Dave Hewitt takes advantage of the winter weather to think ahead and set his stall for the coming year - crises excepted of course!
In this early part of the year, with the days still dark and the seasons feeling somewhat adrift, it makes sense for me to do what the footballers might call "setting their stall out" - namely giving some idea of what might (no promises) appear in these columns over the weeks and months of 2002. This advance warning is, I suspect, as much for my own purposes as anything, as I'm terrible for straying from the intended agenda and an aide-memoire will serve as a useful way of hauling myself back "on message", as Messrs Blair and Campbell would have it.
Of course all manner of unpredictable stuff could intervene and hog the limelight over these next 12 months - "events, dear boy, events", as a man with a moustache once said. Indeed, had I dared to suggest at the start of 2001 what I might write about during those 12 months, not even the best and most soothsaid prediction would have included foot and mouth land-closure problems that contrived to gobble up all the column inches (or their website equivalent) for six months or more. The whole episode didn't just annoy me because of its inherent injustices and lack of sense and logic but also because a whole bunch of things I had planned to pick up on a year ago remain un-picked up to this day.
But, given fair winds and no major crises, in 2002 I'll return from to time to time to two subjects in particular. One is that of early Munroists - and by this I don't just mean the first handful or even the first dozen, rather everyone who had completed the full set of Scottish 3000-footers by 13 September 1970, this being the date on which the late Mike Geddes wrapped his round and so became the 100th person to be named in the list we now see published in Munro's Tables.
The First 100 is an area I've been researching for some time - several years in fact, during which at least two of the people concerned have died - without as yet having written much about it. This is chiefly because I've remained happily in heavy research mode, collecting and collating data, swapping letters with old-timers, filling in dates, straightening the timeline (you really think those 100 names are in the right order?) and reinserting several pre-1971 completers who, for a variety of reasons, aren't in the published list as it stands.
The pile of research on my desk now seems to have passed a critical mass however, so it's time to start shoving things out into the public domain. Quite aside from the (hopefully) interesting and informative aspects of all this, writing about research is the best and most healthy way of weeding out mistakes and uncovering yet more layers of information that might otherwise have remained hidden. For all the time spent writing and editing, I'm a researcher at heart - and like any researcher I know that it's a two-way street - I'll tell you what I know and with luck you'll get back to me with a nugget or two more.
So that's one thread that will run through the year's columns. The other is, on the face of it, an even more curious and arcane subject - those people who, for whatever reason, have contrived to climb the same hill a great many times. This, inevitably, is a subject dear to me, with 319 ascents of Ben Cleuch and counting - but the extent to which the practice is almost commonplace is perhaps best shown by those with far chunkier numbers to their name.
I swapped letters again recently with the redoubtable Alan Douglas of Killearn, about whom I last wrote a couple of years ago when he had just completed a "calendar round" on Ben Lomond - in other words he had been up that hill on every date in the year at some time or other. I joked then that he might in due course aim for a second calendar round and I now hear that this is precisely what he's working towards. In addition to that, as of late December, his total stood at 928 Ben Lomonds overall and he was thus closing in on the very small group (three so far as I know, although there must be more) who have climbed a 600m-plus Scottish hill at least 1000 times.
There is a lot to be written about this, about motivation and routine, about love of a particular place, about being able to watch subtle seasonal changes because you're so in tune with the hill itself. This latter point, more than anything, serves as the best defence when repeat ascending is casually dismissed as "sad", or "obsessive" by those whose habits and fixations take other forms. We're all obsessive in our own ways and everyone does something that might outwardly look "sad" but which inwardly provides a great deal of happiness and stability.
Of course another way of fending off casual criticism is via the old standby of humour combined with self-deprecation and this is nowhere better displayed than by a Grangemouth man named Tom Bell, into whom I occasionally bump on Ben Cleuch (although not often - he tends to be a down-by-lunchtime walker whereas I'm afternoons and evenings). I like Tom because his own hill activities dwarf my own and also because he has a wryness about him that never fails to amuse. One day, halfway up a slope in half a gale, when he was coming down as I was going up, he told me that his sister had been trying - and failing - to give up the fags and was depressed about it. "Don't worry," Tom had said, "I know how you feel. I'm clinically dependent, too - on the Ochils."
He told the story with a twinkle in his eye but he was serious, too, just as he is if you meet him and ask, "How many times is that now, Tom?" Such an enquiry invariably elicits a cryptic answer that requires you to haul the encyclopaedia off the shelf when you get home. You have to do a little work for your information. On one occasion a few years ago I asked Tom his "score" and was told, "I'm past the Battle of Hastings and heading for the Magna Carta". A friend recently told of him having said "I'm on Agincourt minus one". I don't know quite what will happen when his number of Ben Cleuch ascents moves from the realm of historical dates to futuristic science fiction but he'll doubtless come up with something.
Tom Bell has also climbed Ben Lomond 100 times, Stuc a'Chroin 150 times and - perhaps even more remarkable than his Ben Cleuch exploits - has made 100 traverses of the Aonach Eagach. I'm fascinated by people such as this, by what makes them tick in both senses of the phrase and it's an area of hill history (hill sociology, really) that has received scant coverage. Until now, until this year.
So that's at least some of what you can expect over the next 12 months - although next week (typically) Summit Talks will most likely focus on something completely different - a simmering bothy dispute in the north-east. Oh, and if anyone has any information, recollections or anecdotes about either pre-1971 Munroists or people who have made 100 or more ascents of the same hill, please feel encouraged to drop me an email at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
Dave Hewitt
9/1/2002
