A love of the hills does not need to be an exclusive pastime but can easily be married with lots of other interests - whether they be pop bands or boring squares - and packed into one busy weekend according to Dave Hewitt.
Last Sunday into Monday was one of those spells when a whole week's worth of appointments and events ended up concertina-ed into a day-and-a-half. Hectic in the extreme but quite a buzz.
First on the itinerary was an early-morning frosty-motorway drive south for a round of Whitehope Heights and Hart Fell from the Devil's Beef Tub near Moffat. The occasion was an unusual one, perhaps even unique - the first known simultaneous completions of the Donalds by two folk who aren't related. A married couple had finished together on Clockmore in 1992 and a father/son pairing on Drumelzier Law in 1995, in case you were wondering.
Donalds, as everyone should know, are non-Highland Scottish hills over 2000ft/610m and two versions of the list are in print. One is Percy Donald's original 1930s effort which details 89 main summits and a further 51 outlying tops defined by a complex distance/drop formula. Then there is the 1990s update by Alan Dawson which offers a straightforward drop-only definition for 118 summits classified as "New Donalds".
Dawson was one of those completing on Sunday, along with Roderick Manson from Blairgowrie and the target for both was Whitehope Heights, an excellent example of an underrated southern-Scotland hill. Many of the tops in the central Borders area and across to the west in Galloway are wonderful places, capable of providing endless hillgoing pleasure but remarkably undervisited as folk zip past with sights set on either the Highlands or the Lakes. Shame. There are enormous swathes of walking country either side of the M74 that would grace a more trendy area but few people spend much time hereabouts, even turning snotty about it on occasion.
Perhaps it's the false notion that southern-upland hills are all dull and boggy; perhaps it's just that there are no Munros here and so the guidebuccaneers never give it a first, let along a second, glance. Perhaps these spacious, bold hills simply aren't deemed macho enough (although quite what machismo has to do with mountaineering/hillgoing has always been lost on wimpish old me). Whatever, the perennial lack of other people is both pleasant and sad. I, for one, greatly enjoy the spacious solitude but would not begrudge seeing a few more humans on these fine hills. It's not likely to happen, though.
Having said that, we were quite a crowd on Sunday and a very hill-experienced crowd at that. Mega Marilynbaggers Ann and Rowland Bowker came up from the Lakes (although Rowland had jiggered his ankle on an Eskdale path a few days before and so had to settle for a cycle tour instead of the hill). Seventies superbagger Phil Cooper was up from Lancaster, almost 23 years since he had finished his own Donald round on the Scrape. Another Donaldist present was decaMunroist Stewart Logan (1987, Innerdownie), while the handful of other folk had all been on a hill or two in their time.
We reversed the watershed approach I had used in the spring of 1987 during the early stages of tramping from the border to Cape Wrath and ambled over a succession of squelchy-grass bumps: Annanhead Hill (Scotland's only 478m trig point - there are four 477s and five 479s), then Great Hill and Chalk Rig Edge before the celebratory summit where the usual selection of tipples was handed round. A woman who wandered in while we were there said she could smell the alcohol some distance away.
It had taken Dawson 18 years to complete, having started with the Benyellary/Merrick pair in June 1983. Manson had been much quicker. His first Donald was Cairnsmore of Carsphairn in February 1993. And they had a perfect early winter's day for Whitehope - skies scraped clean of cloud with views down to an oddly close Skiddaw (a Solway cloud sea seemed to shorten the perspective) and up to the usual array of southern Highland Munros. Ben More and Stob Binnein showed well through a Tinto-side gap, while from the higher Hart Fell the whole widescreen view - Arran through Ben Lomond round to Lawers - was nicely spread around the horizon. A hot air balloon hovered to the northeast, over the upper Tweed hills, while our cars glinted in the lunchtime sun back at the Beef Tub.
The party split after Whitehope, one team circling back over Crown of Scotland then down to the barn at Earlshaugh, while my half dipped and rose for Hart Fell then wandered down the Arthur's Seat (yes, really) ridge to Ericstane as the light started to fade. Here we encountered a typical piece of post-foot-and-mouth stupidity - every sensible route for the 200m slog back up to the road was festooned with Keep Out signs, even though there had been nothing at all on the start of the round.
Not particularly fancying a 14km diversion along the tarmac to Moffat and back, we just nipped up the old Edinburgh road as planned and so reached the A701. This track is surely still a right of way anyway and in the event no one shouted at us as we passed. The signs should really be down by now - they're long past their sell-by date and can only discourage tourists and walkers. It's a wonder the B&B and tearoom proprietors down in Moffat haven't had words with the farmers about restraint of trade. Certainly the council should.
And so, after a quick cuppa in the Star Hotel (which boasts a certificate from the Guinness Book of Records awarding it the title of the world's narrowest freestanding hotel), it was back up the motorway to Glasgow for the Turin Brakes/James gig at the SECC, which was very good indeed, meriting at least four-and-a-half stars from this reviewer. Of course music reviews are pretty much outwith the remit of Summit Talks but I mention this simply to show, yet again, that hillgoing really should - and often does - fit in with one's normal existence.
This is certainly true of most Scottish-based hillgoers, for whom the habit of dashing back for a movie or a gig or a meal with friends is a common one and for whom a summer-evening hill slotted in after a day's work is also fairly routine practice. This "ordinariness", this joined-up lifestyle, is however something that hardly ever crops up in the outdoor press, where the perennial portrayal is of hillgoing as a set-piece stand-alone activity, adrift and aloof from normal life.
This might be true for holidaying/long-weekending folk from the southern flatlands but not for the many who live and work in areas where the uplands are under an hour's drive away. Indeed, far too many writers and editors take this misconception a stage further and pretend that hillgoing is somehow more "worthy" than meeting friends in the pub or going out to watch the football. It's not, it's just different and nicely offsets and complements the more standard pastimes that a larger proportion of the world's population gets up to.
I'm not saying that I wouldn't relish staying out in solitude to camp under the stars after a fine outing such as our Whitehope/Hart Fell round, of course I would, on occasion. But I wouldn't want to do it all the time, every time and certainly not on a bitter winter's night such as last Sunday. I'm one for whom hills have to relate to and interact with "normal" life. It's often an enjoyable and even fascinating sensation to be doing something utterly different just hours after having been on some high hill and so it was this time, amid the urban throng at the James concert. Shortly after looking down into the Devil's Beef Tub I was hearing a band sing a song called English Beefcake and that amused me, at least.
Incidentally, Scotland has hills that share names with both bands onstage at the SECC that night - Turin Hill and James's Hill. I've not yet been on the latter - a 282m bump above the White Loch on the Stewarton road south of Glasgow - but the giddy north face of 252m Turin Hill northeast of Forfar was tackled in 1998. A shade disappointing, I felt - looks good on the map, with an old summit fort and an all-round view but the reality is rather too many electric fences and clumps of bushes and trees in all the wrong places. Worth a visit, though.
Musical interlude over, the new issue of The Angry Corrie was delivered to the printer in Glasgow first thing Monday morning (it'll be out around 18 December) and then Alan Dawson and I drove east for an altogether odd rendezvous on the south side of the Pentlands. We met up with John Biggar, founder of the Andes trekking firm and one of surely very few people in the UK who have climbed Aconcagua six times. But high peaks and treks weren't on the agenda this day, as we met BBC Scotland reporter Ken MacDonald to record a TV piece about boring squares/white holes, call them what you will.
Readers will recall a recent Summit Talks column devoted to the history of boring squares - about how there has been a revival of interest in the search, initially sparked by Messrs Biggar and Dawson in 1992, for the 1km grid square containing fewest mapped features. I'd also written a letter to the Guardian this November, and it was this that Ken MacDonald had picked up on, leading to a suggestion that we might meet in a suitably featureless location to see if we could make interesting TV of something so dull. "We'll have the most fun anyone's ever had in a boring square," MacDonald had said in one of his emails as the four of us tried to coordinate diaries.
The chosen venue was not Scotland's dullest square-kilometre, NY0569 down by Annan but one of the second-wave of cartographic holes, Auchencorth Moss, NT1955, almost a thousand feet up between Penicuik and West Linton. The day was another belter - the Pentlands skyline of Scald Law and the Kips was etched sharp against a cloudless sky - but the square was every bit as dull and tussocky as it had been on the June 1992 day when Alan and I had first visited it, on the way back from a "proper" walk on the Meldons.
Ken MacDonald was interested in how one bags a boring square and in the case of NT1955 there is an easy answer as its one feature of any real note is a trig point. So we traipsed out to this, through the waist-high bog-grass and did the interview trig-side. Alan aired the theory that because "interesting" squares such as those on hilltops tend to prompt people into being quiet and contemplative, boring squares should, by contrast, inspire unusual, even eccentric activity. He cited the example of his drum kit, which he thinks might receive a battering in NT1955 in due course. "After all, boring squares tend to be a long way from houses, so there shouldn't be any problem with disturbing the neighbours," he said.
Questions were also asked about the great paradox of boring square bagging - that the very act of doing it tends to make the square more interesting. Fair cop, we said and trotted out other examples that supported this - that NT1955 was particularly interesting because it appeared on three Landranger maps, sheets 65, 66 and 72. That it had become much more interesting since our first visit because the trig now carried a small metal plaque commemorating a local headmaster who had died in 1993 and for whom, evidently, this dull place provided the perfect antidote for the playground mayhem of pupils flicking paper pellets or whatever bad things it is kids get up to these days.
NT1955 was also interesting because few if any boring squares can have been bagged twice, as Alan and I had now done. And of course its boringness quotient was being substantially undermined by the very fact of a TV interview taking place in it, an event that might lead to it being years before the square's old vacuum/void feel properly reasserted itself.
Quite what the eventual 150-second piece will look like once it's been through the editing room at Queen Margaret Drive remains to be seen but we recorded over 45 minutes of film in all, wittering on about the Turner Prize, Cameron McNeish, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Scott of the Antarctic, Kirkpatrick MacMillan, George Harrison, "Scotland&£8217;s boring heritage" and goodness knows what else. Ken seemed happy about it all - we left him standing at the trig, filming ambient sky shots, apparently at one with the world. "I had a great time," he mailed later, "tempered only slightly by falling in the bog after you left."
Dave Hewitt
13/12/01
Pictures of the Donald completion can be found on Ann Bowker's website The number of known completions is only 83 - some of the most recent are listed The Angry Corrie website.
I'm always interested to hear of any sub-Munro completions - Donalds, Corbetts or Grahams - so if anyone is able to supply news of such achievements, be they recent or ancient history, please contact me at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
The boring square piece doesn't at present have a definite transmission date but is due to be aired as part of the Reporting Scotland evening bulletin either later this week or early next.
