No higher than the foot

They are magnificent and awe-inspiring to look at but Rab has no desire to climb ‘halfway to ooter space’. And don’t even mention those who use them for ‘leisure-amenity’

Mountains are fine enough things to look at but Rab’s feet will take him nowhere near their summits.

Imust say, without wishing to be too controversial, I am ambivalent about mountains. Their austere majesty tends to make me quail.

Driving to Skye, one passes multifold Beinns and Sgurrs, as they start doing what they do best: they loom. On Skye itself, there are the Cuillin up which I have never been and probably never will. It’s just not my thing.

Unless I did so in my sleep, I cannot remember ever climbing a mountain, though I will climb every hill in a fivemile radius immediately upon arrival anywhere.

It is always good to get one’s heid nearer the clouds, but not so much that it is halfway towards ooter space.

I don’t know where my antipathy towards, or fear of, mountains originates. Perhaps it’s not so much mountains as mountaineers that scare me.

I’ve met a few mountaineers in my time and always thought they would be better off in prison. But then I think that about most folk.

As a boy reared in gutties, I conceived a dislike of those beardie folk with their clanking crampons and mortgaged boots. They always seemed to be on television warning people in normal clothes to stay indoors.

I’m also passionately opposed to the use of nature for “leisure-amenity”. To me, it is having an ulterior motive to just being on the mountain and that is never acceptable to the stern moralist of pure heart and saintly perfection.

I will own that the grandeur of mountains is a sight to behold and I would not have them demolished by municipal order.

They contribute so much to the beauty of the Highlands and Islands. Indeed, I love them in my own way. And I have to say that, having not been out of the house in an age, I have been reminded on this trip that Scotland is a magnificently beautiful country.

Perhaps I like mountains to be unattainable and I’ve no wish to invade their space.

I would not be frightened on a mountain. I’m not scared of mist nor even of dying, as long as it’s outdoors among good, fresh air.

I have the feeling that mountains are scarier from the outside than the inside. On some islands, you find these escarpments that I have always found creepy. I would go so far as to say that I disapprove of escarpments.

Maybe it’s because they dominate the landscape and, like lairds and other horrors, are to be avoided at all costs.

A rare light is flashing up in my memory to remind me that I’ve been up at least one mountain in Norway, but that was by cable car, which probably doesn’t count. As a reporter, I also covered a death on Ben Nevis and seem to recall going a small way up that in a seated contraption.

But to blunder about on one’s own for the hell of it? I don’t know. I have absolutely no sense of direction and once got hopelessly lost on the Yorkshire Moors, which are mostly flat.

Out the window, I see the peaks of Kintail and Knoydart. I like them fine where they are. And I’m sure they like me fine where I am.

Somewhere you will never find Rab – on the top of a mountain.