A mountain is so much more than a march to the summit...it’s watching an otter belly-flop and go bonkers
Forgoing the usual lure of the climb, a wander on Ben Ledi provides an exhilarating wild encounter
The path between the car park at the bottom of Ben Ledi and the summit has only one thing in its favour: it is an efficient way to climb the mountain.
Of the many feet that tramp it in any one year, most use it in order to pronounce the mountain climbed, use it again to return to the car, and for no other reason. That’s fine. If that is the height of your ambition on this, or any other mountain, I wish you joy. But I am cut from a different cloth. I have known the mountain for 50 years now. I have no idea how often I have climbed it. But, much more often, I have been on the mountain with no intention of reaching the summit.
Sometimes I go with neither purpose nor destination in mind beyond a deepening of my bond with the mountain, and with perhaps the motivation of a handful of lines of Norman Maccaig’s poem Landscape And I. He had a different mountain in mind when he wrote it but the philosophy was one I took to heart: … This means, of course,
Schiehallion in my mind Is more than mountain. In it he
leaves behind
A meaning, an idea, like a hind Couched in a corrie.
So then I’ll woo the mountain
till I know
The meaning of the meaning,
no less…
Ben Ledi is a mountain strewn with features named for wild creatures. On an OS map you will find Gaelic names for a fox crag, an eagle crag, a raven peak and a wildcat cairn among others. And on its lower slopes to east and west and north there were shielings, so among the species long accustomed to living on the mountain was our own.
The wildcats are long gone, alas, and the mountain as a whole is too busy with people for a golden eagle to linger by Creag na h-iolaire, although you see them crossing Loch Lubnaig from time to time.
One of my favourite times to be on the mountain is a June evening of endless daylight. The broad north ridge dips to Bealach nan Corp, a feature of which is a scrap of a lochan. It is said an old coffin road led this way. The mourners would pause by the lochan en route from Glen Casaig in the west to the burial ground of St Bride on the far side of Loch Lubnaig.
The lochan is a place I like to linger. So this warm June evening I had climbed to the bealach by way of Stank Glen, with the air carved open by squads of swifts and martins.
It had been wet for days before, and every mountain burn chattered and filled my ears with the voices of water on the move, but the volume dwindled as I came up towards the bealach.
Just before the lochan came into sight, there was a new water voice that struck a conspicuous note. It was enough to slow my approach to the crest. Something was causing mayhem in the lochan. Chin-in-the-grass best describes my approach to a sheltering rock. Fifty yards away, and lit by the lowering, yellowing sun in the north-west, an otter was going spectacularly bonkers.
It’s possible there was enough small fish life in the lochan to hold its interest for a while, but, if there was, it had exhausted that interest and had apparently set about emptying the entire lochan of water instead. It would disappear underwater then, having built up a head of steam, it leapt from the surface like a dolphin but then descended in a singularly un-dolphin-like crashing bellyflop, resurface, execute a series of forward rolls, dive and repeat. And repeat. And repeat.
It came ashore, shook itself, then stood still just long enough for me to take in its substantial size and judge it to be a male. Then it sprinted up a short slope, sped round a conspicuous rock and headed back towards the lochan at a gallop. A yard from the bank it took off and, with all four limbs splayed wide and tail dead straight and horizontal providing the effect of a fifth limb, crashlanded into the water again.
I remembered Gavin Maxwell’s description of his first days with his otter Mijbil in Ring Of Bright Water, “…making enough slosh and splash for a hippo. This, I was to learn, is a characteristic of otters; every drop of water must be, so to speak, extended and spread about the place; a bowl must be overturned or, if it will not overturn, be sat in and sploshed until it overflows. Water must be kept on the move and made to do things; when static it is as wasted and provoking as a buried talent…”
I imagined this otter on Ben Ledi, overheated by his climb to the watershed in his fur coat, coming on the lochan, as still as any stretch of water it had ever seen, and therefore “as wasted and provoking as a buried talent”, and the otter, unleashed its talent for inducing storm from a flat calm. I wished I had seen that arrival.
The otter resurfaced at speed once more, leapt from the water onto the bank, followed its own spoor up and round the rock again then the dash for the shore as before and that five-limbed airborne moment before that hippo-esque slosh and splash.
On and on it went, the same manoeuvre again and again until it needed a new trick, a new way to achieve watery chaos. The otter leapt from surface to shore as before but, instead of hitting the ground running again, it stopped dead, convulsed in a series of mighty shudders, looked along its back directly at me, gave me a long, hard stare, then walked away across the flat ground of the bealach and disappeared going downhill.
That is the mountain I know. It’s nearer 40 years than 30 now since I stopped treating mountains as the basis for mountaineering and became a student of what Nan Shepherd called “the total mountain”.
Seton Gordon became my role model, and it is his work I revisit more and more, for no writer articulated more thoughtfully the kind of relationship with the high and lonely places I craved for myself.
That June evening on Ben Ledi, in the wake of the otter’s departure, he was the writer I reached for, a passage I know more or less by heart: “…In the immense silences of these wild corries and dark rocks the spirit of the high and lonely places revealed herself, so that one felt the serene and benign influence that has from time to time caused men to leave the society of their fellows and live on some surf-drenched isle – as Saint Cuthbert did on Farne – there to steep themselves in those spiritual influences that are hard to receive in the crowded hours of human life.”
If that’s not for you, you can always walk from the car park to the summit and back and pronounce the mountain climbed.
It set about trying to empty the lochan of water