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, William L Gore discovered Teflon and started wondering what it was for. ‘Teflon’ (which is a registered trademark) 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 Gore 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 Bivvybag was about to begin.
Chapter 3 THE BREATHABLE BAG
FIVE NIGHTS IN GREEN PLASTIC
1 Overnight Ochils
You can’t find more suitable hills to walk in moonlight than the grassy Ochils. No need to use torches on these easy slopes, and the views are even better in the dark because of the lights. The Ochil valleys are deep holes of darkness, and a great orange sea of sodium light stretches away to the south.
We unrolled bivvybags in a grassy canyon between two hills, with a small stream trickling somewhere. Here we lay in a floating bowl, looking out and down at the cities of the plain.
The thistles were so comfortable we overslept till 5am. The water bottles froze in the night and so did we – but it didn’t matter about the water bottles as mine had been left lying downhill, so the ice was all at the end where the little lid wasn’t. Dawn crept up from behind, warming the fingers and sculpting the hills with rounded light. The Forth valley was all mist, with oil refineries sticking up like island castles; their chimneys poured wide white stripes across the morning. Vapours ebbed and flowed like slow thoughts in the mind of a giant whose alarm clock hasn’t gone off yet.
There’s a certain incentive not to get up – it’s literally freezing out there. On the other hand, it’s also very cold here in the bag, and the only way to get warm will be to get moving. We’ll eat once our fingers thaw.
Weak sunlight gleamed on the distant Firth of Forth and on us. Four hours into the walk, we met our first fellow-walkers. And down in civilised Stirling at lunchtime, it was quite a surprise to find overnight ice still knocking about in the water bottle.
2 Wet Wooler in November
The green undulations stretching dully to the horizon; the solitude; the wet bedclothes – I’d be a single-handed yachtsman if I could pay for the boat. As it is, I must make do with the not terribly dry land of the Southern Uplands. A crossing of the bottom of Scotland in November offers every important feature of the solo transatlantic except seasickness.
Walking in the dark does strange things to the mind. After an hour of stumbling through mud, 7pm felt like the middle of the night. I was, on my eventual return to houses and electric light, to suffer from jetlag. The map ahead said, ‘stream, plantation; high valley walls’ – in other words, bedroom – and the map didn’t lie. I unrolled the bivvybag on a voluptuous bed of pine needles below the branches.
In November, if nights are clear they’re unbearably cold; otherwise it rains. This was one of the warm wet ones, so I slept for quite a bit of the time. In the expensive sort of bag, you zip yourself into a featureless green slug-shape the same at both ends, and alarm innocent householders when they wake to find you on their lawn. My bag is what it says: a simple bag. So it was necessary to wake up every hour to drink the water in the entrance before it flowed over the doorstep.
Untroubled even by thirst, then, I lay listening to the drips till six in the morning before setting off through the drips to look for the Cheviots.
3 Hoover Bag
On a May evening in 1994, I lay between two tufts of heather, 450m/1500ft above the town of Callander, immediately below a vivid sunset in green and orange stripes. A lump of hill blocked off the cold wind out of the north – it also blocked off the leaping skyline of Stuc a’ Chroin and Ben Vorlich.
Those Munros didn’t matter. My eyes and thoughts were fixed on two peaty lumps to the south. Uamh Bheag (pronounced, very roughly, hoover bag) lies south of the geological Highland Line and is therefore a Donald, though in those days not listed in the tables as such. And I was about to attempt a record-breaking 10-day run over all 148 of those small southern Scottish hills.
Before a long run, it’s important to get a good night’s sleep. The heather was scented and dry to lie on, the sunset was soothing. Wind whispered through miles of surrounding grassland. I pulled the sleeping bag tight around my face and closed my eyes.
My morning preparations were simple. Two of Mr Kipling’s apple pies, eaten in bed with gloves on. Shoes on, roll up the bag, and away. First hilltop 10 minutes later, at 5.07am; start the stopwatch and start running. Only another 147 to go…
4 Man Management
An island is simply a ridgewalk with the sea at each end and also on both sides.
A motorbike can get right round the Isle of Man in 18 minutes. On foot there’s more to it than several very sharp bends and some cattle-grids painted gorsebush orange (not just to match the actual gorsebushes, 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 33 miles with several hills in.
But the aeroplane doesn’t leave till 11am. A bivvybag dawn would give not just a sunrise over the sea but five hours of morning to walk through. And a bivvybag rucksack makes 33 miles 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 still visible 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 bivvybag, 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.
Bike and bivvybag: heading onto Cross Fell
5 Saddle Bag
The day had not been easy. Silly you feel, sitting behind a bicycle on a station platform for two hours waiting for a train that’s late. And on the cyclepath from Whitehaven, strong wind in the face, then strong wind and rain, then strong wind and snow. I came down into Keswick
