Do you keep good hill notes? Dave Hewitt looks at whether proof is needed to claim a completion and warns walkers to be on the lookout for spies.
An interesting question surfaced last week during an email exchange with Graham Bunn, a keen walker based in Stockton-on-Tees. Graham and his wife Anne have recently completed rounds of the Donalds - the underrated and under-frequented list of Scottish 2000ft summits outwith the Highlands. They finished on a typically fine Donald, Bodesbeck Law, one of the main summits on the long high ridge that horseshoes round the head of the Ettrick Valley, twisting from Ettrick Pen in the south to Herman Law in the north.
I've corresponded with Graham Bunn over a number of years but he was writing this time because he knew I've been compiling a list of Donaldists - see it here. The Bunns are the 89th and 90th known compleaters of the list but there are surely more, both ancient and modern and I'm always keen to hear from anyone who has personally completed or who knows of someone who has.
As well as final hill details, I always try to pin down the person's first Donald, both out of interest and because it shows how long the round took to complete. The two known extremes are the nine-day self-propelled effort in 1995 by my occasional Scotland On Line stand-in Ronald Turnbull, and the rather more sedate 60-year round completed by John Wallace of Edinburgh when he climbed Broad Law on 2 October 1988. (He also completed his Corbetts that day, having taken a mere 56 years over those.)
Graham Bunn went away, raked around a bit and came back with this - "Have looked through old diaries etc, and my earliest reference [is] to Windy Gyle, 26 March 1994. I think we did it earlier but cannot find any reference, so 26 March 1994 it will have to be. Incidentally, when I was looking through the Donald Deweys list [hills in the same area as the Donalds but between 500m and 610m] I was convinced we had been up Mozie Law and Beefstand Hill, which are the next hills along the border, but could also find no reference in my diaries etc. My general rule is if I don't find them in my diary I haven't done them, so we will pay another visit."
This, it has to be said, is an unusually severe stance to take about one's own bagging achievements. As you might expect, it's by no means uncommon for a walker to be uncertain as to when or even what their first hill in any category was. Although the majority of people keep some kind of a log of their activities, this often only becomes a habit after a fair few hills have been climbed and some long-term targets set. In the beginning there is no real reason to note down the date of one's first Donald, Corbett or Munro any more than there is to note down when one's first curry was eaten or first episode of Robot Wars watched.
Hence the lists of compleaters are liberally sprinkled with first-hill vaguenesses such as "Dollar Law, late 1970s" - where the hill might be recalled but not the exact date. Indeed I've heard only this week from a Kilmarnock hillgoer named Bill Miller who completed his Corbetts in 1992. I had known that much for a while but lacked any details, so wrote and asked. As well as letting me know that he completed on Breabag on 25 August 1992, Bill notes that, "I think my first was Goat Fell in the early sixties, but my first recorded one in my log was the Merrick on 27 February 1977." From the research point of view, "Goat Fell early 1960s" is what I'm looking for and is what I'll enter in the Corbetteers listing rather than the more precise but less accurate "Merrick, 27 February 1977".
In cases such as the Bunns where there is known to be an earlier ascent than the one noted, but where the date or even the hill-name seems to have been lost in the windy clag of time, I've developed the habit of putting the name of the first known hill in parentheses, to indicate that it wasn't strictly the first. This is the case with the round of Percy Donald himself, the man who, in the early 1930s, compiled the list of what were to become his eponymous hills.
It's recorded in Volume 20 of the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal that Donald climbed all his hills (133 summits at the time) within 167 days, of which 27 were spent on the hill. The first of these was Tinto on 12 December 1932 (I'm tempted to mark the 70th anniversary with a repeat ascent in a few weeks' time), and he completed his self-imposed task on Blackcraig Hill above the Afton on 28 May 1933. Donald was unusually precise with regard to detail. Not only did he calculate his total mileage - 396 - and footage - 89,300 - he also worked out an average cost of 2s 9d per hill and 1s 10d per top.
Anyway, the point is that while Tinto on 12 December 1932 without doubt marked the start of Percy Donald's deliberate attempt to climb all the hills concerned, it's highly unlikely that it was his first ever ascent of what we would now call a Donald. This could have come a good few years before, but is something that, short of tracking down Donald's diaries (and he's been dead for well over 60 years), is unlikely ever to be determined with certainty. Hence Tinto goes in brackets in the list, to indicate that it was the first known, rather than the first absolute.
(While writing the above, I remembered that I'm in possession of a copy of Donald's SMC application form, kindly supplied some time ago by the club. Rummage, rummage...here it is, and its interesting - and very neat - hill CV sheds useful light on Donald's early career. He applied to join the SMC on 27 September 1922, at the age of 30, when he was living in Edinburgh's Leamington Terrace. The form shows a healthy spread of big hill ascents, starting with Ben Nevis in September 1913 and including a bunch of other major Munros - Cruachan, Braeriach, Liathach etc - along with various notable lower hills including Suilven and Canisp. Reference is also made, however, to an April 1922 traverse of the Kells range, "eight tops over 2000ft" [Coserine etc]. So that pushes Percy's first-Donald date back by a decade, but even then it isn't by any means certain that his day on the Kells comprised his earliest session of ur-Donalding, as he goes on to note: "With one exception this list excludes lowland ascents." But it's progress, nonetheless.)
This is all rather esoteric stuff, however. Of wider interest is the question of verification, of being 100% confident (a) that you've climbed a particular hill - which is the quandary in Graham Bunn's case, and (b) that others will believe you and accept the achievement. The latter shouldn't be a problem at all but does tend to crop up from time to time. My understanding of the "rule" on this is that all completions - indeed all hill feats - are accepted as honest unless, in some extreme and unusual case, there is clear evidence to the contrary. Clear, documented doubt is extremely rare. The most celebrated instance in this country is probably the modern-day doubt over AE Robertson's 1901 Munros completion claim as his diaries show that the tops of neither Ben Wyvis nor Stuc a'Chroin had been visited.
The most notorious wider example - and it was genuinely notorious in that deliberate deception appears to have been intended - was the claim made in 1906 by Frederick Cook to have become the first to climb Mount McKinley, the North American highpoint. Cook's so-called photographic "evidence" was later shown to have been taken on a bump 5000m lower and now known, appropriately, as Fake Peak (see it here). Such deceptions, whether deliberate or accidental, are extremely rare, and the main practical problem with regard to verification comes via over-zealous attempts to prove what doesn't actually need to be proved.
When Peter Lincoln embarked on his epic Munros, Corbetts and Grahams expedition in 1997, he began to leave what were, in effect, calling cards on each summit, ostensibly to dispel any doubts that he had been there. Other walkers began to find these, and unsurprisingly their perception was that the cards were simply litter. Something of a groundswell of annoyance began and, not wanting to see Lincoln's huge walk marred by needless bad publicity, I was one of several people who had a quiet word, suggesting that he needn't leave the cards, not least because everyone was believing him anyway. So stop he did, switching instead to photographing every summit cairn (which in itself seemed a bit unnecessary but at least it set his mind at rest and left no hilltop detritus).
More on all this and on other hill vagaries, another time. (For example it seems to be primarily a south-of-the-border thing to feel the need for verification.) For now, though, just a couple of footnotes relevant to all this. On the Tuesday of this week I was due in Edinburgh to talk about early Munroists to the eastern section of the SMC, and I went in early to spend the afternoon in the National Library of Scotland where the manuscripts section includes the useful and interesting SMC archive. I've raked through various parts of this many times before - it primarily consists of letters and logbooks - and this time came across some interesting (and rather amusing) internal SMC letters.
The first was written by the late Jim Donaldson to Iain Smart (both were SMC office-bearers) on 21 November 1980, and concerned a claim for Munro completion put forward by Hamish Brown on behalf of a woman who preferred to remain anonymous. Donaldson's letter was headed "More Munroitis" and read as follows - "You will recall Miss DS Annonymous [sic]. I have decided to omit her from the list as printed in The Book on the grounds that anonymous entries should not be accepted. Perhaps you would intimate this suitably in next year's Journal. The incident is now giving me some concern. Without wanting to be pompous I do not think the person has shown a proper attitude. In fact, it may just have been a leg pull and might lead to others. Hitherto we have always accepted without question all claims to have done the Munros. In the future we might be forced to require the honesty of a claim to be substantiated in some way. If you are going to the dinner we might have a word about it."
Then - as if written in clear support of Graham Bunn's policy of redoing hills he's not sure about, there is a wonderful letter from the great Alastair Cram, written on 10 January 1979 and relating to his own second and his wife Isobel's first Munro completion. (His first had come in 1938, prior to his brave-beyond-words war adventures and subsequent legal career in posts such as the Acting Chief Justice of Malawi.)
"On 24/6/78," Cram wrote to the SMC, "my wife completed ascents of all the 3000ft tops the last being the Bhasteir Tooth and at the same time we completed all the tops together. On 22/5/78, I completed all the tops for a second time by the ascent of Ruadha Stac Mhor [sic]. The clandestine removal by the Iraqi Security Service of my wife's five year diary from our room at the Shatt-el-Arab Hotel on the Tigris deprived us of the best record of a number of tops, all of which my wife insisted on doing all over again, prudently reminding me of the loss of motive were all the tops ascended. Nevertheless, while engaged on this laudable repetition, for reasons obscure to me, from time to time, that hotel name came to mind, it may be from the dire loss of records or for eponymous convenience. Yours sincerely, AL Cram. PS We are about to tour in the Sinai."
There is surely a lesson in this for the modern-day UN weapons inspectors. Don't take your hill diaries with you when you go, or you might end up having to do a lot of extra legwork in due course.
Dave Hewitt
14/11/2002
Stop Press - I'm grateful to Jonathan Whitehead for sending in a cutting from this week's Scottish Farmer, relating to the attempt - discussed here previously at length - to bulldoze another new estate track through the great empty glens near Bendronaig Lodge. The piece includes this, "Ewen Macpherson, who owns the 30,000-acre Attadale Estate, said - We are part of the community here and we consult them. To hell with the Mountaineering Council of Scotland."
Dave can be contacted at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
