Dave Hewitt climbs off the sofa, declines another mince pie, snubs the Queen and heads for the hills.
What's the quietest hill day of the year in Scotland? Christmas Day, by a distance. Whereas its near-neighbours Boxing Day, Hogmanay and Ne'erday are invariably three of the most thronged dates in the calendar, with ridges and glens hoaching as folk evade kitchen duties or (afterwards) test out new gloves and hats, December 25 is always a quiet one, the eye of the festive storm.
It's a day when people attend to parental or filial duties, become embroiled in present-unwrapping marathons and indulge in food/booze/TV binges that involve no exercise beyond staggering from one sofa to the next. The only hills most people see on Christmas Day are those spread across the pages of coffee-table books gift-wrapped by relatives.
The midwinter lack of daylight is a huge factor, of course. At the mid-afternoon point in proceedings when those itchy for a wander might be wriggling free from festive duties, suddenly it drops dark and there's no option but to hit the mince pie/TV remote/Playstation circuit again.
But it's most often the simple domestic logistics that conspire to prevent hill outings on December 25. My own situation is reasonably typical here - my parents and my partner's parents live in northern England and we usually feel obliged to visit one or both sets over the Yuletide break. This rules out any Scottish hills and the options in Derbyshire (where my folks live) aren't particularly exciting as I was brought up in the eastern, non-hilly chunk of the county, away from the boggy, gritty pleasures of the Peak. At least the gentle south-eastern fringe of the White Peak is just about walk-in-able to and the 15km circuit from my parents' place to the monument and 286m trig point of Crich Stand has provided a serviceable jaunt on various Christmas Days down the years. Having a definite summit to aim for helps greatly; Crich's quarry-top might not be the Matterhorn but it sure beats staying in to watch the Queen's Speech and some dismal sitcom special.
In recent years we've tended to stay at my sister's place, a dozen kilometres further south in Ilkeston, bang on the Derbys/Notts border and even further from Peak-fringe targets. This is the area where the UK starts to seriously flatten out, where northern England gives way to the Midlands, and the only summit of any note within short-walk range is Stapleford Hill - a less than thrilling (but better than nothing) parkland bump on the edge of Nottingham.
The North/Midlands divide has long been a factor in my life, a consequence of having grown up as a Northerner aware that being raised just 20 minutes' drive to the south would have made me a Midlander. My parents' place is level with the bottom of the Pennines, but only just. Such divisions and subtle boundaries seem to matter to me, and I tend to feel happiest when living on the edge of somewhere, in debatable land, neither one place nor another but a bit of both.
Ilkeston's suburban joys have led to several Christmas Day outings taking the form of flat, linear roadwalks from my sister's place to my parents, or vice versa, with the route walked fast in an attempt to make the subsequent overeating feel a little less indulgent. Thankfully this artifice doesn't apply in the alternate years when we stay with Tessa's parents in Coniston: there the hills (sorry, fells) rear up right from the door and are impossible to resist.
I love the place. Whatever the season, I rarely spend time in this most pleasant of Lakeland villages without popping up the eponymous Old Man at some point. It's a hill so handy that a target time of an hour can be attempted and sometimes achieved - although to rush the Old Man is to do it less than justice, there being few UK hills quite so complex and topographically twisted. With its nested corries and almost-overlapping spurs, Coniston Old Man (which surely merits a website called COM.com) stakes a claim for being the Bidean nam Bian of the Lakes. Certainly on COM it took me three visits, during which I scarcely crossed a previous path, before I began to get a proper feel for the layout of the place. Exactly the same pleasurable problem had accompanied my first few ascents of Bidean in the 1980s.
I haven't, however, climbed COM on Christmas Day as yet. Instead, Christmas mornings in the Lakes have featured smaller and less spectacular lumps just a short drive from Coniston itself. I can't be bothered motoring far in the short-daylight season, so bumpy-craggy Holm Fell above Yew Tree Tarn was scurried up between downpours one year, while the eerie wind farm of Kirkby Moor provided an avoid-the-kitchen escape in 1999. This latter trip was my 111th outing that year and easily the wildest - turbines revved in the gale as I zigzagged between them, their huge cylindrical bases giving shelter like great metal treetrunks.
As for Scottish hills on Christmas Day, there have been just two in 20 years. The first came a decade ago when I was working at a resettlement unit in Glasgow and was lumbered with a back shift on the day itself. Not wanting to mope around all morning, the unit's minibus was borrowed and driven over the Crow Road to the Carron reservoir, from where the familiar forest tracks leading to Meikle Bin were tackled. It should have been utterly routine, a comfortable two-hour leg-stretch with maybe a decent view from the trig.
But things turned out trickier than that, a screaming gale and whiplash rain coinciding with the tree-free scurry up the summit cone. It was ferocious - one of only two occasions when I've sensed the early signs of hypothermia. The other was in a more predictable place, on Ben Nevis - but Meikle Bin, for all its lack of height, saw the same uncontrollable chittering and creeping muddleheadedness as rain hammered through waterproofs. It was a considerable relief to eventually duck back into the forest and slosh down to the van. But it was also a memorable way to have spent Christmas morning, infinitely more vivid than the merged-together turkeyfests of other years.
And then there was this year. We opted to stay at home for a quiet Christmas - flaked out and still finding our bearings after having flitted just a week before, and with a sick cat to attend to as well. (Mind you, quite why the cat was sick when he'd gone easy on the bevy is beyond me.) So with no relatives on any horizon, Christmas Day dawned cold and clear and I drove to the Ochils at first light. Total ascents of Ben Cleuch have now passed 300 but I'd never been up on the festive day itself, so this was too good a chance to spurn - especially since it could be years before another Scottish Christmas comes along.
I'd planned to go up alone and did but two days earlier the Munro brothers (who run gear shops in Aberfeldy and Pitlochry) had reminded me of something mentioned on the Ben Lawers reclaiming event in May - that they traditionally wandered up Cleuch on Christmas morning. So we arranged to meet on top at ten-thirty-ish, with them taking the standard approach via the Law while I meandered up a hotchpotch route slightly further west.
As on Meikle Bin, there was a vicious gale - but with skies clear there was no risk of exposure this time. (This is one of those paradoxes that perplexes non-active weather "experts" - that you're much more likely to suffer chill effects in steady rain than in cold cloudless wind. Another form of climatic confusion relates to the skewed reporting of fog, which drivetime radio habitually portrays as "bad". We, however, know better...)
The wind made the ascent something of a battle, particularly low down when sneaking round from the Wood Burn spur into the Daiglen. For 20 minutes it was an eye-streaming siege, head-down stuff. Although I could see the others across on the opposite arm of the glen - just half a kilometre away but with a 200m drop between - it was too wild to focus on them. They remained just three shuddery figures sort of over there somewhere.
The top duly came (I arrived five minutes after the others) and with it mince pies from me, alcoholic Christmas cake from them. No one else showed up but Rod Munro mentioned their having met another regular walker in previous years. They themselves had now climbed Ben Cleuch six times, five of them on 25 December, which must be some kind of a record in terms of percentages.
The wind was slackening as we ambled southwards via Wood Hill and an unmapped path through the trees. Conditions were excellent - views all round and the ground grippy with snow-frost. We saw two other people descending the skyline on the Nebit but other than that it every bit as quiet as expected.
Dumyat, on Boxing Day, was mobbed.
Happy New Year!
Dave Hewitt
28/12/2001
