Walking the Song E-Book

Hamish Brown

• Herausgeber: Sandstone Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Hamish Brown has been an outdoorsman for more than sixty years. The first person to complete an uninterrupted round of Scotland's Munros, his account of the feat in Hamish's Mountain Walk is a classic of Scottish mountain literature. Throughout those years he has contributed articles and essays to many journals and, in this selection, he presents not an autobiography or some overview of life, but a very personal record of his many journeys and interests from his 'dancing days of spring' to his present, very active, later life.

Leseprobe

Hamish Brown has been an outdoorsman for more than sixty years. The first person to complete an uninterrupted round of Scotland’s Munros, his Hamish’s Mountain Walk is a classic of Scottish mountain literature. He is the author or editor of many books including The Mountains Look on Marakech (he has made fifty visits to the Atlas), the mountain poetry anthologies Speak to the Hills and Poems of the Scottish Hills

Recent titles by Hamish Brown

The Mountains Look on Marakech (the story of a 1000 mile, 96 day traverse of the Atlas)

The Atlas Mountains (superbly illustrated descriptions of the best treks and climbs)

The Oldest Post Office in the World (over ninety extraordinary places described and illustrated)

Three Man on the Way Way

(the experiences of three Fifers walking the West Highland Way)

Canals Across Scotland

(everything about the Union and Forth & Clyde Canals; lavishly illustrated)

As editor: Tom Weir, an anthology

(a selection of published or unpublished writing; illustrated)

Republished, with new introductions and illustrations

Hamish’s Mountain Walk

(the first non-stop round of the Munros; a classic)

Hamish’s Groats End Walk

(covers the English, Welsh and Irish 3000ers)

Climbing the Corbetts

First published in Great Britain by Sandstone Press Ltd

Dochcarty Road

Dingwall

Ross-shire

IV15 9UG

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.

©Hamish Brown 2017

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

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

ISBN: 978-1-910985-58-8

ISBNe: 978-1-910985-59-5

Jacket design Raspberry Creative Type, Edinburgh

Contents

Foreword

Beginnings

Our Road to Singapore

Starting in the Ochils

The Lure of Snowdrops

With Aunt Nell and I

On Scottish Hills

A Wet Fun Day in the Clachaig

Then and Now in the Loch Maree Hills

A Hill for Jill

Tales of An Teallach

In the Past

The Strange Prisoner of St Kilda

The Rannoch Moor Fiasco

An Arran Murder

Cycle Touring - in Knickerbockers

Time and Places

A Day of Glory Given

The Ups and Downs of Hogmanay

Handa Island

Name Droppings of a Bookworm

Approaches

The Jubilee Jaunt

Nature Watch from a Tent on Wheels

The Twa Dogs

Good To Be Young

At School in the Black Wood

Walking the Song

Canoe Capers

High on Mont Blanc

Furth of Britain

Matterhorn Experiences

A Stubai Ski Day

Hills with Holes in Them

The Matter of the Meije

Opening the Atlas

Highlands and High Atlas

Doing Time at Tachddirt

The Ridge of Dreams

Coasting with Camels

Ladies on Meltzen

Here and There

Ice-cap in Norway

Shocking Iceland

By the Bitter Lakes

Peruvian Places

Peggy and People

Last Gasp Ethiopia

This and That

Durban Castle

A Jerusalem Letter

An Unfulfilled Co-incidence

Essaouira Myths

Bueno

An Enchantment

Foreword

This collection is a potpourri, mainly of articles which have appeared, or have their subject matter in events over the last fifty years. They describe some of the places and varied doings with which I’ve been involved or stories that caught my imagination. If they rather wander then I’ll quote Mummery who declared ‘the true mountaineer is a wanderer’. And the longer and further we wander the better. We need longer wanderings to allow the baggage we bring to fall away and, unburdened, go free. The selections have largely been left as they appeared, appealing to the forgiveness of time, and not updated though I have added notes where needed, either at the end or within square [brackets] in the text. Some are long, some brief, a few are simply snapshots, in all a very token selection with many countries and interests not mentioned. It is not an autobiography or some overview of life though, of necessity, a very personal record. It is simply a potpourri.

Chance, choice (which is chance taken) and hard work has allowed me to spend much of my life actively in mountains, at sea, and wandering the world whether professionally or with friends. Much of what is selected comes from the Sixties to the Eighties when I was most fit and far-ranging (my ‘dancing days of spring’) but as the Arab saying warns ‘Much travel is needed before a raw man is ripened’ and the writing compulsion also needs passing years to mature - or have gained experiences to draw on. The rewards always remain, as long as we can sing within the measure of our abilities, through all the ages of our activities.

I’m really quite lazy and have so many interests besides mountaineering that I need definite challenges to head out and up. The interests often interact: a general interest in gardening becomes a particular interest in alpine flora - because it’s up there, the flowers’ lure among the rocks and snow. Always, the heights pull; it is there we are most content ‘Outclimbing pasture and pine / To seek beyond the mountain line / That far-sought country more divine / Where life is whole’. (D W Freshfield)

Reading about my earlier days I am struck by the confident young man I appear. Perhaps I was for those were days of hope and belief in the future. During the Japanese raids on Singapore we sang of ‘love and laughter, and peace ever after tomorrow when the world is free’. At post war schoolboy camps we belted out, ‘I’m riding along on the crest of a wave, and the world is mine’. And we believed it. Alas, cynicism has grown back over that young sapling’s faith. (‘We are a failed species on the way out’.) Those of my age and my sort of schooling in the Forties were, perforce, physically very fit and challenged but whatever confidence accrued was quite unconscious. We already knew both rough and smooth. I reckon my RAF days ‘made me’ with its great freedom within discipline, and any kindness I have comes from knowing the best of peoples in the Atlas Mountains.

I may have been ‘below average’ in many subjects at school but books, music, art, the countryside around were all part of my very being growing up in Dollar. Hobbies and enthusiasms came and went but these remained. My early interest in what was call Nature Study had me sending in so many questions to a radio programme for schools that they did a whole programme answering my questions alone. Some peers thought this excessive but I wanted to know - and I’m still that ‘Curiosity Kid’, only now deeply worried at what humankind is doing to our only wonder-full world. Awareness of beauty, of idealism dawns when young, losing them is to grow old. Insist on finding wonders, living with beauty, and taking challenges. As Nansen wrote, ‘Try not to waste time in doing things which you know can be done equally well by others. Everyone should try to hit upon his own trail. Do not lose your opportunities, and do not allow yourselves to be carried away by the superficial rush and scramble which is modern life . . .’

Memory is a strange thing, certainly for me, with a greater facility for forgetting rather than remembering. (I marvel at folk who can put a date to an incident thirty years ago!) Luckily I’ve always kept a mountaineering ‘log’ (on volume 73 now!), along with a ‘Summary’, big as a family Bible, with all the Who? When? Where? What? data. I need these. In 2013 when writing about the 1969 school traverse of Mont Blanc I had completely forgotten another traverse with a friend only a year before. But then, that year was rather overshadowed by what happened on the Meije. The briefest note can bring so much back from the limbo of memory. Braehead school’s first week was in winter, in Glen Coe, yet months on, when the Headmaster and I wrote a script for a BBC radio based on our doings, whole chunks of original conversations returned. All this recording, at the time, is also a good check on how memory or imagination can change reality over the years, how good stories become embroidered and truths become myths. (‘Essaouira Myths’ shows the extremes.) I’ve got my personal failsafe then, and try to be accurate. Checking facts is not easy and becomes worse with the sloppy nature of the internet and so on. When I did the book on the Fife Coast the text was checked by a history professor. The only thing he queried was the date when Alexander Selkirk (model for Robinson Crusoe) died. In the publisher’s office we took down four reference books and found three different dates. I had to find documents signed by the man before being sure of the spelling of our great road-builder Caulfeild.

The material has been arranged in roughly thematic sections with a few articles in each, the headings giving an idea of the subject matter. There may be some repetitions as the material has been written over such a long period. The dates of any escapade are usually clear. The book is certainly full of co-incidences, of what is often called ‘wheels within wheels’, how one thing leads to another. We may think we are captains of our souls but any puff of wind can set our crazy craft off on an unexpected course. Life is fascinating, simple, complex, baffling and rewarding - and so very brief. Weave a web of wonders from it; in old age look back with few regrets, and marvel at the rewards. Go places! Six hundred years ago John Donne wrote, ‘To live in one land, is captivitie, / To runne all countries, a wild roguery’. This book is one rogue’s attempt to have followed that advice.

My interests were too many and too varied to excel at any one: I was never a great climber, a great ornithologist, or great anything else. In some ways my niche would be more inspirational than technical, impelling others into experiences, showing that any person has a world of wonder to discover out there, up there.

When I look at all the reasons given why we climb, why we head to the mountains, or sea, or riverbank or whatever, the commonest word surfacing is ‘escape’. We do it to escape from the stranglehold of everyday living to create brief heavens in those neutral worlds we imagine. There we gain respite from pressures, ‘kiss the cheek of beauty’, find good companions, return stronger to face the unfathomable world. It is almost a religious experience. The fact of there being thousands of religions worldwide points to an inexplicable necessity so this should not surprise. In Neil Munro’s New Road Aeneas is girning, ‘I was in a black mood all this day, reflecting on the wickedness of humankind, and sure the world was evil - ‘So it is!’ cried Ninian cheerfully, ‘but man, there’s blinks’. Where would we be without those ‘blinks’?

Burntisland 2016

Beginnings

Our Road to Singapore

No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace - in peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.

Herodotus

My young brother was born in Yokohama, Japan, in December 1940. I was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1934, my mother was born in Thailand (then Siam) in 1904 while big brother and father were both born in Dunfermline. Father had a rough time in WWI, was wounded, recovered, sent back to the front, then captured in the big German offensive of spring 1918. Though we knew it not, being in Japan in 1940 might well have entailed a much nastier replay.

Father was a banker, with the then Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China (Standard Chartered today). Staff in those days of slow travel filled a posting for quite a few years before being given a long home leave and then posted to a new country. Mother’s father had been building railways in Siam to where father was posted after WWI. (I’ve a photo of mother as a girl, in full highland dress, performing a sword dance for the King of Siam.)

I’d always known that big brother and grannie in Scotland almost came out to Japan early in 1941 - for safety! Scotland after all was being bombed. Recently I came on a packet of letters to and from home at the time which confirmed this. Mercifully, father was then posted (January 1941) to what is now Malaysia, to a town called Klang. (The bank would become HQ for the Japanese secret police.)