Do you love your local hill so much you just keep going back again and again? Dave Hewitt looks at the four figure men who just keep coming back for more.
One of my resolutions at the start of the year was to write a few words about the curious practice of multiple-ascending, of going back and back and back again to the same hill and I'm overdue a report. At a future stage I'll offer some thoughts about what might be termed the psychology, philosophy and practice or multiple-ascending - why people do it, in other words, and why it's arguably no more curious than the far more widespread habit of climbing a hill just once and never returning to it. But for now I'll concentrate on three "case studies" - one this week and a couple (including myself) next week.
So first I'll turn to the remarkable Alan Douglas of Killearn, about whom I've written before, in another place. At that time (early 1999) he had just achieved a very rare "calendar round" of ascents of Ben Lomond. There are various ways of defining a calendar round, the loosest being simply to have climbed a hill, any hill, on every date in the calendar, regardless of the year. The next step up is to climb a hill in a particular category on every date, eg Hamish Brown completed a calendar round of Munros with the Cairnwell on 17 September last year: every date has now seen him on at least one of the Munros. That's rare enough but on 11 February 1999 Alan Douglas completed a Ben Lomond calendar round: he had been up it on every day of the year.
I joked at the time that his next target would be a double calendar round, thinking that this was both unfeasible and unlikely. Well, it's still not happened but he's only a couple of dates short and the double round is likely next March. (I'm tempted to say that this will be a unique achievement, but although it might well be in the UK there is always the extraordinary Larry Davis of Jaffrey in New Hampshire. Last I heard he had climbed Mount Monadnock, the 960m high point of Cheshire County, every day for almost six years.)
The reason I mention Alan Douglas just now is that he recently invited me to another landmark event - his 1,000th ascent of Ben Lomond. This was on 19 June and was, oddly, the first time I'd been on what tends to be a fairly regular hill for me since the calendar-round outing in February 1999. In the intervening 40 months, however, Douglas had climbed the hill 421 times, an extraordinary rate of progress, particularly as he had climbed plenty of other non-Lomond hills during the same period. By any standards an average of ten times per month up the same hill is a hefty workload. As I'll mention again next week, I tend to average Ben Cleuch slightly more than once a week - such that six per month is my "default" figure, in itself on the substantial side. If I don't do six however it's far more likely to be five than seven, and I've not hit double figures since March 1998, when I was living so close to the foot of the hill that it was in evening-stroll territory.
Routine is a big factor in repeat ascending (it's often the domain of the runner, for whom known routes and timings are crucial), and Alan Douglas, although no runner, is systematic in the extreme. As he neared 700 ascents (reached on 25 March 2000), he "thought it would be quite neat if I had climbed Ben Lomond 100 times on a Monday, 100 times on a Tuesday, 100 times on a Wednesday, etc". Not many people would think this way but for the arch Lomondeer it was just an example of pleasing tidiness - "not too difficult, it just requires a bit of organisation and planning". And of course it was duly achieved, once he had dealt with "the added complication that at that time I was also trying to climb Ben Lomond at least once every week and wanted to avoid reaching, say, 696 and having only, say, four Saturdays outstanding. This would commit me to climbing on four successive Saturdays in what would be potentially the worst part of winter. Perhaps I should be committed elsewhere."
The 800th ascent followed, "as autumn follows summer", on 20 November 2000 and much the same rate led to his being on 999 when, along with his brother Ian (himself with 600+ Lomond ascents), we set off from Rowardennan for the Ptarmigan approach to the northwest ridge. As with the 1999 ascent, it wasn't a great weather day. That had seen wintry squalls and thin, skiddy snow on the ground; this was just intermittently wet overhead and remarkably sodden underfoot. Even the first steep slope up from the lochshore - normally pretty dry - was saturated enough to merit sideways diversions. The Douglas brothers reckoned they had never seen the hill so wet, the dismal winter having been followed, after a brief dry interlude in April, by the torrents of spring and early summer.
Of course we made it to the top without any undue alarms - Alan is slightly faster than Ian but the pace was steady throughout. Ian gave Alan a Clan Douglas quaich to mark the occasion and then we ambled down the tourist route as conditions steadily brightened. For all the recent fast rate of progress, the 1,000 ascents had taken just over 34 years overall - the first (when a man on a motorbike was seen on the hill) having come on 28 April 1968. Alan Douglas was working full-time for much of that period, latterly in banking computer services, but he and his brother managed to organise themselves well enough to complete Munro rounds in 1985 and 1986 respectively (they had been only two short by 1972). Between them, they've racked up over 8,000 Munros total.
The only odd thing about all this for me, really, is not that Ben Lomond has been climbed 1,000 times but that it has only been climbed by two routes - the tourist path and the Ptarmigan ridge. As we sat on above the steep summit corrie in June, sheltering from the wind while we ate our lunches, the cloud briefly cleared to give a glimpse of Loch Ard forest and the eastern approach route from Comer. And as this happened I asked Alan Douglas a question I'd asked him before, "Have you really never climbed the hill from that side?" The answer was the same as last time - No - but it's safe to say that he didn't seem at all bothered.
Each to their own of course but this I don't pretend to understand. In 100 ascents of a hill, let alone 1,000, I'd be wanting to rummage around in just about every corner and on every slope I could physically get at - and my own first ascent of Ben Lomond, in sun and snow at Easter 1986, had been from that side, walking in with a friend after having "borrowed" a couple of bikes from the timeshare place near Kinlochard. That had been a great day, so to think that someone could make 1,000 ascents of such a fine hill without testing and tasting the eastern slopes is, to me, a bit strange. Likewise Alan Douglas hasn't been up any of the neighbouring lower hills - no Cruinn a'Bheinn, no Beinn Uird, no Binnean nan Gobhar. He's loyal to his one hill and his two routes.
The Larry Davis example always makes me wary of stating absolutely that someone has climbed a hill more often than anyone previously and it's not impossible that 1,000 ascents of Ben Lomond have been clocked up before. It's one of those luring, landmark hills which tend to gather affection and ascents in equal measure (others with massive tallies surely include Bennachie, Ben Vrackie, Lochnagar, Ben Cleuch and the Highland-edge outposts Ben Vorlich, Stuc a'Chroin and Ben Ledi.) In terms of the numbers known to me (which is as far as I'm prepared to go, confidence-wise), Alan Douglas is the first definite 1000er on Ben Lomond. The late Jock Nimlin is believed to have climbed it over 800 times, while Lady Lorna Anderson (Lorna Ticehurst as was) tells me she made 461 ascents.
I only know of four 1,000+ tallies for Munros. Alan Douglas on Ben Lomond is one, Richard Wood on Sron a'Choire Ghairbh another (1,000th ascent 19 February 2000; he's also been up Ben Tee 1,000 times and is currently busy with Sgorr na Diollaid). Then there's the late Eddie Campbell on Ben Nevis, although I've only seen one brief reference to this, in Hugh Symonds' book Running High, and an anonymous man unearthed by Hamish Brown, who found the reference in "the Naylor brothers' big tome on the Groats-End walk". As with Campbell, the hill was Ben Nevis and the man - a guide - was once mortified to fail through illness "having been up the hill 1,200 times".
The biggest current Scottish tally for any hill is possibly that by Tom Bell of Grangemouth on Ben Cleuch - he's nearing the 1,500 mark. Other high sub-Munro figures include James Lamb (over 1,000 of each of the Fife Lomonds) and Robert Gibson of Blanefield, over 1,000 on Dumgoyne. South of the border the late Teddy Turnbull passed the 1,000 mark on Coniston Old Man, while Wales seems to be the most prolific place for such behaviour. Bev Barratt near Machynlleth has researched an 18th-century guide from Dolgellau, Robert Edwards, who climbed Cadair Idris over 1,800 times and lived to be over 90. Biggest of them all, though - and again researched by Bev Barratt - is Tom Ward, another guide, 19th-century this time. He moved from Nottingham to Llanberis and climbed Snowdon over 4,000 times.
If anyone knows of any other four-figure single-Munro tallies, do let me know. In fact I'm generally interested (and have been keeping a file for a few years) on any instances of 100 or more ascents of any UK hill over 1,000 feet.
Dave Hewitt
19/9/2002
You can get in touch with Dave at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
