Dave Hewitt is on holiday so his more than able deputy Ronald Turnbull steps into the breach with a tale of walking to Edinburgh with a Victorian explorer.
There were giants in the earth in the 1800s
Naismith, hard man of the Scottish Mountaineering Club, took a day off from the hand-cut snow steps and the slimy gullies to walk over Bidean nan Bian and Buachaille Beag and Buachaille Mor. He was slightly concerned to find himself rather more tired than this small matter of 3,000m (10,000ft) of ascent really justified. He put it down to lack of sandwiches, cut himself a couple of extra rounds and walked off to Dalwhinnie by way of Ben Alder.
At the start of the same century, Coleridge and Wordsworth came jaunting up Nithsdale into the Highlands to sample the porridge at the Kingshouse and Wordsworth anyway was more of a walker than a poet. Compare his truly dreadful Leech-gatherer ditty (read it here) with his 30-mile days through France and over the Lakeland Fells. Coleridge too, before the opium got into his legs, took 45-mile day walks along the Somerset Coast Path - and not just day walks but night walks as well over the Quantocks and Helvellyn.
Most downloaders of this screensworth will know Naismith, if only for his Rule and his route up the Bhasteir Tooth. Some may have heard of Coleridge and Wordsworth as well. But this week I celebrate my neighbour Joseph Thomson, who outwalked them all. Thomson (pictured) was a stonemason's son from middle Nithsdale who became the most famous African explorer you haven't heard of. (Specifically: you know about Livingstone, Stanley and Mungo Park. My neighbour is the next most famous after them.)
Four diseases and a gazelle
Thomson walked from Zanzibar to Kilimanjaro and then to Mount Kenya. He walked across South Africa. He walked through the Atlas Mountains and made the first ascents of Djebel Ogdemt and Djebel Likoumt. Between 1879 and 1919 he walked 15,000 miles in Africa, picked up at least four tropical diseases and gave his name to a waterfall and a gazelle.
In between expeditions, he walked across southern Scotland. Last Autumn I decided to follow him on one of his 70-mile training exercises - from Thornhill in Dumfriesshire to Edinburgh. He walked this one in July of 1886, stopping at Biggar for breakfast and reaching Edinburgh in the early evening.
To keep things topical, I decided to combine the physical exercise with an exercise in practical genetics - I invited a Thomson descendant to come along. Keith has trekked the Upper Dolpo but never more than 30 miles at once and is about twice as old as his great-granduncle was when he walked this way. If you already know you can do it, why bother?
Sightseeing in the dark
If you're going to go walking at three in the morning, the Well Pass through the Lowthers is the place to do it. The former coach road is now a green track, smooth enough to walk torchless. Downhill, it makes a thrilling mountain bike ride. Uphill, it climbs gradually to give a view that twinkles here and there with a village streetlight or a milking parlour just starting up. On either side are reasonably shapely hills standing 1,980ft high against the stars. Somewhere a stream rustles gently. Invisible in the darkness is a small earthen fort - the Romans used this route a long time before Joseph Thomson.
Like the Romans, our explorer understood about lightweight footwear for long journeys. On the march he wore what look like brogues of thin flexible leather - on his kit-list they appear as "short boots" at £1 17/6 the pair, as against the "long boots" at £3 8/6. We're wearing 20th-century trail shoes, pared down for endurance runners and adventure racers. These are cooler and less clumpy than Thomson's leatherwear and are one reason why we hope that, despite our car using effete lifestyle, we'll be able to keep up. But they do let in the nighttime dew. And this means that blistered feet are likely in the far distances ahead; that is, if we ever manage to reach the far distances ahead.
For on the A702 above the pass, things are rather more austere. The initial excitement has abated after five hours of striding in the dark. Our brains are reminding us that time-to-get-up is still a couple of hours away. Far ahead, a band of fuzzy orange and a faint rumble are the M74 under morning mist. For an hour and a half we walk towards it, as it gradually gets louder and more orange. In the first grey light of dawn we cross the Clyde on a footbridge that's still slippery with overnight frost.
Their faces were a sight
On his expedition to the Atlas Thomson travelled with a 22-year-old companion, Mr Harold Crichton-Browne of the British Army. In his book Thomson shows real compassion for young Crichton-Brown when he fails altogether to enjoy 14-hour days through rough unexplored country while being pursued by armed Berbers. They got through by waving an important letter from the Sultan of Morocco. What the letter actually said was that they were to stay on the main roads and on no account to enter the mountains. At the same time they had to deceive their mutinous porters. "It was only when we were well into the mountains that the situation dawned on them - and then their faces were a sight to see."
Keith has been reading this book. Already he is worried that he may end up in the Crichton-Browne role, without the benefit of a convenient scorpion-sting when he wants to wimp out. And when I explain that an unremoved foot and mouth sign ahead now obliges a sudden left turn into the Culters, he looks definitely distrustful.
More fun than the Moorfoots
Keith has good reason. The lower Culters are like the plateau of the Moorfoots, only slightly more fun. That still makes them very little fun at all. Culter Fell itself is a pleasant patch of grassland with a sheep, a couple of fence posts and a view of some reservoirs; but come down 500ft and the grassland flourishes under the Lowland raindrops into a monstrous sponge structure. Just high enough to be inside the cloud but low enough for some truly luxuriant sponge, we flogged across the lower Culters for a couple of hours. This was not the way to get to Biggar for breakfast.
But like most nasty hill bits the Culters have nicer edges as the ground tilts and the water runs off. We even ran off a little ourselves, down gentle yellow grasses. Down in the Culter valley the friendly car laid on by the Thomson Museum people waited with sandwiches and soup.
The sandwich stop was too long. Twenty minutes every five miles will add three more hours to the journey. But the meal and the daylight did give the impression of a new day starting. The nine hours of nighttime and early morning were almost as if they had been spent in sleep - rather than halfsleep striding - and now newly awoken from. It may have felt different for Keith, though. Along small roads we approached Biggar: Thomson's breakfast stop, the half way point on the journey, and the furthest Thomson's descendant had ever previously walked.
"Edinburgh's Edinburgh," so the tourist slogan goes, "but Biggar is biggar." For us that morning Biggar was a bit of a bugger. Breakfast was taken in a cafe that had conveniently just emptied after lunch.
A dose of salts and a shock from the battery
Thomson's proudest boast was that he walked 15,000 miles through Africa without ever having to kill anybody at all (except, in the end, himself). When he needed to make an impression on a Masai chieftain, he would administer a dose of Eno's fizzy fruit salts and a shock from the galvanic battery.
So when we were approached by an inquisitive tractor - this was not long after the end of foot and mouth in our parts - I counted on Thomson's descendant to do the talking. "We want to go over that hill," Keith explained, "In order to get to Edinburgh." That's the Thomson technique - hit them with something they don't expect. It was already mid-afternoon, and Edinburgh still 25 miles or more. The farmer looked at us pityingly and said we could go over his hill if that was what we wanted.
No frozen elephant
I sent Keith on a short-cut while I diverted over a nearby Black Mount that I hadn't been up before. I'm a bit bloody-minded with my Marilyns*, and don't like to bag them by short trips from a parked car. I arrived at Dolphinton roughly on time. ("It is at this point," wrote JoAnne unkindly in the car, "that I know that Ronald is not human.") Half an hour later there came a rather peeved Keith. I'd recce'd his short cut at both ends but failed to notice that it didn't have a middle. He'd had an authentically nasty experience of thick forest with swampy bits and a region of giant heather dripping in the mist.
However Broomy Law does lack tree groundsel and a frozen elephant. In 1883 Thomson climbed to 8,700ft on Kilimanjaro in seven hours, before discovering that he didn't have enough food. His next bit of Africa was blocked by fierce Masai - he could have taken his time over the mountain and brought up some porters and a tent. Then he'd probably have achieved a first ascent six years before Meyer and Purtscheller and that would surely have moved him up the rankings, from most famous that you haven't, to become the least famous African explorer that you have heard of.
Bush hat and ice axe
There's a track along the base of the Pentlands that's the old road to Edinburgh. It's flat for fast walking and the surface of mud and slurry is soft under sore feet. Those feet are already wet ones, so we don't even have to mind about the puddles. What we do mind, rather, is the heavy rain that's falling downwards into them. But gradually the Pentland villages trickle by: Dolphinton and West Linton and Carlops. At every village is the support car, with JoAnne and the folding chairs, and the sandwiches, and the hand-made Thomson teddy bear with his bush hat, ice axe and tartan waistcoat. After West Linton the rain stops and the cloud rises to show a narrow strip of dirty purple sunset.
You can almost imagine this isn't happening at all
The Pentland Ridge, from the Kipps to Allermuir, is a wonderful high walkway - at its best at dusk, as the wide view fades, the air cools, and the daytime walkers drive home along the A702. And then at Allermuir you get Edinburgh as a luminous landscape, with the seven hills standing black out of the orange and the Fife Coast as a sparkly line along the horizon. However, at 7.30 on an Autumn evening the Pentland Ridge seems an unnecessary extra pleasure and we pound instead along the wet pavement, shading our eyes against the headlights. At the end we get the sodium streetscape anyway. Dropping gently downhill in darkness for a thousand feet to Fairmilehead, you can almost imagine that this isn't happening at all and that you're actually already asleep.
"Almost there," say the kind people and the teddy at Boghall Farm; "Almost there," again at Fairmilehead. "Almost there," they say in Braid Hills Road, and this time they aren't lying.
A fragment of wild Africa, we waft in through the crowds of civilised late-night Edinburgh. "Yes, Officer - it is a funny place for a picnic," JoAnne admits to the policeman. At every Pelican crossing the clubbers give us dubious looks. We turn up out of the Grassmarket into darkness for the long stone steps between the houses to the castle.
The date being 14 September 14 2001, the castle is barricaded and closed. But the teddies are there to welcome us. We've taken 23 1/2 hours; we've walked about 70 miles, and we've reached Edinburgh.
Joseph Thomson did it in 16 hours. The tropical diseases got him in the end: he died in 1895 at the age of 37.
Ronald Turnbull
13/2/2002
*Marilyns - the listed hills of Britain that, no matter how small, have 150m/500ft of clear drop round them.
