were too far for all but the toughest and most athletic: too far for the entire female sex. Today, 30,000 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, who was 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 2.85kg/6lb (5.7kg/12lb 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 hob-nailed leather sandals; auxiliaries preferred the lightweight boot called caligula. One report describes the caligula 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 would 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 Munro-bagging. 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 10lb to the effective weight. And that effective weight already included the tent of the time: 11lb 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, 100 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 bivvybag.
‘This child of my invention was nearly 6ft square (i.e. 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 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 recorded night out 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 in 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.’
But even earlier, in 1858, the explorer Charles Packe was backpacking across the Pyrenean High-level Route, and sleeping out on the summits of Lakeland.
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 bivvybag. After digging several caves into the side of 3298m/10,824ft Vignemale, he had himself buried overnight at the summit. His head alone stuck out into the clouds, and frost formed in his beard.
But whatever we think of the rival claims of Packe and Stevenson, it’s clear that the mystic exploitation of the bivvybag goes back much further than either of them. The quotation at the head of this chapter is from the 4th 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.’
Informal bedroom of the fifth century: St Ninian’s Cave at Whithorn
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
