Scotland is enjoying some of the best snow conditions of recent years but as Dave Hewitt makes the most of the hills life grinds to a halt in other parts of the country.
It's a soggy morning as I write this but on the whole Scotland is in a chunk of old-style, snow-down-to-sea-level winter, the kind of conditions that used to occur once or twice most years but which, these globally-warmed days, have become far too rare. The last such spell coincided, by dint of Sod's Law, with the most fraught period of the 2001 foot and mouth crisis, and I seem to recall that the winter before that wasn't exactly a showpiece season. So for many people these past few days could well have provided the first chance to stroll around up top in near-perfect winter weather since - well, since the end of the last century.
The snow and ice hasn't yet had quite enough time to consolidate into something ideal to walk or climb on (although today's sogginess ought, paradoxically, to help), but in many places the skies have been clear, the bitter early-week wind has dropped and the hills have been looking as good as they ever look. I for one am loving it and lower down the screen I'll enthuse about a couple of forays. But first, please excuse me while I chunter a little.
This arrival of genuine winter has prompted another example of something I've grumbled about before - the way in which adverse conditions are reported and reacted to differently in different parts of the UK. Last time I mentioned this it was with reference to strong winds, how huge gales hitting Scotland (and particularly the exposed Western and Northern Isles) go relatively or even completely unnoticed by the British public as a whole. But whenever any storm disrupts the leafier and more populous parts of England, the tabloidy news bulletins (and I include in this the BBC's ever-poorer Six O'Clock News) go straight into let's-look-concerned crisis overdrive.
Similarly with floods - witness the amount of network news coverage of the repeated Elgin flooding compared with that in places such as Shrewsbury, Kent, East Anglia etc. And also with snow and ice - which is why I mention the subject again just now. Last week there was snowfall down much of the eastern side of Britain, nothing particularly substantial or unusual for late January but dominating the news schedules because some roads were blocked in the south due to lack of gritting and ploughing.
Even laying aside what has subsequently happened weatherwise, there was an immediate imbalance to this reporting. It appears that Aberdeenshire received substantially worse conditions than did Cambridgeshire, with many more roads closed - but guess which county was the focus of the mainstream coverage, guess where the well-wrapped-up reporters were to be seen doing roadside one-to-ones with the studio?
Things weren't at all helped by the modern radio trend for phone-in vox-pox traffic reports - Radio 5 Live, for example, is much given to these - where motorists do one of two things. They either feed information to an overexposed traffic reporter in the studio who is often allowed - even encouraged - to witter on for minutes at a time not just about road conditions but also about what soap she watches (it's usually a she), what food she eats, what she thinks about asylum seekers so on. Or else the drivers (usually male) come on air directly via their crackly mobile phones and say stuff like "Yeah, Darren here, I've been stuck in really major gridlock on the A1826 for four hours now just because nobody did nothing about the weather, it's a bloody disgrace so it is..." and so on and so on.
This is blame culture made flesh and a particularly stupid form of it. Sure, in an ideal world all the roads would be gritted and every icy night would be anticipated. But weather doesn't work like that. It has - and always will have - a tendency to sweep across the country at speed and at funny angles, hitting a large number of places near-simultaneously and non-identically. And, more important, it doesn't pay the slightest heed to guidelines and phone-ins and policy committees and the like. There's never going to be much scope for a rain ombudsman - Ofwet, anyone? - or a snow tsar. (Such people will quite likely be appointed at some stage, mind you and on 70k a year plus London weighting.)
It is, I suppose, to be expected that the ordinary stuck-in-a-jam member of the public, who loves his car beyond all else, is going to gripe about the weather given half a chance. Trouble is, such people are nowadays given much more than half a chance. We have always liked to moan in private among our friends but it's increasingly become something to do in public, in the space provided by the countless papers/stations/channels with column inches and dead airtime to fill. More and more often, pundits in the media - particularly in the broadcast media - are to be heard trying to make pointscoring capital out of bad weather, claiming that it is not just someone's fault but - absurdly - something that "shouldn't be allowed to happen". And thus the less-than-wise philosophy of Pete from Basingstoke or whoever gathers a momentum that in all honesty it doesn't really merit.
The heavily southern and metropolitan biased media conspire in this, just as they do in their imbalanced reporting of high winds and floods. Witness, by way of comparison, what has happened this past week. I am almost at sea level here on the edge of Stirling and the scene outside my window these past few days, if not quite Arctic, has definitely tended toward the Scandinavian.
Around 7cm of snow fell in the night on Sunday and by the time I started writing this piece, 48 hours on, scarcely a millimetre of it had shifted. Monday was fairly calm and clear, with air temperatures either fractionally below or above freezing. Tuesday was a different story -much clearer and brighter but with a fierce, windchilly gale ripping through all morning such that anyone plodding the fields and roads would have required several layers, never mind someone venturing on to the high tops. Tuesday was also - unsurprisingly - the day when two motorists were killed in drift-related smashes. Numerous schools in several parts of Scotland (eg Callander, and much of Aberdeenshire again) have been closed.
For the first couple of days the road into our village - we're along a kilometre-plus of dead end - wasn't gritted or cleared in any way. Obviously this wasn't ideal but people just got on with things, driving more slowly, choosing a lower gear both literally and metaphorically. There hasn't been any obvious flap or fuss, just an acceptance that this is stuff that happens from time to time, part of the way the world works.
Yet has all this disruption and - tragically - death been occupying the uppermost slots in the national news bulletins, as did the less serious disruption last week? Er, no. Anyone tuning in to the London-based stations - again 5 Live is the example I've most often tested given my weakness for sport - is likely to remain pretty much unaware that there's now any bad weather in Britain at all. The same applies on Radio 4, which I hear from time to time, and probably on Radio 3, which I hardly ever hear, and also no doubt on Radio 2, which I've not listened to on principle since 1977 when I decided I preferred Joe Strummer and his Orchestra to the Ray Conniff Singers. And the last time I checked, the networked BBC radio stations and TV channels were supposed to be just as accountable to - and as relevant for - the listeners and viewers in Unst as in Upminster.
My guess is that the absence of disaffected drivers and motorised moaners ringing in this week is simply because they don't exist in northern Britain in anything like the numbers they do further south. Drivers in the north - like everyone else in the north - tend to fairly accepting of bad weather, such that there's no flurry of blame and badmouthing about it all. And so 5 Live, one of many "national" stations which seems largely unaware of how most of the country lives, has been able to revert to discussing Michael Jackson or the transfer window or whatever happens to be today's preferred topic. Yet the current weather and road conditions are very similar - if not more severe - than they were a week ago, and more widespread, too. It's just that it's not happening on the Home Counties doorstep.
I could go on - this bugs me more and more as the years pass, no doubt because I'm becoming more crotchety but also because I do think it's becoming more marked. Anyhow, I'd better write something about this week's hills, since that's what I'm paid to do.
I've managed to juggle my schedules enough to allow two trips out since the snows came, on the same local range of hills each time (guess which - but then it hasn't been the weather for "venturing out on the roads", so I hear). The first trip came in the first flush of the new snowfall, on Monday morning before the skies had really started to clear. It was hard work throughout, trailblazing up the kind of thigh-deep, wind-blown hillside where paths and tracks are an irrelevance and where the landscape is as near as it ever comes to reverting to some kind of primeval state.
A route that normally takes me 80 minutes was never going to succumb in anything like that but I was pleased to break the two-hour barrier, even if that was only achieved by working up a sweat that felt more than a little incongruous in the back end of a minus-plenty blizzard. The summit was reached just before two in the afternoon, and with there being no footprints coming up from the other side I was evidently the first person there that day. Given the conditions and the effort required (oddly pleasant in that this hill is normally little more than an occasionally steep stroll), it felt almost like the genuine kind of first ascent.
The summit was also a place for some tactical thinking, as the route up, although taking a theoretically easy line, had involved two long stretches of serious floundering in drifts that were waist deep in rather too many places. So instead of trying to return the same way, it made sense to simply straight-line it down into, then steeply up out of, the glen beneath the summit, reasoning (correctly as it turned out) that this was a day when almost any amount of direct ascent and descent was going to prove easier than canny contouring round by cols and suchlike.
Conditions cleared on the slog back uphill to regain the ridge, and looking back across I could see the line of my bootprints weaving down from the summit, dodging a small crag here and there and making some very easy ground look a good deal more serious than it was. (I can recall looking back up at a similar ribbon of footsteps on Binnein Beag on another winter's day in the early 1990s. It's always one of my favourite sights in the hills, and is just about the only time I ever feel like I've been at all intrepid.)
The second outing came in the perfect clear-blue near-windless weather of Wednesday, conditions so solid that I didn't bother taking a cagoule, just a trackie top and a fleece. The snow was still mostly all there, and was in substantially better condition than on the Monday: plenty of drifts of course but occasional banks and bulges of firm stuff which took a boot-edge very nicely. The view was of the whole country white and the snow had that ultraviolet tinge which marks out dazzling days in deep winter. There were plenty of people about, including a bloke who had set up a short-wave radio mast at the summit, and it was good to see everyone keen and happy and crisscrossing each other's paths as they meandered around. A dream of a day, in other words.
But as to which of the two outings I preferred? No contest, really. The Wednesday was a treat, in conditions close to being as good, outwardly, as it gets. But the Monday had been a battle, a struggle, an internalised, huddled-against-the-weather adventure, and it brought a sense of quiet achievement, a feeling of having done something a bit mad, just for the hell of it. That was the day I'd keep, if forced to choose.
Dave Hewitt
6/2/2003
You can contact Dave at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
