Isles at the Edge of the Sea E-Book

Jonny Muir

• Herausgeber: Sandstone Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Off the western seaboard of Scotland are hundreds of islands. Beginning on Arran, Jonny Muir sets out to explore these places with a single ambition: to reach the St Kilda archipelago, the islands at the edge of the world. On the way he attempts to finds his inner peace on Holy Island, takes part in a punishing foot race across the mountains of Jura, confronts the Inaccessible Pinnacle on Skye and walks the white-sand beach on Berneray. He encounters sharks and whales, discovers gory histories and follows in the footsteps of Boswell and Johnson, but island life is not without its challenges. 'Man-eating' midges live up to their reputation on Rum. An Atlantic storm threatens to rip his tent to shreds on Barra. Wicked weather lashes the Outer Hebrides, leaving his prospects of reaching St Kilda balanced on a knife-edge. An intensely personal account of a journey through some of Britain's most extraordinary landscapes. Complete with twenty five beautiful colour plates.

Leseprobe

Jonny Muir is an adventurer, runner, writer and proponent of UK-inspired travel. Born in Birmingham in 1981, he grew up and was educated in north Worcestershire, before studying history at the University of Exeter. Family holidays in south-west England, the Peak District, Wales and Scotland kindled a life-long love affair with his home nation.

Jonny visited the UK’s 91 historic county tops in a continuous 5000-mile cycling and walking adventure over a three-month period in 2006. His first book, Heights of Madness, published in 2009, is an account of that unique journey. He is also the author of a guidebook, The UK’s County Tops: Reaching the Top of 91 Historic Counties.

A journalist for six years at newspapers in Cheltenham, Peterborough and Inverness, he subsequently retrained as an English teacher, and now works at a secondary school in London.

By the same author

Heights of Madness

The UK’s County Tops

ISLES AT THE EDGE OF THE SEA

Jonny Muir

First published in Great Britain by

Sandstone Press Ltd

PO Box 5725

One High Street

Dingwall

Ross-shire

IV15 9WJ

Scotland.

www.sandstonepress.com

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

© Jonny Muir 2011

The moral right of Jonny Muir to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.

Editor: Moira Forsyth

The publisher acknowledges subsidy from Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

ISBNe: 978-1-908737-61-8

Cover design by River Design, Edinburgh.

Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore.

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Maps

Nowheresville

1 Arran

2 Holy Island

3 Bute

4 Colonsay

5 Islay

6 Jura

7 Mull

8 Coll

9 Tiree

10 Eigg

11 Rum

12 Canna

13 Skye

14 Barra

15 Berneray

16 Lewis

17 Harris

18 St Kilda

19 Homeward

20 London

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

I would not be writing these words were it not for the faith placed in me by my publisher, Sandstone Press. Thank you to the publishing team, notably Moira Forsyth, my editor. The joy of travel is in the people one encounters: the crotchety bus drivers, the round-the-world cyclists, the roomful of snoring strangers, the walker who stood next to me on Conachair, the ceilidh crowd on Eigg, the marshals on the windy summits of the Paps of Jura, the ‘whisky brothers’, the Barra tourist who bought me a cup of tea, the English sailors who filled my glass. It is the littlest gestures that live longest in the memory.

I have, however, some specific thanks: to the volunteers at the Centre for World Peace and Health on Holy Island, for persuading me not to ‘ceaselessly strive’; to Fiona Hogg, for fixing my right knee; to Magnus Houston, for keeping his promise to get me up the Inaccessible Pinnacle; to George Broderick, for his expert insight on Gaelic and the Paps of Jura fell race; to Kenny Macleod, for welcoming me into his church and home; to Anna MacArthur, for educating me on the nuances of the Free Church of Scotland; to Dougie and Karen MacDonald, for rescuing me in my hour of need on Skye; to my parents, Lynda and Roger Muir, for their unshakeable support; and, of course, to Fi, for putting up with not only my prolonged absences, but the endless hours of writing. She cannot have minded too much; she agreed to be my wife.

Finally, to the Highlands and islands of Scotland: the most beautiful, challenging and extraordinary places on our planet. I may be hundreds of miles away in London, but to unashamedly borrow a pair of lines from the chorus of Caledonia: ‘Let me tell you that I love you, that I think about you all the time.’

List of Illustrations

1 Goatfell, from Brodick

2 Holy Island and Lamlash pier from Lamlash, Arran

3 Mount Stuart, Bute

4 Sunset over Kiloran Bay, Colonsay

5 Looking east to the Paps of Jura from Beinn Eibhne, Colonsay

6 Camping on the edge of The Strand, Colonsay

7 The ‘whisky brothers’ from Germany at Ardbeg distillery, Islay

8 Ardbeg distillery, Islay

9 The finish line of the Isle of Jura Fell Race

10 Tobermory seafront, Mull

11 Pier at Galmisdale, Eigg, with stone pillar commemorating the island’s independence in the foreground

12 Bullough mausoleum and the Rum Cuillin

13 Magnus ascending the An Stac screes, Skye

14 Descending the An Stac screes, Skye, in mist

15 A Barra-bound ferry leaves Oban

16 The Virgin and Baby statue on Heaval, Barra

17 Gatliff Trust Berneray youth hostel, Berneray

18 West Beach, Berneray

19 Petra and Peter, round-the-world cyclists in Leverburgh, Harris

20 Standing Stones, Callanish, Lewis

21 Summit of Conachair, Hirta

22 Dùn, The Village and Village Bay from Conachair, Hirta

23 The Village, Hirta

24 Stac Lee

25 Boreray and Stac an Armin

26 Flooding on the campsite at Sligachan, Skye

Maps

Nowheresville

O Caledonia! stern and wild,

Meet nurse for a poetic child!

Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,

Land of the mountain and the flood,

Land of my sires! what mortal hand

Can e’er untie the filial band

That knits me to thy rugged strand!

Sir Walter Scott

Meteorologist Tomasz Schafernaker was partway through a live Saturday afternoon bulletin on BBC One when he casually waved a hand over the hundreds of wondrously-shaped islands pitched off the west coast of Scotland.

He pronounced rain. Nothing unusual in that. Except these were the words Schafernaker uttered thereafter: ‘This lumpy stuff you can see here, these clouds have actually been producing a few showers, but it’s mainly in the Western Isles, mainly in nowheresville, and it looks as though the east of Scotland will keep the sunshine.’

Nowheresville: a place void of identity, charmless and undistinguished.

It was an unfortunate choice of word.

Schafernaker did not forecast the subsequent cloudburst: a media storm, a tempestuous one of his own conjuring. Angus MacNeil, MP for the Western Isles, was unimpressed. Nor were his constituents enamoured; one islander branded the comment ‘insulting, ignorant and self-satisfied’. The BBC received a ‘squall of complaints’, the Times punned.

Schafernaker’s crime? He had reduced the Hebrides – a place of faultless natural beauty with flowering machair meadows, towering mountains and white-sand beaches washed by cobalt seas; a place of inimitable spirit, the birthplace of Christianity in Scotland and the source of the globe’s most revered single-malt whisky; with St Kilda, the island at the edge of the world, a cultural and physical marvel, in a league with Ayers Rock and Machu Picchu, among its isles – to nowheresville.

It was like calling Elle Macpherson ugly. Or water fattening. Or the Earth flat.

Schafernaker said sorry – after identifying Scotland’s north-west hinterland as nowheresville for a second time during a later broadcast on the BBC news channel. He had been misconstrued, Schafernaker said in an apology: ‘My intention was only to convey that very few people were likely to catch a shower on that day. It was in no way a comment or opinion on the area or the people that live there.’ Nowheresville, the forecaster explained, was meant to refer to the mountains of the Highlands, not the islands of the Hebrides. That makes it all right then.

Deciding not to be offended, Scottish author Jenny Colgan, writing in the Guardian, offered a fresh slant: ‘Now, let me see – if Schafernaker lives in London and works in television, it’s a near-certainty he lives in Notting Hill or Shepherd’s Bush. Hideous traffic, litter-strewn streets, the congestion charge, bendy buses and £5 cappuccinos? Now that’s what I call nowheresville.’

1 – Arran

Arran I would call on the whole the most delightful; more enjoyable even than Skye, partly because smaller, though scarcely less wild, but chiefly because of the better condition of its inhabitants.

Sheriff Alexander Nicolson

‘Number 68.’

I was being summoned to the start line of the Goatfell hill race – eight miles of toil from sea level in Brodick to the 874-metre pinnacle of Arran, and back again: the sort of thing perfectly sane people do for amusement.

‘Yes, me,’ I muttered, reluctantly walking forward to join the other competitors, a throng of lithe, sinewy men and women wearing little more than club singlets and shorts. I stole an anxious upwards glance at the skyscraper we would soon be climbing. The imposing impression of Goatfell glowered back, turning my legs to lead. I dreaded the next minutes of my life; they would involve certain pain.

Only nature could have engineered such an accomplishment, but were Goatfell a building, it would be the tallest in the world, standing 46 metres above the ludicrously-lofty, 160-storey Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Imagine the staircase in that high-rise. If a flight of stairs to the summit of Goatfell existed, the number of steps would exceed 4000 – an extraordinary figure. Not only must the Goatfell runner ascend the equivalent of many thousands of steps, they must descend them too. There is a further complication. No two of these 8000 steps is the same: they are an ever-changing variety of big and small, short and long, loose and firm, dry and wet, flat and sloping, smooth and rough, grassy and rocky, hard and soft.

Hill running is not meant to be easy.

The herd was released. Some 80 bodies surged forward in unison, first bustling around a playing field, then spilling onto Arran’s round-island road and turning north. Goatfell loomed above us, its summit – our destination – touching the heavens, seemingly a lifetime away. I lowered my eyes, focusing my gaze on the road ahead, mentally preparing for the battle to come. The race route swept us away from Brodick and across Glenrosa Water, with a marshal directing the pack of runners onto a minor road. I was soon on the lower reaches of the mountain, ascending a rocky uneven track through forest.

The adrenaline of the start had gone. Banter and blether had fizzled out. I had not been running uphill long, but already I was conscious of overwhelming tiredness, a profound weariness in my legs. I fought the desperate urge to simply stop, to cease movement. A foot hurt, then a thigh, then the other foot, then a hip, and so it went on. The hill runner’s enemy, lactic acid, engulfed both calves. I contemplated walking. At least then I would still be moving. Too soon, far too soon, I resolved, scolding myself.

Lacking the will to confront pain, I succumbed, slowing to a depressing shuffle, then – inexorably – an undignified walk. The rhythm of running broken, the psychological fight had been tamely fought and easily lost. The roof of Goatfell, now almost directly above my head, seemed further away than ever; there was still a CN Tower and two St Paul’s cathedrals to go.

I continued up Goatfell, following a track that climbed unbroken to Meall Breac, a stony ridge leading to the mountain’s summit, half-running, half-walking. I tried to recall why I had thought it would be a sensible idea to spend the first day of my journey among the west coast islands of Scotland racing up a mountain. If there had ever been logic in the madness, I could not recall it now. The path became rougher, littered with boulders and jagged rocks. To compound my frustration, I was being overtaken. After sneaking into the top-10, I had been unceremoniously spat out of the elite. A runner silently skipped past me, then another, and another. More would follow.

Climbing towards the sun, I developed a maddening thirst and fantasised about what I would drink later to quench it. Then I began to panic. I was due to take part in the Isle of Jura fell race in a fortnight, a contest twice as long and involving three times the ascent of Goatfell. I asked myself the same question over and over again in my head: if I struggle on Goatfell, how will I fare on Jura? It was not as if Goatfell was reputed for its extreme toughness. The race is not even the hardest on Arran. The Glen Rosa horseshoe, a 12-mile dash over Goatfell and neighbouring Cir Mhòr, took that accolade. Then – in the context of the Scottish islands – there was the Glamaig race on Skye, a tortuous contest up and down a cone of scree that a bare-footed Ghurkha once completed in less than an hour; the ‘Mull monsterette’ over Ben More, the highest mountain on Mull; and, of course, the race over the formidable Paps of Jura. In the hill running stakes, Goatfell was a kitten among lions.

There was no let-up, the terrain became steeper and steeper. There was still a Canary Wharf to ascend. I hauled myself skywards, dragging my aching body across heather, grass, mud and rock. The track was increasingly ill-defined, a rough route through a maze of rocks and across loose soil. I was wallowing in my hellish existence when I looked up to see a runner hurtling downhill towards me. It was the race leader, a man who had already been to the top and was on his way back to Brodick. Surging downhill with apparent reckless abandon, he looked like a man who had just been told his house was on fire.

Just when it seemed I might be climbing forever, the land before me abruptly flattened, and there it was: a miracle – the rocky crest of Goatfell. I stumbled towards a marshal positioned by the summit toposcope, snatching a fleeting glance across the island I had conquered. The prize was glorious: an unending panorama of islands, mountains and ocean.

The spell-binding landscape of the British Isles takes on an extra echelon of greatness when viewed from the Goatfell zenith. Writing in 1628, the Scottish traveller William Lithgow described Arran as being ‘sur-clouded with Goatfieldhill which with wide eyes overlooked the western continent, and the northern country of Ireland; bringing also into sight in a clear summer’s day, the Isle of Man and the higher coast of Cumberland. A larger prospect no mountain in the world can show, pointing out three Kingdoms at one sight.’

When Sheriff Alexander Nicolson, a late-19th century pioneer of climbing in Scotland, stood here, his eyes were drawn to the surrounding mountains and their interlinking ridges. ‘The two chief features of it that impress one in succession are, first the terrible congregation of jagged mountain ridges and fantastic peaks right opposite and very near you, with their shelving precipices and dark clefts and wild melancholy scaurs,’ he recalled.

I did not have time to saviour the spectacle. But in the moment of that fleeting glance, my spirits soared. This was where I belonged: running up a mountain, a free, striving spirit, pushing myself to mental and physical limits, always putting one foot in front of the other. Exhaustion, frustration, self-doubt and thirst vanished in a puff of exultation.

The epiphany was short-lived. I had to descend the 4000-step staircase. This is the moment when hill running can seem a rather pointless exercise. What is the sense in stretching every sinew to reach the highest point in the shortest time, only to retreat to the lowlands as soon as the task has been accomplished? I have never liked descending. I am too sensible, incapable of switching off dark thoughts of blood and broken bones. The previous year’s race had been a bloody event and I did not want to be the unlucky one in the back of an ambulance. Disengage your brain, hill runners urge one another. To me, disengaging my brain on a running descent of Goatfell was tantamount to disengaging my life. So I tiptoed down cautiously, petrified of falling, agonising over every step. A group of four runners drifted past me, stretching their lead to hundreds of metres in the space of two minutes. Be brave, be bold, I told myself, but it was not until the gradient had softened that I began to stretch my legs, to run as fast as I could run without fear.

A man standing to the side of the path was telling runners their positions. I was 20th. Moments after imparting the information, he articulated a far more enthusiastic cry: ‘First woman.’ They are the words many a male runner dreads: misplaced masculine pride the reason, not sexism. The utterance lit a spark of desperately-needed motivation. I ran hard and fast until I could no longer hear the woman’s footsteps behind me. I had dropped her. Back on the road, the finish line still more than a mile away, I did not slacken, furiously passing three of the four runners who had overtaken me on the descent. I crossed the line in 17th place, a polite ripple of applause greeting my return to sun-drenched Brodick.

Lolling on the playing field several minutes later, mug of tea in one hand, block of shortbread in the other, my jumbled emotions settled into one feeling: thank goodness that is over – a notch above ‘never again’. But memories of pain and suffering are brief. An hour later, sitting in a beer garden outside the Ormidale Hotel, alcohol now in the hand that had held tea, I convinced myself that I had actually taken pleasure in running up and down Goatfell. Paps of Jura, I thought – a doddle.

When I was a boy I would draw islands, miniature worlds of my own creation. Putting a pencil to a blank sheet of paper, I would start with the outline – sometimes fjord-like and serrated, sometimes smooth and sweeping. I would sketch a narrow, isolated peninsula, at the end of which would be a jumble of treacherous rocks and a lighthouse built high above a crashing sea. Not all ships had heeded the warning beam. A ship, lying abandoned and askew, had been wrecked on the stony maw of the rocks. Picking up my colouring pencils, I would add detail to the coastline.

The shore would be attired with sand, shingle and seaweed, broken by tremendous cliffs and rolling meadows, secluded coves and broad bays. I would draw white waves breaking on the beaches, while in other places the water would be calm and still. The interior would feature fearsome, stupendous, snow-capped mountains, perhaps a volcano spewing magma. There would be a lagoon or a lake, with an island in the middle – an island within an island. And what else? Dense forests, a pier, villages, footpaths along cliff tops, a castle, a river growing wider as it neared the sea, a dam, a pack of wild animals. The possibilities were endless – it was my kingdom, after all. Offshore would be sandbanks and sailing boats, dorsal fins and flying fish. Seabirds in the shape of an upside down ‘w’ would soar overhead. At the top of the picture would be a large, glowing, yellow sun.

I had three months of island-hopping ahead of me, four if I wanted, and no itinerary. That was the way I wanted it. Travel is not travel when it is contrived. I had one fixed notion: to journey overland and overseas in a generally northerly and westerly direction until I had reached the St Kilda archipelago, the farthest, remotest outpost of the British Isles, a Utopia gone wrong. The year was 2010; it was 80 years since the last remaining inhabitants of St Kilda – notorious for its seabird-eating population – were evacuated from their faraway island. To get there, I would cycle, run and walk, as well as thumbing the occasional lift. I would travel on boats and buses, and become accustomed to the inter-island ferries of Caledonian MacBrayne (or Cal Mac, as the firm is commonly known).

A desire to visit the islands of the west, not in a series of weekend or even week-long excursions, but as part of a long, unbroken journey, was a slow-burner. The idea, a romantic dream, had crystallised in my mind in the unromantic environs of a first-floor office occupying an Inverness business park. There I spent 18 months working for the Highland and Inverness editions of the Press and Journal, editing and writing stories about the islands: uncertainty surrounding air services to Barra; the growing environmental credentials of Eigg; the campaign to make Harris Scotland’s third national park; bitter Presbyterian opposition to Sabbath sailings from Lewis; sea eagles on Mull; a community buyout on Rum; plans to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the evacuation of St Kilda.

At times, however, I felt like a fraud. I had never seen these places, never set foot on them. How could I write about somewhere I had never visited, somewhere I had very little knowledge or understanding of? I imagined readers in Castlebay, Stornoway or Tobermory laughing at the efforts I, an Englishman, made to unravel their concerns, their lives, their ways. Even my geography was uncertain. I would need to consult a map to establish the correct position of Islay in relation to Jura, or double check I had not inadvertently called the Small Isles the Summer Isles.

I quit, telling my colleagues I was leaving to explore the islands. I told my housemate I was moving out. I invested my savings in a mortgage, buying a flat with my girlfriend Fi in London. Seeking life after journalism, I gained a place on a teacher-training course.

But London and teaching were months away. The summer was my own.

It was late when Fi called. Rescuing my phone from the depths of my sleeping bag, I whispered into the receiver so as not to wake the other campers on the Glen Rosa site I had made home. Parting had not been easy. We had moved into our flat in early-April, busying ourselves with cleaning and decorating, putting our own stamp on the property. My imminent departure was rarely discussed. A month and a week rolled past until it was mid-May and time to go.

‘How long will you be?’ she had asked.

‘I don’t know, as long as it takes,’ I said, snapping back.

Perhaps I should not have gone at all, resisted the temptation of my island affair? My itinerant streak had already put a strain on our relationship, ultimately destroying it – albeit temporarily. We spent a year apart, ‘a gap year’ we called it, Fi in London, I in Inverness. And now, given a second chance, here we were again, with me disappearing for an unspecified period of time – the very factor that drove a wedge between us. I had often wondered how one balanced a desire to explore the world with the love for another person. I decided it was not possible to give your heart to both, certainly not at the same time.

There is a joke about an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman going on a mountain-climbing expedition. They become trapped on the peak, but a fairy appears offering to transform them into birds so they can escape the narrow ledge they are poised on. The Englishman chooses a swan, the Scotsman a golden eagle. As is often the case, the Irishman is the butt of the joke. He chooses a penguin. Arran has its own version of the Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman yarn, except in this case there is no Irishman and the punch line is a grisly variant. The tale goes something like this: an Englishman and a Scotsman went on a mountain-climbing expedition in the dark, granite peaks of Arran, but only one returned. The other was murdered – or so it seemed.

The death of Englishman Edwin Rose, apparently at the hands of Scotsman John Laurie in 1889, is believed to be the only case of murder in the British mountains to come before a court. Rose’s body was discovered beneath a stone-built shelter on the south side of Glen Sannox, three weeks after the pair had set out for a walk on Goatfell. The death of Rose was a brutal one. His skull had been smashed into eight or nine pieces and his spine, a shoulder and ribs were broken. Laurie went on the run for two months before being arrested in Hamilton. After an unsuccessful attempt to take his own life, he insisted: ‘I robbed the man, but I did not murder him.’

The Coatbridge pattern-maker was tried and found guilty at Edinburgh Crown Court by a majority of one in a 15-strong jury which deliberated for only 45 minutes. Laurie’s decision to steal some of Rose’s possessions, flee Arran, and evade arrest pointed to his guilt, the prosecution argued. But the evidence against him was circumstantial only. No blood or murder weapon was found on Laurie, nor could any eyewitness place the supposed assassin at the ‘murder’ site. Upon being sentenced, Laurie turned to the benches in the courtroom and declared: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am innocent of this charge.’ He continued to plead his innocence until his death 40 years later in 1930.

I hoisted my bulging rucksack onto my shoulders, the weight, supplemented by litres of water, almost causing my legs to buckle beneath me. Looking at a map of Arran earlier, reaching Lochranza by late-afternoon had seemed a realistic proposition. My route would take me up Glen Rosa, over two mountaintops – Cir Mhòr and Caisteall Abhail, from where I would be able to see the site of Rose’s death – before a long descent to the north coast.

Yet with the unexpected strain of the load and the tiredness of a fell race in my legs, a 10-mile excursion to Lochranza no longer seemed rational. The prospect was downright absurd. I could have caught a bus instead. Even so, I soldiered on; I wanted to see where Rose came to a macabre end.

Arriving at a junction, I was faced with a choice between a low and a high road. The low road would see me continue on the gently-rising track that ran along the floor of Glen Rosa. The high road veered west, climbing up and up, and crossing two ridge-linked mountains. Low or high, the destination – Cir Mhòr – would be the same, although the high road was unquestionably the way of the mountain masochist. Foolishly, I chose the hard way, climbing steeply and sweating profusely. The weather was much worse higher up. Rain soon began to fall. There was no shelter. The terrain was boggy, the path indistinct. I had made the wrong choice. I turned back, descending to Glen Rosa.

Frustrated at the energy exerted and the time wasted, I marched up the glen towards the toothed triangle of Cir Mhòr. My pace dawdled as I laboured towards The Saddle, a narrow plateau of land between the 799 metre mountain and Goatfell. It was close to this point that Rose had been pushed or, if the account of Laurie is to be believed, where Rose fell. The walkers had only met three days earlier at a hotel on Bute and sailed to Arran the following day. Laurie and Rose spent the latter’s final hours climbing with two others, before the group split, leaving the infamous pair to ascend Goatfell. They were seen on friendly terms on the summit by five witnesses. In a letter to the North British Daily Mail, Laurie claimed he left Rose ‘in the company of two men who came from Lochranza and were going to Brodick after summiting Goatfell’. The only certainty is that Rose – either alone, with Laurie or with the two mystery walkers – fell to his doom from a point midway between the peaks of North Goatfell and Mullach Buidhe.

I could not fathom how Cir Mhòr could be surmounted. I stared up at the mountain’s seemingly impenetrable maze of buttresses and cliffs from The Saddle for some time before I spied four figures far above ascending the peak by way of a thin track. I followed them. The climb was arduous and unyielding, made doubly difficult by the bricks I seemed to be carrying on my back. At one point I had to clamber through a gap between two rocks, then haul myself up to a third. For a moment I lost my grip; I was detached from the mountain. My weight thrown backwards, I had a brief, fearful sensation of falling, before I clawed at a rock and regained my balance.

Now high above The Saddle, the path weaved across the northern face of Cir Mhòr, passing tremendous buttresses, before squirming its way to a pointy summit. A whistling wind was frantic in its attempts to force me from this plinth, but as I crouched in the shelter of a boulder, the revelation of seeing sea all around was a joyous reminder that I was an islander. I had almost forgotten I was occupying such a territory, so engrossed I had been in mountains, murder and the wild interior of Arran.

Beyond the snow-filled corrie of Beinn Tarsuinn, the majesty of Goatfell and the sweeping glens of Rosa and Sannox, I could see Arran’s place in the world. There was the long arm of Kintyre to the west, with Gigha beyond, while to the east the islands of Bute, Great and Little Cumbrae, and Holy Island, interrupted the Firth of Clyde.

Not long after I was standing on a second summit. Despite rising to a greater altitude, the tor-littered top of Caisteall Abhail lacked the grandeur of Cir Mhòr. But from here I was able to look across Glen Sannox to Coire nam Fuaran, the place where Rose’s face-down body was discovered by a search party. Only a fortunate man would survive a drop from such a place, regardless of whether the fall was accidental or not. Men have died in lesser tumbles. The Londoner would not have been able to halt his plunge. His head would have been repeatedly dashed on rocks. Was Rose pushed? Was Laurie the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice? We will never know. The mystery belongs to the mountains.

Looking north I experienced a smidgen of what Ernest Shackleton and his two companions on the ill-fated Endurance expedition must have felt when they glimpsed civilisation on the south Atlantic island of South Georgia in 1916, for there was Lochranza, my salvation. The comments uttered by Frank Worsley also came to mind as a warning: ‘Boss, it looks too good to be true.’ Though visible at last, Lochranza sat a long way off, still several hours away.

I descended on a path that followed the curve of a cliff-edge, only for the track to peter out. Plunging downhill, I began an exhausting slog across a terrain of wobbling boulders and gorse. Going down was worse than going up. My legs, smarting from the application of Goatfell, throbbed with every step. I longed to reach the path marked on my map, but when I did it was as bad as tramping over rough country had been: more loose, ankle-twisting rocks and stretches of sopping bog.

The terrain at last began to ease, the path growing drier and more distinct. I turned a final corner and a distillery and houses appeared, now minutes away, not hours. Soon I was walking on a road, my feet grateful of a firm, flat surface after seven hours of unevenness. I was dirty, drained and disgruntled when I clumped into the youth hostel at Lochranza.

At least I had managed to walk out of the hills. Edwin Rose had not been so lucky.

2 – Holy Island

May every wonderful and wholesome thing arise here on Holy Isle and may its goodness and happiness spread throughout the entire world.

Lama Yeshe Rinpoche

Of all the days to cancel a ferry.

Dawning bright, the morning had grown luxuriously sunny. It was balmy: shirts and shorts weather. As I consumed a bacon and egg brunch at a café in Lamlash, the prospect of the weather possibly foiling my expedition across the mile-and-a-half strip of sheltered water to Holy Island was unfathomable.

Then as I approached the ticket office at the edge of the pier, there it was, the unthinkable reality, scribbled in black and white: ‘No sailings due to wind forecast.’ It was blustery, admittedly, and winds of up to 40mph were anticipated, but right now the sea appeared at ease, calm and flat. It was a glorious day. I walked the length of the pier, stopping at the end and peering down at the clear water below, then raising my eyes to Holy Island.