Contents

Introduction

I was actually at a meeting to talk about something else entirely when somebody suggested that I could present a programme about mountains for the BBC.

‘But I know nothing about mountains,’ I bleated.

‘That’s excellent,’ the executive replied. ‘It will be a new experience for you.’

‘But isn’t there a certain amount of skill involved?’

‘Well, we can see you mastering those.’

‘And if I don’t master them?’

‘That’s good television.’

So I was recruited, or press-ganged even. This is the story of that trip, which took up a lot of 2006, but it is obviously not a mountaineer’s account. I was a virgin climber and a trembling one. I had once crawled up the volcano Stromboli hoping to dodge fridge-sized rocks. I had been skiing in various parts of Switzerland. I had even crossed the High Atlas in a Fiat Punto. I thought I knew what a mountain was like. I was wrong. Now I have climbed fifteen British mountains, some of them three or four times in a row for the cameras. I have scrambled, bouldered and scaled. By climbers’ standards, of course, I have done nothing, but I do feel, well… experienced.

As a virgin, I was a little sceptical to begin with. Was the discomfort going to be worth the effort? Apart from a little panting, could it really make a man of me? Was I really going to walk down my flat city streets with a new glint in my eye and a swagger in my step? You can judge for yourself. There were some minor physical challenges, to which I usually failed to rise, and a smattering of minor orgasmic summiteering moments. But what began to fascinate me as an outsider was the history of the vertical world I encountered. By walking into the hills I discovered that mountains are a separate environment, a different territory with their own rules, where for thousands of years people have lived, but with difficulty, where bad men have fled, where dreamers have escaped, where ordinary people have struggled to survive and where elements of everyday existence long since abandoned on the easy flat lands have hung on right up to the present age. And on every climb there came a moment when we crossed a stile or climbed a wet gully or breasted a ridge when we suddenly broke through into an undisturbed, wild place, bare, open, ravaged by previous ice ages and largely left to itself: a real wilderness on an overcrowded island.

Almost a third of our country is covered in mountains. This is a minor introduction to some of the people who have been there and lived there. It would have astonished Mr Tarrant in the fifth form but I did become fascinated by the way that geography can affect our lives and shape our history. British hills hatched rebellions, attracted speculators, sheltered eccentrics, powered industry and prompted scientific investigation. So there is a little bit of that sort of stuff here, in among the subjective whimpers and triumphs.

Of course I didn’t go on my own. Cubby, Mark, Fraser and other experts were with me all the time. They not only showed me the ropes, lovely purple ones too, but listened to my wild prattling and suffered my prickly inexperience. There were cameramen and assistant producers and directors too who struggled up slopes and sheltered in wet hotels. They are largely hidden in this account, as they were in the resulting series. But one thing rather frightened me, a portent of the new media reality, I suppose. In all our bold company I was definitely the oldest person in the unit. ‘Are you all right, Griff?’ was too common an enquiry. Yes, thank you. I’m only fifty-four,’ was a grumpy common response. It took my wife to point out to me that I was in fact only fifty-two. I couldn’t really hide my inadequacy behind pretend advanced old age. Damn.

But at the end of months of trudging and exploring, climbing and clambering, I have to admit that this fifty-two-year-old virgin was left with one inescapable question. ‘What took me so long?’ The hills were an extraordinary and unexpected experience and as I sit here writing this I find I am hankering to go back. I hope, when you read this account, you will be able to see why.

1. North-West Scotland

Crouched in a Cessna at ten thousand feet I could finally understand why blokes with preposterous facial hair called aircraft ‘crates’. The doors were aluminium straws with a shell of silver paper. If I leaned too hard against the side I was going to leave my own shape pressed in the frame. The entire plane seemed to bend and crumple as we flipped around like a paper bag in a wind tunnel.

My pilot’s company was running out of Loch Lomond. ‘We’re going to take tourists, fishermen and landowners out to the furthest isles,’ he shouted over the roar. Now he was taking me by the quickest route to the far north west of Britain.

As we crawled around massive lumps of hill and thundered laboriously along valleys neutralized with snow, I dimly realized that that thin cotton thread of a line across the bottom was the main road between Altnaharra and Inverness. On the map there was satisfying emptiness, and emptiness in our crowded island is rare, except that – and I apologize if this seems blunderingly obvious – it wasn’t empty. The space was filled by mountains – an upthrusting territory that needed endurance to cross. True, the airplane could curve effortlessly around that beetling cliff. A car, with its powerful built-in laziness, could slip straight up hills and down the other side. But the road followed the line of least resistance and added miles to a journey, snaking round the low route, avoiding heavy, difficult climbs. These ranges I was flying through were in truth just as inhospitable as those mid-European Alps I had crossed so many times by giant jet-liner.

Six hundred miles from London, on this white day, approaching the slinky, silver Kyle of Tongue, we were descending on the very tip of Sutherland, a place more akin to the wastes of Greenland than the rest of Europe. Beyond the mule-grey skin of the estuary itself, the freezing North Atlantic stretched away to the next hard surface – the polar cap. We breasted the western edge, turned and slewed downwards on to the water in a cascade of freezing white. At the head of the huge shallow lagoon a broken nose rose up against a darkening sky. This was Ben Loyal. Any reservations I may have felt about the status of British mountainhood were blown away in a slithering vista unfolding through a veil of spray.

I stepped gingerly on to a float and into a boat. Andy Beveridge was waiting to take me to the shore. He was a razor-clam fisherman. The kyle was a silted harbour. There was a causeway bisecting it and the road ran across and off along south to Lairg. Ben Loyal dominated his working beat.

There are, of course, greater ranges in Europe. The Matterhorn is higher by two miles. But as anybody who has gone skiing knows, the route to the high slopes in the Alps happens via miles of foothills and lesser bumps. Here 2000 feet of crumpled horn rose straight from sea level. It was magnificent. Andy saw me looking.

‘Are you going up it?’

‘No,’ I shrugged. I was going to try to get up Ben Hope, out of sight and round the corner. Ben Loyal may have been imperious but at 2865 feet it wasn’t high enough even to count as a Munro, the name given to any mountain in Scotland over 3000 feet, in honour of the man who first set out to map and climb them all, Hugh Munro. There are 284 Munros. The trick now is to do them in one single month, or backwards, or without a break. Ben Hope was to be my first. But Ben Loyal, the lesser peak, was enough to cow me into silence. ‘What about you?’ I asked after a while.

‘Oh aye, I’ve done it with the kids, you know, as a holiday thing. It’s a good view, if you get it.’

He meant that the mists came down and obscured the peak so frequently that we were lucky to see the mountain clearly now.

‘You can see it better sometimes in the winter. But it’ll be cold up there, I should think.’

This from a man who, if he hadn’t been picking me up, would have been, even on this raw day, down over the side, with an air supply in his gob, sifting through the sand to drag up the long, boxy shellfish for the Chinese restaurant trade.

That night in my tiny room in Tongue I laid out my own kit and re-read my Basic Guide to Hill Walking. Nine hundred pages of close print – not bad for an activity I had mastered reasonably effectively since I was two. This was another testament to the otherness of the mountains. Ninety-nine per cent of the book was warning. Warning about the weather, warning about the cold, warning about the accident potential of loose stone, or hard stone (slippery), or steep grass (even more slippery). The ease with which people can get lost. The difficulty of finding a way in fog. The foolishness of blowing a whistle for pleasure (when the tooting whistle may be the only hope of rescue). Planning, pre-planning, eating, sleeping; everything was intrinsically unsafe or deadly. The entire book seemed designed to frighten people off.

For the first time I tried to sort out what I had brought with me, under instruction, as it were. My collection of kit covered the bed, the floor and parts of the wall. I certainly didn’t want to take everything up a mountain, if at all possible. The anorak was obviously useful, except that it was no longer an anorak. It was a ‘shell’. The science of dressing, presumably after close consultation with the Mothers’ Union, had been subject to injunctions about being nice and warm, and ‘feeling the benefit’.

First there was a base layer. I had some of that. The secret is not to sweat and yet to be warm, to enclose but still to breathe. Having swathed oneself in light but breathable fabric, tight against the skin, this was covered with that woolly stand-by: the fleece, in various thicknesses, one for climbing and one for standing about in, which meant the alternative was bunged into the knapsack. (Sorry, I call my backpack a ‘knapsack’ from some nagging folk memory. What is a ‘knap’ anyway?) There were heavy, unyielding boots with laces that went right down to the toes. There were some peculiar flappy things made of Gore-tex, called gaiters, which zipped and strapped around the boots in a simple fashion, if you allowed for about six hours of fiddling. My trousers were, even then, merely a shell, because I had some super-tight, Laurence-Olivier-as-Richard-III, black leggings to wrap over my bulging calves, and a pair of excellent nubbly socks to go on top.

I had everything I needed. My immediate problem was that I had everything I didn’t need as well. Obviously I was going to be cold. So I had packed all those multicoloured thermal long underpants and woolly socks that we had accumulated skiing. They were not very scientifically packed. A number of them actually belonged to my wife – probably the ones with the lacy trim.

But the clothing was as nothing. There were drinking bags with catheter-like tubes for sipping at the vital supplies of water (dehydration was a great enemy on the mountainside), head-lights for descending, gloves, spare pairs of gloves, whistles, flasks for spare water, map cases, food in silvery plastic bags, compasses, emergency rations, blankets, lip salve, junk, more junk and a single ski pole, supposedly important for balance and control. This was a serious business.

It snowed in the night. I woke a little light-headed. The breakfast weather forecast announced that the coldest place in the whole of Britain had been at minus eighteen. That was us. We were that minus sign.

By the immutable law of accommodation, half the film crew were staying in another hotel. Somehow we had to get together. I dressed in every layer, as instructed, and waddled out into the magic kingdom of crunchy whiteness, looking and feeling a little like Buzz Aldrin. Scott, my driver, ex-special forces and a former intelligence agent, heaved me into the front of the hired Vauxhall. The wheels spun excitedly. The snow rose around us.

At that moment a snowplough came thundering along. They had cleared the roads as far as Altnaharra. It was standard practice: the mail and the papers had to get through. Scott asked whether the plough could clear the back route round to the side of Ben Hope.

Alex the driver puckered his face under his bobble hat. ‘Not usually, no. What are you wanting out that way?’ The farmer had his own four-wheel-drive. He usually cleared the route with a tractor.

‘We’re going up Ben Hope.’

‘Not in this weather you’re not.’

‘I think we’ll be able to manage it.’

‘No, you don’t understand me. You’re not going up! I work for the Mountain Rescue.’

Scott began to explain that we were all right. This was television. We had a talisman. We would be escorted by the rest of the Mountain Rescue team.

The snowplough man seemed unconvinced. The Astra was stuck anyway. But luckily the hotel owner had a four-wheel-drive, gas-guzzling behemoth. This was no status vehicle. It was essential in Sutherland. It certainly was to anyone who wanted to climb Ben Hope in a blizzard.

It was nine miles to the bottom of the mountain, through a landscape of monotone textures. Between Altnaharra and Tongue, the snow added a smoothing effect, but the lochs and burns were wrinkled ammonite at one end and sharp, frozen blue at the other.

A small wooden sign announced ‘Ben Hope’ and pointed the way across a trackless snow field. It seemed incongruous. We were now, I guessed, standing in what would usually be a demarcated car park for the casual rambler. A broad river valley wound away to the north. There was a distant huddle of farm buildings, but the valley was otherwise empty and blanked by the snow. It looked prehistoric, except that, perched on an outcrop of high land commanding a view both ways, was a round stone fortress built originally by the Picts. So it was actually historic.

This valley had been worth defending for some 3000 years. Around the time the fort was built it would have been largely cleared of trees. The bleak, primeval emptiness was an illusion. It was empty by human choice. Indeed it would have been snowy like this, in a permanent manner, only 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age. It is now believed that the huge frozen ice field that covered this place, and the sea beyond as far as the pole, the force that gouged out the valley where we stood, may well have melted in the space of a few decades around 10,000 bc. It was probably followed by a period of extremely palatable global warming, certainly warm enough to bring early hunters and nomads up here pretty quickly.

I was going up 3040 feet with Cameron McNeish, a writer, adventurer and Munro-bagger with a nice beard and an infectious enthusiasm, who laughed at my onion skins of clothing and persuaded me to take off one of my fleeces. ‘It is sensible to set off feeling slightly cold,’ he explained. ‘You’ll get hot soon enough and find yourself sweating.’

Cameron has been editor of The Great Outdoors magazine since 1991. He completed his first round of Munros in the same year. This was a walk in the park for him.

He took my ski pole, showed me how to twist out the telescopic extensions to the right length and we trudged off, beginning by following, as was so often to become the case, a watercourse cutting down the mountain and providing a handy cascade of rocks to climb.

We had bargained for bad weather and now we had it. One hundred and forty-four schools across Scotland were shut that morning. By the evening the A roads would be closed. Luckily it wasn’t blowing any frosty winds as we left. There was blue sky overhead, deformed by towering, grey-black cumulus, and littered with a spattering of flakes. The stream fell down through black pools heavy with ice and dotted with spectacular miniature waterfalls of icicles.

‘It’s arctic mountaineering up here,’ Cameron said proudly, ‘because the winds come straight from the Pole. These…’ and he pointed up at the beetling broken pointed summit, ‘are arctic mountains.’ I stuck out my lower lip and nodded.

There were probably no more than a dozen trees on the entirety of Ben Hope and they were crouched down in the cleft where we started, frosted and sugared with snow. Cameron picked his way ahead through the rocks and ice and I followed dutifully, reminded of Good King Wenceslas as I trod in his deep foot holes.

I was like a child, though, unwilling to settle in for the long haul. Impatient and frisky, I had glimpsed the peak through a break in the clouds. It looked impressively high and alpine, but somehow I could hardly conceive the sort of journey this was going to be. I was jigging on, thrusting ahead a little, probably keen to impress Cameron with my own enthusiasm, but this was going to be a proper trek and there would be distance and effort involved.

‘You always gain height surprisingly quickly,’ Cameron remarked. And he was right. We had been puffing on for no more than fifteen minutes but the perspective was already changing. Other peaks were emerging above the horizon. The valley now seemed way below us. The Pictish fort had shrunk to a thimble in the white landscape. Already I was feeling exuberant. We were heading up and away from people and roads. There were no hedges to cross or gates to shut. We were up in an abandoned waste. To the west, the ledge we were on lifted up and followed the top of a huge black cliff. The wind picked up. As we clambered higher, tiny icy balls of compacted snow, hard and stinging, flew in our faces. ‘Graupple,’ said Cameron.

Typically this was a Swiss-German term, like ‘rucksack’ or ‘alpenstock’. The sport of climbing had been developed and refined by the British when we were the rich and adventurous centre of the civilized world. But the tough and foolhardy young men who pioneered the sport in the 1850s had done so in the Alps. Hugh Munro had climbed these British mountains in the late nineteenth century. The Scottish Mountaineering Club was not even founded until 1889.

‘God’s chandeliers,’ said Cameron, pointing at the bulbous configurations of icicles in the frozen waterfalls, but also God’s transparent undersea creatures, or God’s Polish art glassware. It was steep going. I was no longer feeling snug or smug. I was grunting for breath a bit and beginning to sweat.

‘Sweat kills,’ Cameron joked.

I nodded ruefully. I had started nice and warm, now I was red-faced and perspiring and fearful to stop in case I suddenly became a popsicle.

‘But there’s no real danger at these temperatures,’ Cameron said.

Above the first stepped rock face we came to a cliff and ran at it, yomping upwards through deep snow, clutching at heather buried just beneath the surface to get a handhold, but walking as if on air, upwards to gain a ridge which would take us on and away to the left. It was utterly unsullied. This was soft, crisp, snowball snow underfoot, good carving and building snow – ‘quite unusual’, Cameron told me – supportive and totally blanketing and obliterating all the paths that might have been there before. Here in winter with the ice fields stretching out to the horizon it felt as if we were the first who ever walked on this surface, instead of a couple of ramblers on a well-worn path.

But who had actually been the first to climb this mountain? All the Scottish peaks are carefully recorded. Most are claimed or attributed to individuals, by no means all of them climbers. Bonnie Prince Charlie was an original Munro-bagger, heading north away from his failed coup, with the Redcoats on his trail, escaping into the hills and in the process, according to the record collectors, conquering summits across the Highlands. Botanists and geologists and map makers, especially map makers, followed. General William Roy made a map for military purposes in 1765 and this was used for the first recorded ascent of Ben Hope, by James Robertson, looking for botanical specimens in 1767.

Already we had left even the certainties of paths and heather behind. Now we were up where the rocks had fallen from the heights and formed unearthly piles and alien environments. The granite was naturally cut into planes and squares.

The slopes themselves weren’t difficult. Each field stretched ahead like a pristine roof. We slogged on and surmounted the ridge and I stood for a moment with Cameron, savouring the inescapable truth that this was not, as I had thought, the last.

‘There’s another peak, then.’

‘Aye. Two or three more, I can’t remember.’

False summit followed false summit. The day which had begun so fresh and new had become dark and used and grimy. Snow was blowing up, down and around us and we had lost all vision beyond a few feet ahead. So much so that I failed to notice that we had reached the top. There was a slope, a field of stones and ahead of us a cairn. All sense of the massive and awe-inspiring had been lost in this grey cloud of fog and snow. Only the ground beneath our feet gave us any sense of up or down. If there were a view of seven counties or 300 other Munros, or Greenland, or my house, it was utterly obscured. We might as well have been at ground level, except for the details. There was a squared-off block with inset brass furrows at the very highest level, a trig point, and growing out of its top at a horizontal angle were little white coral sticks, with pine-cone spandrels, sharp and organic, just a few centimetres long but exquisitely fashioned.

‘That’s rime,’ Cameron explained.

The wind and the ice formed these fairy ice-lollies. So this was rime.

Cameron was already backing off through the swirling fog. ‘Come on.’

‘What! We came all this way!’

‘It’s getting dark.’

Was it? I found it quite difficult to tell. We were in danger of becoming ‘benighted’ – a word which, I now realized, meant being overtaken by the night and was a state to be avoided by any traveller, even one in nubbly socks. So we groped around in our packs, got out our miner’s-lamp head torches and headed back down the mountain almost as soon as we had got up. If we had brought some skis we could have been down in ten minutes. As it was, we plunged through the drifts and let ourselves slide on our boots and bottoms as best we could for a further couple of hours.

That night, slumped in front of a fire in the hotel, I had to accept that all this felt like an achievement, though there was none to boast about. When the first ‘sport’ climbers went up into the Alps for the sake of the experience instead of gathering useful scientific information, The Times railed in a leader against the ‘selfishness and recklessness’ of their enterprise. They had exposed themselves to needless danger and frightened their families, and to no good purpose (no Basic Guide to Hill Walking).

The next morning I went to the local Skerray post office to meet Meg Telfer and Marilyn McFadyen, both incomers. It was a pretty place with a thatched roof, held on by stones on strings, and painstakingly restored with a grant from the National Lottery. I knew this before Marilyn told me because there was a thumping great sign disfiguring one entire gable end.

‘We have to have it. It’s a condition,’ she explained.

But the girls were otherwise happy in their new role as joint postmistresses to eighty-three people, and as I write this I hope they survive the threatened cull. They were more than an indulgence for the people in this remote area. Shops which sold more than tartan tourist rugs and biscuit boxes were few in number. Meg had come to Sutherland precisely because she wanted to climb in the mountains. She had all the kit and loads of maps. Marilyn, by contrast, didn’t worry about them at all. She had no particular urge to clamber up rocks.

‘Meg tells me what I’m missing, but I know what I’m missing,’ she said.

‘What are you missing?’ I asked.

‘Sweat, exhaustion, terror, exposure, chill,’ she replied. That was what tourists like me suffered.

I was only at the post office because I was waiting for postman Paul Blackman. He drove up, delivered his sack of mail and opened the rear door of his van for me to get in. This was the ‘post bus’. There wasn’t much room in the back, just a couple of comfortable seats. It was a means of transportation so civilized and intelligent, generally on time and combining several vital needs, that I can only assume it will be done away with fairly shortly.

Paul was an incomer too. He came from Swindon. But he found dating someone from Altnaharra a bit of a schlep. So he moved here, and married into a crofting family. He had some sheep of his own now, so he was extremely patient with the stock that tended to wander haplessly out in front of us in the seaboard areas. He had time to be a shepherd because his rounds didn’t start until ten. I didn’t ask, but assumed that he couldn’t start until ten because his post didn’t arrive until then.

The service was introduced in 1968. There are 140 routes which between them travel two million miles and carry 80,000 passengers annually.

Paul loved the scenery, how the colours and the ambience were always changing. As we talked, they did. The weather surged over the low hills. The road wound through lumpy mounds of blackened heather which had absorbed more of the snow, so they had a piebald marking. But all along the coast the mood changed in a flash, the colours pulsed like sea anemones with the passing complications of the clouds. A distant view of the mountains was translucent blue, ice blue, the same blue that glows like a gas pilot flame at the bottom of holes in the snow high on the slopes. The water of a burn was a pale slab of turquoise. There was a sudden patch of yellow reeds or exposed grass. The sky was piling up with fast-moving clouds, burning gold at their edges and reflecting in the drifts of snow blowing up on the ridges.

And if you go up to Caithness it suddenly becomes flat and completely different,’ Paul said.

Mind you, it wasn’t the flat I was there for. Paul was another one who never went up the mountains himself. He dropped tourists who did, with their backpacks, sometimes carrying bags of coal to take to outlying bothies. But he never wanted to join them. I could see why.

This was supreme happiness for me, trundling along with the daily round, with Paul chatting away in the front, and playing down his role as Santa in a red van. It occurred to me that he was the major connection with the modern world of consumer durables for a whole section of the population. We were in catalogue country and Paul was the courier.

‘I expect you’re pretty busy at Christmas, Paul.’

Paul cackled.

We travelled some fifteen miles. It was only a tiny part of Paul’s daily round trip of almost ninety miles (from Thurso to Tongue and back), taking me past Loch Eriboll, the sea loch where the British Navy had stationed frigates and submarines during the Second World War, and now a single fishing boat huddled by the remains of the old fortifications. On the far side I got out and walked the rest of the way to Lotte Glob’s house, perched on the side of the inlet.

Squat, bulbous, amorphous figures sat within a rolling enclosure and beyond the gate lay a scattering of huts, the centrepiece of which was a very fine building indeed, with a curved roof and slatted wooden sides. It was deliberately constructed to evoke the simplicity of a farm outbuilding, pure and direct – raised on stilts and enhancing the grand sweep of the loch. This was Lotte’s workshop and atelier.

I envied the house. It had a Scandinavian modern practicality. Not unexpected because Lotte was a Dane, although the award-winning place was in fact designed by a Scot – Gokay Deveci. I had probably even seen it before, in the pages of a glossy magazine. Beyond the entrance were two small rooms and a kitchen. Beyond that a narrow corridor suddenly broke out into a wonderful double-height space, a sleeping platform at one end, and a glass wall that opened on to a balcony at the other; and the overwhelming vista of the loch itself, still streaked with snow, beyond.

Lotte had achieved her dream home on a tiny budget, paid for by her work as an artist. She was a potter. Her speciality was ceramics. But her fascination was the hills around her. She snorted at my book on hill walking. ‘I call them Munro commuters,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I pass them and they are always in such a hurry, puffing on, you know.’ She imitated a walker pumping his arms.

She would have sent a shudder through the authors of my guide. She liked to set off, armed with little more than her sleeping bag and a week’s supply of food, in order to wander at will. ‘I don’t think these people understand the mystery of this place at all. I go to get deliberately lost.’

Lotte and I crunched across the snowy garden to her workshops. One kiln was wood-fired. It was boxed in by heaps of kindling. The other, inside a shed, looked like a large, blue, metal electric safe. It could reach temperatures of 1320° Centigrade. Lotte showed me some of her ‘books’, leaves of clay cut with her writings and interspersed with flat stones, which had been fused together in the white heat, and then a piece of granite that had been through the furnace: a heavy blob of molten rock, the edges dripping like candle wax, shiny and slippery. Of course rock could melt. It had melted originally. I knew that. Up until that moment, though, looking at the splodginess of the molten granite which had squeezed out of the layers of Lotte’s firings like cream from a sponge, I had never really considered the cookery involved. The mountains I was exploring were wrinkles in a hot crust on a lava lamp suspended in space. It was this relationship between naked geology and human creation that Lotte was exploring in her pieces.

One by-product of her experiments had been to produce globes of clay, hollow inside and rock-like outside. They could float. We walked out by the side of a lochan to take part in one of her ‘interventions’, clambering over a sheep fence and bouncing over the spongy peat tussocks to get near enough to the water to float them away.

‘What happens to them now?’

‘Oh, they just float around, and sometimes people find them and it makes them wonder.’

Not many found them, I sensed. Lotte dwelt among the untrodden ways. At least they were untrodden enough to make her launch site a soggy and wet-booted experience. I think we had started by being rather suspicious of each other, Lotte and me. She wasn’t happy with the shallowness of television and I wondered about the propriety of coming across one of Lotte’s floating balls. But, perched on my tussock in the deepening afternoon gloom, I thought these pale-grey floating rocks bobbing away across the mere seemed strangely in harmony with the open moorland. T also have put small pieces of pot in obscure places,’ she told me. ‘One was picked up by walkers and taken to a museum in Cornwall because they thought it was a prehistoric artefact.’

This wilderness thing was partly an illusion anyway. Sutherland is not the real frozen north. To some it had once been the attractive, warm ‘south land’, hence its name, and Lotte was hardly the first Scandinavian settler. When lumbering about the countryside was still a challenge to an ox-cart driver, adventurers from the ‘viks’, or inlets, a few hundred miles to the north east, had cruised into these sheltered waters in fast, efficient, long-hulled ships. It is English propagandists, we are told, who claim the Vikings did nothing but rape, murder and pillage. Revisionists believe that they mostly settled and farmed. But the sagas emphasize that these were pretty manly farmers. Jarl Sigurd betrayed his lord near here, ambushed him and cut off his head. Sigurd hung the severed head from his saddle pommel, as anyone would, for his triumphant return to base, but he rode a little too enthusiastically, jogging about on his mount. The teeth of his victim jumped up and cut his thigh. Alas, the wound festered and Sigurd died of blood poisoning. (He was laid to rest at Dornoch, about fifty miles away.) We may want to think of Vikings as misunderstood smallholders, but they certainly didn’t waste precious fighting time cleaning their teeth.

It is not difficult to come across the evidence of later settlements but it was still shocking to realize the implications of what I stumbled into on the shores of Loch Naver later that day. We are perfectly used to seeing deserted shepherd’s huts in all parts of Britain. Agricultural revolutions, depressions, hardship and plagues have all driven the population off the land, especially difficult land, but under the lee of the hill, by the side of the loch, I found myself walking into a complete ruined village of ten or twenty dwellings. This was what remained of Grummore. Built of stone, the houses would have had long turf roofs. The animals would have been housed down one end, the people in the other. It was a mixed agricultural world where farmers shared the common grazing on the uplands: not good grazing, but plenty of it and enough to support a significant population. But these people were inconvenient, and they were cleared away.

The Duke of Sutherland, George Granville Leveson-Gower, has been fingered as the villain of the piece, though Karl Marx preferred to portray him as a dupe under the control of his wife, Anne, who was the Countess of Sutherland in her own right. She it was who, between 1810 and 1820, championed the virtues of efficiency. She saw the lands over which she had virtually feudal control as a means of paying for her upkeep, if only the inconvenient people who lived there could be got out of the way, and an up-to-date, modern, agricultural monoculture introduced – sheep, in fact. Sheep everywhere, mowing the uplands, eating any young trees and taking the bark off the rest, creating the bare, neatly shorn landscape we recognize as Scotland today. The sheep population rose from 300,000 to 1,600,000 in fifty years. Only a third of the human population remains, even today.

The Countess was not alone. The Highland Clearances were a nationwide drive for new productivity. But the Duchess of Sutherland had the zeal of a nineteenth-century Iron Lady. She achieved her ends by harrying people out of their cottages on to ‘marginal lands’, basically the edges of the estates, the unproductive bits, where those who didn’t escape to America were encouraged to struggle for a living by fishing or crofting.