CAIRNS THE TROUBLE WITH
Why is piling up rocks so appealing to some and appalling to others? We get our hands dirty with the topic of cairn building...
Cairns have been waymarkers, burial mounds and art forms. Built in response to significant moments for a society, like the death of an important figure; or for an individual, in response to a more internal feeling. It’s hard to say with certainty which is the oldest in the UK but Garn Goch, on the western edge of the Brecon Beacons, is a contender, gradually assembled about 5700 years ago. It’s believed that on equinox and solstice events, people would place a stone on the cairn in honour of their ancestors, the line of rocks symbolising the boundary between life and death.
In Greek mythology, cairns have been associated with Hermes, the god of overland travel, and they’ve been used as trail markers across the world: from the seas around Scandinavia to the Andes of South America. On Ben Nevis, a row of 1.8m tall cairns, spaced at 50m intervals, indicates the safest route off the summit, away from the mountain’s precipitous north face – which can be fatally undetectable in bad weather.
Cairns have always had a place on our mountains – on summits and in titles. Ben Nevis’ neighbour, Carn Mor Dearg, is just one of many named after its resemblance to a big pile of rocks. It seems that across the ages and across the world, from the
child to the elderly, and from the Stone Age to now, humans have had a proclivity for piling up rocks. But as stones are increasingly stacked up in the hills, they are just as energetically taken down.
In 2008, the John Muir Trust, which looks after Ben Nevis, completed a project removing other rock stacks scattered around the summit, some of which carried a serious risk of misdirection or led to largescale path diversion and erosion. There were a lot. The project took five years. Some had some bases bigger than 10m. Though some were likely built in a moment of inspiration and some were indeed built as burial mounds, what most of them concealed was litter and human poo. “Some people have said: ‘You shouldn’t take it down, it’s ancient,’” says Joanne Backshall, programme manager for Fix the Fells in the Lake District. “Then when we take it down, underneath there’s a pile of rubbish or worse.”
“There simply is no grey area on the matter of building cairns,” says mountain leader Jamie Rooke. “It’s not acceptable and should not be done under any circumstances.
“First and foremost it doesn’t adhere to the ‘Leave No Trace’ principles. Spending time in the mountains comes with a degree of responsibility to protect them and care for them, and if you are leaving your mark everywhere you go by piling stones up, you are not caring for the mountains.
“SPENDING TIME IN THE MOUNTAINS COMES WITH A DEGREE OF RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT THEM AND CARE FOR THEM”