of Mull The Isle of Skye The Skye Trail The Southern Upland Way The Speyside Way The Speyside Way Map Booklet The West Highland Way The West Highland Way Map Booklet Walking Highland Perthshire Walking in the Cairngorms Walking in the Pentland Hills Walking in the Scottish Borders Walking in the Southern Uplands Walking in Torridon Walking Loch Lomond and the Trossachs Walking on Arran Walking on Harris and Lewis Walking on Jura, Islay and Colonsay Walking on Rum and the Small Isles

Walking on the Orkney and Shetland Isles Walking on Uist and Barra Walking the Cape Wrath Trail Walking the Corbetts Vol 1 South of the Great Glen Vol 2 North of the Great Glen Walking the Galloway Hills Walking the Munros Vol 1 – Southern, Central and Western Highlands Vol 2 – Northern Highlands and the Cairngorms Winter Climbs Ben Nevis and Glen Coe Winter Climbs in the Cairngorms NORTHERN ENGLAND TRAILS

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The Lancashire Cycleway The Lune Valley and Howgills Walking in Cumbria’s Eden Valley Walking in Lancashire Walking in the Forest of Bowland and Pendle Walking on the Isle of Man Walking on the West Pennine Moors Walks in Silverdale and Arnside LAKE DISTRICT

Cycling in the Lake District Great Mountain Days in the Lake District Lake District Winter Climbs Lake District: High Level and Fell Walks Lake District: Low Level and Lake Walks Mountain Biking in the Lake District Outdoor Adventures with Children – Lake District Scrambles in the Lake District – North Scrambles in the Lake District – South The Cumbria Way Trail and Fell Running in the Lake District Walking the Lake District Fells: Borrowdale Buttermere Coniston Keswick Langdale Mardale and the Far East Patterdale Wasdale DERBYSHIRE, PEAK DISTRICT AND MIDLANDS

Cycling in the Peak District Dark Peak Walks Scrambles in the Dark Peak Walking in Derbyshire Walking in the Peak District – White Peak East SOUTHERN ENGLAND

20 Classic Sportive Rides in South East England 20 Classic Sportive Rides in South West England Cycling in the Cotswolds Mountain Biking on the North Downs Mountain Biking on the South Downs Suffolk Coast and Heath Walks The Cotswold Way

The Cotswold Way Map Booklet The Great Stones Way The Kennet and Avon Canal The Lea Valley Walk The North Downs Way The North Downs Way Map Booklet The Peddars Way and Norfolk Coast Path The Pilgrims’ Way The Ridgeway Map Booklet The Ridgeway National Trail The South Downs Way The South Downs Way Map Booklet The Thames Path The Thames Path Map Booklet The Two Moors Way The Two Moors Way Map Booklet Walking Hampshire’s Test Way Walking in Cornwall Walking in Essex Walking in Kent Walking in London Walking in Norfolk Walking in the Chilterns Walking in the Cotswolds Walking in the Isles of Scilly Walking in the New Forest Walking in the North Wessex Downs Walking in the Thames Valley Walking on Dartmoor Walking on Guernsey Walking on Jersey Walking on the Isle of Wight Walking the Jurassic Coast Walking the South West Coast Path Walking the South West Coast Path Map Booklets: Vol 1: Minehead to St Ives Vol 2: St Ives to Plymouth Vol 3: Plymouth to Poole Walks in the South Downs National Park WALES AND WELSH BORDERS

Cycle Touring in Wales Cycling Lon Las Cymru Glyndwr’s Way Great Mountain Days in Snowdonia Hillwalking in Shropshire Hillwalking in Wales – Vols 1& 2 Mountain Walking in Snowdonia Offa’s Dyke Path Offa’s Dyke Path Map Booklet Ridges of Snowdonia Scrambles in Snowdonia Snowdonia: 30 Low-level and easy walks – North

Snowdonia: 30 Low-level and easy walks – South The Cambrian Way The Ceredigion and Snowdonia Coast Paths The Pembrokeshire Coast Path The Pembrokeshire Coast Path Map Booklet The Severn Way The Snowdonia Way The Wales Coast Path The Wye Valley Walk Walking in Carmarthenshire Walking in Pembrokeshire Walking in the Forest of Dean Walking in the Wye Valley Walking on the Brecon Beacons Walking on the Gower Walking the Shropshire Way INTERNATIONAL CHALLENGES, COLLECTIONS AND ACTIVITIES

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Kilimanjaro The High Atlas Walking in the Drakensberg Walks and Scrambles in the Moroccan Anti-Atlas ALPS CROSS-BORDER ROUTES

100 Hut Walks in the Alps Alpine Ski Mountaineering Vol 1 – Western Alps Alpine Ski Mountaineering Vol 2 – Central and Eastern Alps Chamonix to Zermatt The Karnischer Hohenweg The Tour of the Bernina Tour of Monte Rosa Tour of the Matterhorn Trail Running – Chamonix and the Mont Blanc region Trekking in the Alps Trekking in the Silvretta and Ratikon Alps Trekking Munich to Venice Trekking the Tour of Mont Blanc Walking in the Alps PYRENEES AND FRANCE/SPAIN CROSS-BORDER ROUTES

Shorter Treks in the Pyrenees The GR10 Trail The GR11 Trail The Pyrenean Haute Route The Pyrenees Walks and Climbs in the Pyrenees

AUSTRIA

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The Danube Cycleway Vol 2 The High Tatras The Mountains of Romania Walking in Bulgaria’s National Parks Walking in Hungary FRANCE, BELGIUM AND LUXEMBOURG

Chamonix Mountain Adventures Cycle Touring in France Cycling London to Paris Cycling the Canal de la Garonne Cycling the Canal du Midi Mont Blanc Walks Mountain Adventures in the Maurienne Short Treks on Corsica The GR20 Corsica The GR5 Trail The GR5 Trail – Benelux and Lorraine The GR5 Trail – Vosges and Jura The Grand Traverse of the Massif Central The Loire Cycle Route The Moselle Cycle Route The River Rhone Cycle Route The Way of St James – Le Puy to the Pyrenees Tour of the Queyras Trekking the Robert Louis Stevenson Trail Vanoise Ski Touring Via Ferratas of the French Alps Walking in Corsica Walking in Provence – East Walking in Provence – West Walking in the Ardennes Walking in the Auvergne Walking in the Brianconnais Walking in the Dordogne Walking in the Haute Savoie: North Walking in the Haute Savoie: South GERMANY

Hiking and Cycling in the Black Forest The Danube Cycleway Vol 1 The Rhine Cycle Route The Westweg Walking in the Bavarian Alps

HIMALAYA

NORTH AMERICA

Annapurna Everest: A Trekker’s Guide The Mount Kailash Trek Trekking in Bhutan Trekking in Ladakh Trekking in the Himalaya

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IRELAND

The Wild Atlantic Way and Western Ireland Walking the Wicklow Way ITALY

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The High Mountains of Crete Trekking in Greece Treks and Climbs in Wadi Rum, Jordan Walking and Trekking in Zagori Walking and Trekking on Corfu Walking in Cyprus Walking on Malta Walking on the Greek Islands – the Cyclades

SOUTH AMERICA

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Camino de Santiago: Camino Frances Coastal Walks in Andalucia Cycle Touring in Spain Cycling the Camino de Santiago Mountain Walking in Mallorca Mountain Walking in Southern Catalunya Portugal’s Rota Vicentina Spain’s Sendero Historico: The GR1 The Andalucian Coast to Coast Walk The Camino del Norte and Camino Primitivo The Camino Ingles and Ruta do Mar The Camino Portugues The Mountains of Nerja The Mountains of Ronda and Grazalema The Sierras of Extremadura Trekking in Mallorca Trekking in the Canary Islands Trekking the GR7 in Andalucia Walking and Trekking in the Sierra Nevada Walking in Andalucia Walking in Menorca Walking in Portugal Walking in the Algarve Walking in the Cordillera Cantabrica Walking on Gran Canaria Walking on La Gomera and El Hierro Walking on La Palma

Walking on Lanzarote and Fuerteventura Walking on Madeira Walking on Tenerife Walking on the Azores Walking on the Costa Blanca Walking the Camino dos Faros SWITZERLAND

Switzerland’s Jura Crest Trail The Swiss Alpine Pass Route – Via Alpina Route 1 The Swiss Alps Tour of the Jungfrau Region Walking in the Bernese Oberland Walking in the Engadine – Switzerland Walking in the Valais Walking in Zermatt and Saas-Fee TECHNIQUES

Fastpacking Geocaching in the UK Map and Compass Outdoor Photography Polar Exploration The Mountain Hut Book MINI GUIDES

Alpine Flowers Navigation Pocket First Aid and Wilderness Medicine Snow MOUNTAIN LITERATURE

8000 metres A Walk in the Clouds Abode of the Gods Fifty Years of Adventure The Pennine Way – the Path, the People, the Journey Unjustifiable Risk?

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