THE CAIRNGORMS IN FOCUS
Cameron McNeish on his hills of home, wonderful walks, and the unlikely tale of a vegetarian pig farmer
I t’s hard to think of the Cairngorms National Park without thinking of the mountains, and it’s hard to think of the mountains without thinking of Cameron McNeish. Scotland’s best-known and most loved outdoors man, the author of many books on Scotland’s wild places and presenter of BBC Scotland’s Roads
Less Travelled, he’s a great advocate for Scotland’s countryside, which is where he spends most of his time.
Cameron has lived in the Cairngorms for 42 years and now refers to those aforementioned mountains as his ‘hills of home’. But it took Cameron, a boy born in the tenements of Glasgow, a while to graduate to the high, wide and remote peaks of the Cairngorms. Moving from Govan to Cardonald at the age of five, Cameron immediately found himself drawn to the trees and the White Cart Water river.
‘My friend Hamish and I would have Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn style adventures, building rafts, stealing apples, playing and falling over and hurting ourselves,’ he says. ‘If I hadn’t had that upbringing I’m sure I would have been a very different person.’
This in turn led to hill walking in the Campsie Fells at the age of 15 with a borrowed tent and pots and pans from his kitchen as well as false assurances to his parents that he had joined the scouts and that there would be adult supervision. Here Cameron learned to use a compass, to read a map and how not to freeze to death or burn himself on camp fires. He also looked north and saw the snow-capped peak of Ben Lomond shining in the distance. He knew that his adventures would always take him further north and only the interlude provided by training to be an athlete got in the way.
‘I was Scottish long jump champion in 1968 and was in training for the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh,’ Cameron
tells me. ‘We had some really great athletes in our squad, including Allan Wells who also started out as a long jumper before he went on to be a sprinter and win the 100 metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics in 1980. But I kept getting injuries and I think I knew in my heart of hearts that athletics wasn’t for me. At that time I was a policeman in Glasgow, but I did some hillwalking and kayaking when I took police cadets to a summer training camp just north of Oban for two months. But then I was back on the beat in Govan all winter and I knew I’d much rather be in the hills.’
This led Cameron to apply for a job with the Scottish Youth Hostel Association and after a short time in Aberdeen, the opportunity that he had been waiting for to move to the mountains arose. ‘We had the choice of a new hostel in Torridon or one in Aviemore,’ he tells me. ‘By this time I was married with one child and another on the way and there were no schools in Torridon, so we went for Aviemore and we loved it.’
Having served his mountaineering ‘apprenticeship’ on the west coast Cameron admits to being ‘terrified’ by the Cairngorms at first. ‘When you’re climbing in Glencoe or even on Ben Nevis you can look down and see the road below you, so you’re never really that remote,’ he says. ‘But here, these are big, wide and potentially dangerous mountains and I’d never felt such a feeling of remoteness.’
Recalling his first trip walking up the side of Ben Macdui, the second highest mountain in Britain, and working his way around to the mist shrouded Cairngorm, Cameron tells of a moment when the mist cleared and all that he could see were hills. The realisation that if he had an accident it was a very long way to the nearest road hit him hard. ‘I was at a spot where in 1971 a school party had got into trouble and many had perished. I don’t know if it was just the atmosphere of the place or if I was recalling the words of Professor Norman Collie, who claimed to have heard footsteps behind him at the summit cairn and turned to see a tall wraith-like grey man on the hill, or the flood of other walkers who claimed to have had similar experiences on the mountain. But I was overcome by fear and scuttled, terrified, into the Lairig Ghru where I set up camp for the night. In the morning I awoke to glorious sunshine and a reindeer grazing near my tent and suddenly the world was fine again. To this day I can’t put my finger on why I felt so terrified. I’d never felt like that before and I haven’t since.’
What started out as fear has now become a healthy respect for, and a true love of, the Cairngorms, the mountains that have the highest land mass in Britain of over 2,000, 3,000 and
‘I awoke to glorious sunshine and a reindeer grazing near my tent and suddenly the world was fine’
4,000 feet, making for conditions that are more arctic than alpine. Here plants that don’t grow anywhere else spring up and rare birds like the ptarmigan, dotterel and snow bunting make their homes. ‘In winter up there conditions are truly arctic even though you’re only at around 4,500 feet,’ says Cameron. ‘That’s what makes them such a challenge for hill walkers and mountaineers. I don’t like to use the word wilderness, because there’s not really any wilderness left in Scotland, but these are big, remote mountains and they’re about as close as you can get. That’s why so many people head to the hills: it’s not just about getting up high and enjoying the views, it’s about getting away from the hand of man. The higher you go the further away from man-made artefacts you get.’
Last year Cameron had an unlikely companion to accompany him away from civilisation into the Monadhliath Mountains. Star of Outlander and Hollywood actor Sam Heughan, who has since become a good friend and even wrote the foreword for his latest book, took to the hills with Cameron for a special edition of The Adventure Show.
‘I knew of Sam through Outlander and I’d heard on the grapevine that he was a bit of a hillwalker. Then I noticed that a Sam Heughan was following me on Twitter. I thought, “I wonder if it’s the same Sam”, so I got in touch with him and it was. He told me that he had all of my books and that he’d love to go for a walk sometime.
‘So I thought we should do something for TV. I really didn’t think he would do it as he has such a tight schedule, but he did and that’s how I got to know him. He’s a friend now and he comes and stays at my house now and then. I have to keep it very secret when he’s there or I have all of the housewives of Newtonmore camping out on my lawn. He’s dead keen on the hills and he’s a great ambassador for Scotland.’
The mix of cultures and languages associated with the Cairngorms is also a source of fascination for Cameron, from the Celtic and Gaelic speaking areas, to the Doric and even Norse inspired names, the Cairngorms span a real melting-pot of cultures. ‘I love the folklore that surrounds the mountains and you can learn so much there about mythology,’ he says. ‘For example, the name sithean (pronounced shee-an) refers to fairies, but fairies in the Celtic context don’t wear white dresses and play at the bottom of your garden. They are nasty creatures who steal children
and take them away for 100 years. Then there’s the water horses who live in the lochans and will drag unsuspecting passers-by down into the water if they stop to admire them. I want people to know that there’s lots more to climbing mountains than just bagging a summit. These are stories that I like to tell in my writing and my TV programme. The Cairngorms is the biggest national park in the country and it’s a great area for stories.
‘When we first moved out of Aviemore we moved to Kincraig and lived there for about five years. There’s a lovely wee church there by the shores of Loch Insh and it’s supposed to be the place with the longest history of continual Christian worship in the country – prior to being a Christian church it was a pagan site. Saint Adomnan set up this church and the story goes that he had a bell in the church – there’s still a very old bell there today – that he used to take down to the loch and ring to summon wild swans to come and worship. This ties in with an old Celtic story about the Swan Children of Lir. The King of Lir had two children but his wife died and when he married again his new wife was an enchantress. She cast a spell on the King’s children so that they would slowly turn into swans and be destined to fly between Scotland and Ireland for 200 years.
‘The story is that these swan children were the swans that were summoned to worship on Loch Insh. I didn’t realise until I moved nearby, but Loch Insh is the principal wintering place of whooper swans from Iceland and Greenland. It’s lovely how these things all tie in.’
Having lived in Newtonmore for the past 30 years, in the heart of shinty country, Cameron is literally living in the shadow of the mighty mountains. He admits that they may not have the visual appeal of some of Scotland’s other mountains when you stand at the bottom and look up, but is a strong advocate for expending some energy and appreciating what they hold. ‘Ben Macdui is a great example, you can get to the top and that’s fine, but if you just go up and come back down you miss so much. There are beautiful sculpted corries and high level lochans all to be discovered.
‘Up until July there are snow banks up there and it’s like being in an ice cave at points. Now because I’m older I quite often don’t even go to the summit and I’ll just explore the rest of a mountain and then lie down and fall asleep for half an hour.’