Cameron’s Country
The hills and mountains of Scotland are not just summits to conquer but have wonderful legends and fascinating stories to offer
Cameron McNeish celebrates the release of his 21st book on Scotland’s mountains
WRITTEN by BBC producer W Gordon Smith to an old Irish tune, Buachaill o’n Éirne Mé, the words of the song Come By The Hills are curiously evocative and tinged with hope.
“Come by the hills to a land where fancy is free…”
Landscapes that allow free reign to the imagination, places that are haunted by the stories of yesteryear, yet can offer us the peace and certainty that comes with beauty and tranquility.
Choosing a book title can be a minefield but in this
case it was easy. A follow-up to my autobiography There’s Always The Hills called for an obvious link between the two, and that link is the landscape of Highland Scotland – a constant from my teenage years to my present septuagenarian years.
For more than 40 years I have earned my living from hills – writing about them, editing magazines about them and making television programmes about them. Come By The Hills is my 21st book about hills and mountains, a coming-of-age perhaps?
I’m still acutely aware of the pull of the hills, it has been my anchor and the foundation from which I have created a kinship that has stood me in good stead when the world has occasionally appeared a little darker. I accept for much of my life I’ve been obsessed by hills and mountains. I’m still thrilled whenever I’m in the proximity of mountains and still worry myself silly about the day that will inevitably arrive when I can no longer immerse myself in them.
I was terrified at losing the very thing that had driven me for most of my life – my love of mountains and wild places. I can still hobble about the hills, but I am painfully aware that age can rob us of so much.
Fortunately, medicine and technology have improved so much and help to overcome much of the discomfort caused by conditions like chronic plantar fasciitis,
plantar plate tears and osteoarthritis. Thankfully I can, with adjustments to pace, still get on the hills.
A constant theme as I was writing Come By The Hills was something that Nan Shepherd wrote in her wonderful little love letter to the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain.
“To aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain. We must abandon the summit as the organising principle of mountains.”
Nan Shepherd wrote The Living Mountain in the 1940s, although the book wasn’t actually published until 1977. By 1949, only 15 people were recorded by the Scottish Mountaineering Club as having climbed all the Munros – mountains of more than 914m (3000ft). The Munro-bagging phenomenon didn’t really begin until later, and while folk did “collect” summits in those early days, there was a greater emphasis on exploration.
The last thing I want to do is disparage the idea of Munro or Corbett-bagging. A large part of my hillwalking life has been taken up with ticking lists. I’ve climbed the Munros three times and written two books about them, but when the vagaries of age begin to make themselves felt, it’s not a bad time to take a longer look at other aspects of our hills and mountains. This, fundamentally, is what my new book is about.
Our wild places are so full of history and legend it sometimes feels as though every place name has a story to tell, every hidden corrie holds its own secrets, and every right of way echoes to the sound of cattle drovers, travelling poets and priests, soldiers and vagabonds.
These are stories worth telling and in their telling is their preservation. By preserving them we learn of those things that shape us as a nation. All these heroes of history have left traces, often in place-names, song and story, but most often in legend and folk tales.
In 1868, Neil Marquis, the son of a local shepherd, clambered up the north face of Aonach Dubh above Loch Achtriochtan in Glen Coe to reach the long vertical slit in the rock that’s commonly known as Ossian’s Cave. Years later I tried to repeat the climb but the experience wasn’t a good one.
At the time I was infatuated with the heroic sagas of the Celtic Revival, in particular James Macpherson of Balavil’s controversial translations of The Poems of Ossian, first published in the mid-18th century.
Macpherson claimed the work was a record of ancient oral poetry told to him in Gaelic during his travels through the Highlands and Islands. After publication, however, the London critic Dr Samuel Johnson, denounced the work as a forgery. This was the Samuel Johnson, literary critic and poet, who once remarked, “The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England!”
Despite the learned doctor’s scorn, other academic studies suggest Macpherson’s work may have been genuine. Sadly, the harm was done, and to this day history recalls James Macpherson as a fraud.
Fraud or not, The Poems of Ossian offer a wonderful account of the ancient sagas of Fionn Maccumhail, his Fingalian warriors and their heroic battles.
Ossian was the bardic warrior son of Fingal himself and his poems had an enormous impact on 18th century European society. Admirers included Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, W.B. Yeats and even Ludwig van Beethoven.
It has been claimed that the book was a favourite of Napoleon Bonaparte, who carried it into battle and read
“Ossian Fingal” was the bardic warrior son of
passages every night, inspired by the combination of north European cultural mythology and Celtic identity.
The patriotic view still held by a limited number of Scots is that Ossian’s poems are historical; that the Gaelic is genuine ancient poetry composed by a third century bard who witnessed many of the exploits recorded; and that to all intents and purposes, Macpherson simply gave us a sequential narrative of traditional lore as an anglicised version. An example of
such can be found in The Death of Cuchulin from The Poems of Ossian.
“Blest be thy soul, son of Semo. Thou went mighty into battle. Thy strength was like the strength of a stream: thy speed like the eagle’s wing. Thy path in battle was terrible: the steps of death were behind thy sword. Blest be thy soul, son of Semo, car-borne chief of Dunscaith.
“Thou hast not fallen by the sword of the mighty, neither was thy blood on the spear of the brave. The arrow came, like the sting of death in a blast: nor did the feeble hand, which drew the bow, perceive it. Peace to thy soul, in thy cave, chief of the Isle of Mist.”
The legends of Fingal and Ossian are commemorated in place names throughout the Highlands and Islands, and goodness known how many Fionn Coires there are. As a young climber, Ossian’s Cave beckoned to me with all the magic of a Druid’s command and I succumbed to the call. The cave itself is a vertical slit, two-thirds of the way up the north face of Aonach Dubh, and from afar it is like a dark portal to another world.
My old pal Hamish Telfer and I clambered up through vegetated gullies, over loose crags and faint meandering sheep trails, searching for a route known as Ossian’s Ladder, which was said to lead to the cave.
It was in this cave, according to Fingalian legend, that Ossian was born. He was the son of Fionn Maccumhail, chief of the Fianna warriors, and a half-woman, half-hind by the name of Sadh.
The couple met when Fingal was hunting with his hounds, Luath and Bran. There was one hind the dogs refused to chase, and when Fingal called them off, the deer turned into a beautiful woman. Later, the call of the wild proved too strong and she returned to the steep and lonely places to give birth to a son.
On our high stance we considered whether to attempt the last section to the mouth of the cave but decided against, not because of the difficulty, but because it was clear that it wasn’t really a cave.
A ledge sloped upwards at an angle of about 45 degrees from the opening to the top, and it was running with water. A disappointed and dispirited pair of youths slipped and slithered their way back down to the A82.
Come By The Hills, published by Sandstone Press, will be released on October 20.