Dave Hewitt has discovered a fascinating internet photo archive of the late astrophysicist and Munrobagger Professor Sir Fred Hoyle that he says shows for most people hillwalking provides the space and time we need to reflect on the everyday - and indeed not so everyday - problems of life.
Not for the first time, I'm grateful to Richard Webb of Wolverhampton for sending me details of an interesting hill-related website. This time it's the photographic archive of a nuclear astrophysics site, , located on the server of Clemson University in South Carolina (see it here). And the reason it's of interest in the context of this column is not because of any musings on the terminal velocity of scree, or the Schiehallion effect on the spacetime continuum but for the much more mundane reason that it includes pictures of that well-known astrophysicist and Munrobagger, the late Professor Sir Fred Hoyle.
Born in Bingley in 1915, Fred Hoyle has a strong claim to be the most famous person ever to have climbed all the Munros. His only serious rival is the journalist James Cameron - but for all Cameron's acclaim he never came close to the Nobel prize that many believe was wrongly denied Hoyle. Quite how bitterly this status-failure rankled with Hoyle is a matter for conjecture but it has certainly deprived us of a pub-quiz question to go with the old chestnut about "Who's the only Nobel laureate to have played first-class cricket?" (Answer at the foot of the column, in case you're wondering.)
Hoyle might have been a theoretical physicist but his love of the hills was grounded in reality and he worked his way through the Munro list at a frenetic rate during the 1960s. His name doesn't appear in the Scottish Mountaineering Club's list of Munroists but in 1999 the then keeper of the list, Dr Chris Huntley, achieved something of a coup by nudging the ageing scientist into confirmation that his round had been wrapped up on Blaven in 1980. (See the 1999 SMC Journal for the full story.)
If there is any mystery about this, it's not that Hoyle actually finished the Munros, rather that he took so long over it. He was at retirement age come completion and his main Munroing sidekick, a Fell and Rock member named Dick Cook, had finished his own round on 7 September 1968. Reading Cook's 1967 article "In search of the Munros", it's clear that a great many of the 199 Munros he had climbed at that stage had been in the company of Hoyle.
Cook died shortly before Christmas 1985 and Hoyle last autumn, so we're unlikely ever to be sure as to the reason for Hoyle's "delay". The explanation is, I suspect, simply that the in-demand Hoyle was jet-setting all over the cosmos when he could have been pencilling-in his last few ticks - but if anyone knows any specific details about this, please do let me know. (Likewise get in touch if you've ever seen a picture of the actual Blaven event. Did Hoyle pass round the whisky like everyone else, or did he give a celebratory summit lecture?)
So, with that as introduction/explanation, it's back to the Clemson website. Trying to explain a website in words is a bit like trying to make a sculpture about music but I'll have a go. The "photo archive in nuclear astrophysics", to give its full title, consists of internal links to a further 280 pages, each of which contains a photograph and a brief description. Two of the pictures date from 1959, 32 date from the 1960s, 58 from the 1970s, 61 from the 1980s, 96 from the 1990s and 31 from 2000 onwards. Some of the headings are very grand, eg. "1973 - Group at Explosive Nucleosynthesis Conference" and "1975 - Fowler and President Ford". Some are oddly mundane: "1981 - Woosley, Arnett, Fowler and Clayton at the hut", "2001 - Clemson Astrophysics at the pub" and the rather menacing "1971 - Rice Mafia at lunch", which sounds like John Woo meets the Sopranos. And some appear to be written in a strange language, or at least to derive from some parallel Dan Dare universe, "1969 - Clayton explaining 56Co gamma background" and "2000 - Massive-Star Evolution Team at Clemson". But the ones that really interest me, that link the world of top-level astrophysicists with the world of bogs and lochs and glens, are things such as, "1967 - Hoyle and Clayton on hike", "1968 - Hoyle and Clayton on Ben Loyal" and "1969 - Clayton and Sargent on Ben Sgritheall".
What these pictures show are expeditions - usually day-walks in the summer months - organised by the Yorkshire-born, Scotland-loving Hoyle for astrophysical colleagues such as Donald D Clayton (centennial professor at Clemson University - where he maintains this website - and pioneer in the field of gamma ray astronomy), William A Fowler (Pittsburgh-born astrophysicist considered to be the founder of the theory of nucleosynthesis) and Wallace Sargent (Scunthorpe-educated former director of the Palomar Observatory).
The pictures themselves are of no better than snapshot quality, sometimes worse - eg. the images of non-Scottish outings in the Brecon Beacons and on Helvellyn ("the highest mountain in The Lake District") look to have been smeared with some substance in a strange laboratory experiment. But several are of presentable quality, and even the poorer ones carry an affectionate, unpretentious feeling of friends having a good day out on the hill. (The same argument - namely that low-key photographs added rather than detracted from the overall feel - was made about Muriel Gray's book The First Fifty.)
It's the caption to each picture that really intrigues, though. Take this example, "Donald Clayton and Wallace Sargent near the beginning of their climb with Hoyle and Fowler of Ben Sgritheall, a 3200ft "Munro" in the western highlands of Scotland. June 1969. The weather was outstandingly benign for Wester Ross. Sargent and Clayton had accepted Hoyle's 5-year invitation to be part of Hoyle's Institute of Theoretical Astronomy as summer appointees. Clayton was an avid summer climber with Hoyle, and Sargent accompanied several times. Photo was snapped with Clayton's camera by Willy Fowler."
There is something pleasantly down-to-earth about this, especially given the out-of-this-world nature of what these guys did for a career. The same mix of humble and high-flying occurs in most of the captions, eg. in my personal favourite, "Fred Hoyle and Donald Clayton on top of Ben Loyal, a 2500ft mountain in the north of Scotland in June 1968. This was the second of many trips to the Scottish Highlands by Fred Hoyle with the IOTA visitors inclined to climb. Hoyle certainly was, and climbed all (about 290) of the 3000ft+ peaks ("Munros") of Scotland. A very significant discussion by Fowler, Hoyle and Clayton on this climb concerned whether Hoyle's original e-process origin of iron was correct or if the explosive ejection of radioactive nickel was instead its source. Both Fowler and Hoyle agreed that the latter was probably correct and Fowler retracted their earlier picture and its relevance for neutrino-cooling timescales in the paper Bodansky, Clayton and Fowler (ApJ Suppl. 16, 299 (1968); see esp p368, 2nd paragraph). Clayton's idea with Colgate and Fishman to test this with gamma-line astronomy of young supernova remnants (ApJ, 155, 75 (1969)) was enthusiastically embraced by all three on this very climb. The Kyle of Tongue can be seen in the background. By coincidence Clayton's future wife Nancy had lived in that town of Tongue at about this very time."
I know why I like these miniature write-ups. It's partly because there's something endearingly quaint about these two vastly different worlds - hills and heady science - being juxtaposed in such an ordinary, affectionate, those-were-the-days kind of way. But it's mainly because a fundamental truth is on display here, one only rarely expressed but deserving of all the airtime - internet or otherwise - that it can get. It's this - that far too many books, magazines, websites etc. habitually portray ordinary walks or climbs as though the participants had spent the entire time swooning over the wonder of the hills. Either that or they're just lost in a mystical dwam-cum-meditation for which the dreaded mind/body/spirit label might well have been invented.
Now I'm not knocking joy-of-nature musings in themselves and I wouldn't deny that maybe, oooh, one in 100 hillgoers is permanently switched on and tuned in to some higher level of consciousness. But it's long been an easy - even lazy - option for writers to create the impression that hillgoing invariably and immediately toggles into some near-ecstatic state of being where everyday concerns of work, relationships and how best to fix that rattle in the car simply fall away the instant that boots are laced and rucksacks shouldered, to be replaced by eight hours of trance-like perambulatory bliss in the midst of God's creation.
That might be the case for one out of 100, as I say, but for the other 99 of us I rather suspect we mainly just natter away about ordinary stuff, with the on-hill context providing space to relax and to think a bit more clearly. In 20 relentless years of hillgoing I can scarcely ever recall any kind of enhanced state of being (as opposed to thinking "Oh, that's nice," which happens pretty much every day at some stage). And by that I don't mean to belittle hillgoing - on the contrary, it means everything to me, such that being denied it for even a short while for whatever reason sees me start to seize up, mentally as well as physically.
Put me on a hill however, with a chum or two and I won't blether about the Beauty of Nature (or, even worse, about the Meaning of Beauty). Rather, I'll most likely be wowing about that Van Nistelrooy bicycle kick or the new Thea Gilmore CD, or asking my friends what they've been up to since last we met. With different companions I'll discuss different things - on-hill with my chess-playing friend Ken I'm capable of spending a whole 600 metres' worth of ascent analysing how best to fend off kingside attacks, while with Helen and Pete a long forest track could be reeled in while picking their brains about kart racing, about which they know much and I know little.
The actual topics and subjects aren't important - they're different for everyone - but the underlying point remains the same: that hills (particularly "domestic" hills such as those in Scotland) dovetail with the lives of the people who climb them. As such, hills provide a usefully different perspective on this world rather than an alternative, even alien, route into another. Of course I'm laying myself open to accusations of being a soul-less pleb here, someone for whom all is prosaic ploddery. Maybe that's true - but I'm habitually unable to relate to, or identify with, any of the high-flown, overblown hill-related writing by the old German romantics and their modern-day disciples. You know the types, those who would describe a Sunday stroll up West Lomond or the Meikle Bin in terms that would make even Hermann Buhl blush. Such writing might be appropriate - and indeed might work - in the Greater Ranges or in the context of death-defying void-tempting big-craggery but Scottish tramping remains an altogether more low-key and self-deprecatory business.
And so it fair cheers me up to see these snaps of some of the world's leading scientists, and to read write-ups that plainly indicate that they discussed physics on the hill just as they would have done back on campus. There is something reassuringly ordinary about this, about the fact that if you juxtapose human genius with stunning landscape then what you end up with looks remarkably like normality. It's evidence of people taking the chance to discuss what they want to discuss, bringing something of themselves to the hill and feeling at home and at ease there. Surely what our hills provide is not mysticism (although there is plenty of mist), nor an arena for overblown metaphysical philosophising, but a structured access to time and to space - things which, in this day and age more than ever before, we very much need in our lives.
Dave Hewitt
24/1/2002
(For those of you who don't know the answer - Which Nobel laureate played first-class cricket? Samuel Beckett, a couple of games for Dublin University in the mid-1920s.)
You can contact Dave by email at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
