Forgotten Scotland
Patrick Baker reveals the hidden history of the Arrochar Alps
Scotland’s wild places are full of forgotten history. In this extract from his new book The Unremembered Places, Patrick Baker heads to the Arrochar Alps in search of a collection of caves most people have never heard of – but which played a defining role in the history of climbing and mountaineering
ALTHOUGH I CAN’T SAY when or how I first became aware of the Glen Loin Caves, it feels like they have always been there, hardwired into my imagination. Most people will never have heard of them, but I have come to think of them in near-mythical terms: an unconfirmed place, conjured somehow within my consciousness over the years by the slow drip-feed of rumour and folklore. When their name occasionally surfaces, in stories about the early days of climbing or mentioned as the hideout for some dubious historical figure, it always stirs a strange restlessness in me.
There is something inherently beguiling about caves anyway, a powerful sense of both attraction and foreboding. To consider entering a cave is to experience a conflict of feelings, a potent and contrary rush of curiosity and trepidation, inquisitiveness and apprehension. Caves are portals, breach points where the surface landscape is pierced and an inner world is reached. They are often retainers of mystery as well as space, an ingression into past happenings as much as they are themselves an ingression into the land.
The Glen Loin Caves are loaded with a similar duality, a peculiar and opposing combination of significance and secrecy. On the one hand is their historical importance. Among other claims, they were the reputed resting point for Robert the Bruce and his routed army in 1306 after their defeat at the Battle of Methven. More recently, the maze of fallen rocks on this Argyll mountainside was the focal point of a unique, sporting counterculture.
It was here for almost two decades from the 1920s that groups of working-class young people, mainly from the poverty-stricken tenements of Glasgow and shipyards of Clydebank, congregated to climb the huge rock walls of the Arrochar Alps. They created an almost permanent weekend residence in the caves. Small groups arrived at first, each with its own particular rules and hierarchies, then more established affiliations evolved. Clubs formed here whose names still resonate with modern mountaineers: the Ptarmigan Club and the infamous Creagh Dhu. The influence of these pioneering climbers was immense, providing a surge in climbing standards and techniques that was unequalled anywhere else at the time. They also redefined the sport, dismantling existing class barriers and creating a makeshift society in the Glen Loin Caves whose values and ethics became imprinted on generations of climbers that were to follow.
Yet the caves and their whereabouts have managed to remain largely unknown for decades: hidden partly by the obscurity of the landscape, but also by an unwritten code of fraternal discretion. “The lad with the clinker-nailed boots and the rope in his rucksack who told me how to find the cave made me promise to keep the secret,” wrote Alastair Borthwick in 1939, in one of the earliest and most detailed descriptions of the caves. “I was to follow a track to a forester’s cottage, pass through a gate . . . and there search for an old sheep fank. Behind it I should find a faint track leading up the hillside; and if I followed the scratches on the rock it led to, I should find the cave and good company.”
Even at close proximity, however, the caves are frustratingly hard to locate. In 1996 the writer Rennie McOwan described his efforts to find them. “This huge tangle of steep rocks, high up a hillside in Glen Loin… is not easily found. The ground is rough, very steep, often cliff-like and a mass of tree-covered holes, fissures and crevices.” It took McOwan, an accomplished outdoorsman, several attempts to pinpoint the exact position of Borthwick’s earlier description, leaving no doubt about the visual indiscernibility of the caves. “You can trace these historic caves if you know where to look,” McOwan advised matter-of-factly, “but it can be both timeconsuming and exasperating if you do not.”
UNWRITTEN PLACES
I am captivated by these kinds of places. Although ‘compelled’ is perhaps a better word to describe the slightly obsessive nature of my interest. For many years I had regularly roamed Britain’s largest and most inhospitable mountain range – the Cairngorms – searching for something akin to what the writer Roger Deakin described as “the unwritten places”: fragments of human and natural history that had somehow become lost in that vast granite landscape of plateau and corrie. Like the Glen Loin Caves, these were peripheral places, existing at the edges of our collective memory and often hidden by dint of sheer geographical remoteness. I had come to think of them best described as wild histories. Wild, certainly, in that they were located in wilderness areas, but wild also in an almost anthropomorphic sense: feral, uncared for, mostly unknown or nameless, and outside the boundaries of public places.
It is hard to believe that in such a densely populated archipelago as ours there are features of our landscape that could remain undocumented or unexplained, that there are places beyond our comprehension or recollection. Perhaps this is because we have become disconnected – distanced both physically and in thought – from the familiarities of wild places. So much so that we have come to regard our history with a distinctly contemporary, geographical bias: a predominantly categorised, class-bound and urban interpretation of the past. But this is to forget that we have only relatively recently become a nation of city-dwellers, and that Britain’s northern latitudes are still a place of wildness, a littoral-edged domain, full of mountain and moor, forest and fen. And it is from these places that we have ancestrally travelled.
And so, the landscape of Scotland becomes a vast diorama: the setting for countless narrative scenes, lives and stories overlaid, some more vivid than others. These wild histories define us, perhaps more than any iconic building or national monument, for they are records of things inconsequential and commonplace. They are the simple transactions of life and land, of life in land. The same repetitive priorities that echo distantly in our own lives today.
Our islands are deep in time, but limited in their boundaries, and are therefore densely layered in mystery and significance. Anyone who has spent time in Scotland’s more remote regions or has purposely explored its less-visited nooks (and crannogs) may well have come across some fragment of a recent or a long-forgotten past – for wild histories are profuse here, often hidden in plain sight but invariably difficult to reach. They are the strange anomalies in the landscape encountered by chance on an isolated ridgeline or discovered on a stretch of deserted coast. They appear without explanation or ceremony, harbouring stories of uncertain origin: apocryphal tales with a hint of truth, enough to seed intrigue or perpetuate a myth.
It would be impossible to search for or catalogue all of Scotland’s wild histories. To do so would involve a lifetime’s exploration
and would, by the passage of time, be rendered incomplete even before it was finished. But I wanted to reach certain places which, through their location and mysteriousness, had for years exerted on me a powerful imaginary appeal. They were often sacred but unremembered sites, such as medieval burial grounds, hidden on remote Highland lochs, or the abandoned graveyard for itinerant construction workers of the Blackwater Dam – perhaps the most desolate cemetery in the whole of Britain. There were also curiosities: the chance to visit one of Scotland’s highest
(and smallest) mountain shelters, situated – if I could find it – somewhere on an ancient drovers’ route, as well as the derelict sea island once used as a prison, quarantine site and military garrison, which still guarded the wind-strafed waters of the Firth of Forth. In the Inner Hebrides, I intended to spend a night on Belnahua, one of the uninhabited Slate Isles, where a ghostly village stood watch over the deep lagoons of abandoned slate quarries, flooded by Atlantic storm surges. Underground places would also feature in my journeys, and I would travel to Assynt’s karstic landscape in search of the enigmatic Bone Caves. Elsewhere, I would track across empty moorlands looking
for the remains of illicit stills and the clues to a secretive bootlegging past.
The journeys would be neither definitive nor conclusive. Neither would they be a search for the unsurpassed: the most ‘wild’, the most ‘remote’ or the most ‘obscure’. Instead, they would be more folly than analysis, personal rather than primary discoveries. By necessity, they would also only be possible to experience first-hand, by self-made journeys on foot or by boat, and because of this they would also be an exploration of the landscape itself and the forgotten links between people and place.
FINDING THE CAVES
We’re not having much luck. Chris lowers himself into another opening in the rocks – the third we’ve tried. I stand over the gap and peer in from above, seeing his head torch sweep the interior. The light disappears. I hear shuffling and some words I can’t make out, followed by silence – then a call from lower down on the other side of the rock. “No good.” Chris emerges from a vegetated crack in the hillside below. “Too small, too damp. That can’t be it.”
By now the rain has stopped and the cloud cover has thinned. I can see clusters of stars through breaks in the forest’s canopy. It’s
close to freezing and my breath lingers in the thin cone of torchlight. We continue higher, zig-zagging steeply through pines, tracking a chute of massive boulders.
I have the feeling we are getting closer, but I’m being careful, remembering another description I have read about the area. The mountaineer Hamish Brown had struck a cautionary tone. The place, he warned, is “riddled with caves and howffs of all sizes. Some overgrown gashes can provide booby-traps every bit as dangerous as crevasses”.
The gradient eases and then I see it. Ahead of me is a curtain of rock, glossy and bright in the moonlight. But there’s something else – a thin pleat of darkness. I move closer, and as the angle changes the crimp becomes a wide triangle, a large void of textureless black. The opening is huge: a story-book cave entrance, an eight-foothigh archway with tendrils of gnarled tree roots snaking along the threshold. It’s so perfectly formed it could be straight from a fairy tale: a bear’s den, the home to an ogre or a band of thieves. We enter slowly – in real life, caves can still be places for those not wanting to be found.
It’s dry inside, despite the rain. The ground is dusty and strewn with boulders. Sound redoubles, each movement carrying a louder, secondary reverberation. It feels like we have entered a crypt. A large, cold space: vaulted and full of dark air. I scan the cave walls, seeing ripples and folds appear in the torchlight, waves curving and bending in the schist, ridged to the touch – a kind of metamorphic graffiti. It’s laughable, but I’m ridiculously pleased to have found the cave, finally closing a loop of such long-standing fixation. More immediately, though, as the temperature plummets, it also means we have shelter for the night. Chris sets about making camp, arranging his sleeping bag between the rocks. From his jacket he has unstowed a plastic bottle with whisky swilling inside, straw-coloured and gleaming.
I take off my pack and explore further in. There’s an anteroom, a narrower chamber that I clamber into. It leads back into the open and I find myself at the bottom of a small chasm with rock walls rising either side of me. Water falls in thick, rhythmic droplets from the branches above. I work my way along the fissure, wading through slippery rock pools and pressing my hands sideways to balance, my fingers sinking into sponges of damp moss.
My route is soon blocked by a steep ramp of boulders. About halfway up I see another large cavity, hard to reach in the wet without climbing gear. Borthwick had described something similar: ‘holes’ that appeared ominously “to lead directly into the bowels of the earth”, and I wonder if this is the same huge cave “about 40 feet square with a roof 15 feet high”, that he had discovered.
Borthwick told of a boisterous place, noisy but welcoming, where “someone was always arriving” – the cave being home to a rowdy and garrulous lot: “As the shouting grew, others arrived. We had eighteen in residence in the end . . . Then they told stories . . . They seemed to have been in every conceivable variety of scrape on every conceivable variety of mountain, and the bigger the scrape the louder the laughter.”
I picture the scene as if I were arriving many decades ago. Not much would have been different; the same uncertain, perilous route to get here. But there, in the cliff face high above me would be the cave’s fire-lit entrance: a hot coal, bright and singular in the darkness, with loud voices barrelling out into the night.