here, the mountain becomes a podium. Views open, and the eastern distance hits you with a vision of astonishing depth. There was Beinn Eighe, curled like the rim of an old caldera, brittle quartzite dusting its flanks like fine flour; Baosbheinn and Beinn an Eòin to the north, watchful twins overlooking torpedo-shaped Loch na h-Oidhche between them. And beyond, the watery hinterland of the Flowerdale Forest, a broad place of loch, mountain, bog and bug stretching to the long natural divide of Loch Maree, seven miles to the north. Detail was hazy, but the mountains’ outlines were clear, black shapes in the murk.
My companion in the view all the way up Beinn Dearg to the west was perhaps Torridon’s most distinguished mountain, Beinn Alligin – which, as I’d climbed, had gradually sharpened and shifted from being a huge mass of terraced rock to becoming a shapely, flat-topped cone fluted with dark gullies. With its neat architecture and straight edges it looked as if it had been folded like a steepled napkin. So unique. So charismatic.
The winner in the spectacle stakes, however, didn’t show itself until I made the final walk to Beinn Dearg’s summit. The last stretch to reach it is a bowed whaleback of a ridge, slung like a rickety bridge between the two high points. The most logical line takes you within handshaking distance of the massive drop into Beinn Dearg’s secretive inner valley – the floor of which is drowned by the black waters of Loch a’ Choire Mhòir.
Happily, the only difficulty here was just one move, little more than a long step. There was a drop – but so long as I didn’t dwell on it, only a head appearing from a hole at my feet could startle me into getting it wrong. Soon I was on the other side of the crags. Breathing hard but happy, I began to walk up the final easy slope to the broad summit of Beinn Dearg, beyond which, rising steadily into view, lay one of the great mountain sights of Britain.
From Beinn Dearg’s little-trodden high point, the view of Liathach (the ‘Grey One’, probably in reference to its quartzite scree) is spectacularly vivid: a long battlement of peaks resembling the cardiograph of a racing heart. From the main road in Glen Torridon it’s just a lump. You have to walk miles to see this, and to view it at its best you need to climb. It’s the reward you get for being intrepid: a great sight, and once seen, your perspective of scale within Britain’s humble little archipelago may well shift for good. Amongst mountain walkers, Liathach is famous, and much coveted as a prize. But the view I was getting from Beinn Dearg was much rarer – an unbeatable vantage point that, as I’d found, was no easy win itself. But I’d made it. Here I was, for the second time, on the summit of Beinn Dearg: the culmination – and exact halfway point – of a 1,000-mile round trip.
There was the summit marker cairn: a modest, human-piled heap of native rocks, one the shape of an incisor tooth poking out of the top to the height of my shoulder. Within that cairn – somewhere around the height of my hip – was the 3,000-foot contour line.
And herewith lies the great irony of Beinn Dearg, and the third reason I’d chosen to climb this mountain above all others hereabouts. Beinn Dearg is considered the least noteworthy of Torridon’s central quartet of mountains, not for lacking challenge, nor spectacle, nor location: it has all of these in plenty. Despite being the nucleus of the area that contains Liathach, Beinn Eighe and Beinn Alligin, the mountain is ignored by the bulk of human traffic because it’s 30 inches too short. Thirty inches: that’s the distance between the sole of my boot and the middle of my thigh. You cannot imagine how spectacularly, how ridiculously insignificant that is in mountain terms. A 3,000-foot mountain is 36,000 inches high; 30 inches represents 0.08 per cent of its total height. On a 6-foot person, that’s the equivalent of cutting just under two millimetres of hair from the very top of their head, then dismissing them for being inconsequentially small. The reason for this is that 3,000 feet is quite an important measurement for a mountain in Scotland; it’s the height at which a mountain becomes a Munro.
There are, at the time of writing, 282 Munros in Scotland. I say ‘at the time of writing’ – new mountains don’t appear or disappear at a rate necessary to be monitored by hillwalkers, after all – because nobody can really decide what actually constitutes a Munro. The original list was compiled by a London-born, Scottish-raised baronet, Sir Hugh Munro, as a way of categorising the hills of his familial homeland into some sort of quantifiable system. It was published in 1891, and surprised most by its sheer length; most people thought Scotland harboured a mere handful of mountains over 3,000 feet, so the whole thing was a splendid surprise.
But despite being thorough, Munro wasn’t particularly specific. His Tables reflected what he considered ‘separate mountains above 3,000 feet’, but he neglected to define what constituted ‘separate,’ and this is of course unsatisfactory for today’s levels of numerical scrutiny. Alas, much quarrelling continues about which peaks should and shouldn’t be on the list, and it all gets terribly complicated. The debates on the matter are filled with terms such as ‘overall drop’, ‘relative height’ and ‘subsidiary tops’, which all broadly circle around the fact that nowhere did Munro give a specific figure for how tall a summit had to be in relation to the one next to it to qualify it as a separate mountain – and therefore a true Munro.
The reason this all matters is that ‘bagging’ the Munros, as well as subsequent (and generally rather more specific) mountain lists such as the Corbetts, Grahams, Hewitts and Marilyns – not forgetting the Lake District hills chronicled by celebrated guidebook scribe Alfred Wainwright – has become a way of quantifying experience and achievement, a means of systematising and categorising something which, by its nature, is the antithesis of order and reason: walking into the wilderness, and climbing up something for no other motive other than you can. And – of course! – because it’s there.* Frustrating, annoyingly pedantic and wonderfully idiosyncratic. In short, splendidly British.
As of May 2013, some 5,000 people have completed all of the Munros, some of them having done so twice, a few without stopping. That’s an awesome achievement. Superhuman, even.
Yet how many of those people looked up at Beinn Dearg, saw it, and thought: ‘Wow! But not on my list,’ before shuffling on?
It’s all a lot of fun and certainly makes a pleasingly functional answer to the perennial question ‘Why climb a mountain’ (Answer: ‘I’ve got them written down on this piece of paper, so I have to’). And whatever legacy Hugh Munro left when he died of influenza in 1919 – presumably without someone sitting anxiously at his bedside imploring him to write a number, any number, down on this piece of paper before you go, old chap, because one day this could be important – you have to admire his style. Other than that 3,000-foot criterion, Munro went on instinct rather than anything more mathematical; it was simply a question of how grand a summit felt. And at its core this all brings us back to the argument of what is and what isn’t a mountain. It really doesn’t matter. If it feels like a mountain, then it is one.
I didn’t have time to do the Munros, even if I wanted to. I certainly couldn’t do all the Corbetts, or even the Wainwrights. I admired and envied the experiences of all those who did, but I couldn’t invest the precious time I had to spend in the mountains to one geographical area, and certainly not to the same narrow band of the vertical scale.
Stand on Beinn Dearg’s summit, make a little indentation in your thigh, and take a moment to consider your context – there’s the Atlantic, there’s the river, wriggling along far below, and here you are, alone amongst it – and you’ll realise how little numbers matter when it comes to climbing mountains. Beinn Dearg is a mountain: each and every one of its 35,970 inches builds towards a top of such elevated spectacle, you’d be mad to discount it on any basis, let alone it not making the coveted slate of a man whose life occupied but a flash of its own existence.
I looked at my watch. Six p.m. It had taken far more time than I’d thought to reach the summit and darkness would soon start falling. Cloud was beginning to
