It is the shooting season again so Dave Hewitt looks at the Hillphones system and how relations between stalking parties and hillgoers could have been very different.
So we're back in the shooting/stalking season, oh joy, and will be until 19 October when the stag shooting comes to an end. (It's officially 20 October, but this is a Sunday so the action will need to stop a day earlier this year.)
Scottish Natural Heritage and the Mountaineering Council of Scotland have again combined to publish a list of Hillphone numbers for walkers and climbers to ring by way of checking if their intended route might prove problematic on any given day.
Hillphones have been on the go since 1996, and the scheme seems a reasonable attempt to "reduce conflict", as the blurb has it, between the walking and stalking communities. Note that it isn't intended as a go-away charter for estates, rather to "enable stag stalking and hillwalking to take place on the same mountains at the same time [my italics], reducing potential conflict between hill users".
The scheme now encompasses 12 areas, and an estimated 4,000 calls were received during last year's effort. The way it works is that participating estates leave a recorded message informing walkers which areas are being worked that day, and which areas and routes are therefore hassle-free.*
The stalking/shooting season always puzzles me, and not because of the incongruity of seeing the words "shooting" and "sport" in the same sentence. Along with many other recreational hillgoers, I've come to adopt an "each to their own" approach over the years, accepting that just as I'm not interested in, say, gralloching a deer, so the Barboury apes are similarly unmoved by the prospect of marching off to some outlying SubMarilyn in the rain.
(It does bug me, however, that the shooting community often claims a freehold on "the financial well-being of the rural economy" and so on, blithely ignoring the drop in revenue of the average Highland B&B/pub/petrol station/wee shop during the autumn as the baggers back off.)
No, what genuinely puzzles me is the way in which so many in the walking and climbing community - so many of us - have come to accept that there is some kind of crypto-legal requirement to keep off the hills (or at least to keep within strictly defined hill corridors) during the months of August, September and October. Don't get me wrong - I'm not arguing that the walkers of the world should rise up and unite in stomping over every hill and glen regardless of any other activity that might be taking place there.
I'm very much in favour of both the Hillphones system (provided it actually works and isn't just a PR smokescreen as seemed to be happening up Drumochter way last year) and the more ad hoc, improvised forms of consensus in operation elsewhere. But it is all to do with consensus and co-operation; walkers don't have any bounden duty to keep off, and I'm pretty sure that no one could be convicted of either a crime or a civil offence if they did choose to opt out of the consensus.
It's always good to see co-operation in action, and there's something heartwarming about those occasions when a stalker met on the ground proves amenable to the idea that walkers don't deserve to have their day spoiled any more than do stalkers and their clients. A few years ago three of us met a couple of very amiable stalkers on the hills south-east of Amulree, and they asked that we hang around on top of the first of our intended summits until such-and-such a time (it wasn't a massive delay, and it was the weather for dallying), after which we could do our own thing in our own time. Fair enough. Happy to oblige. Let's all have a good day.
Set against this are estates such as those in the Blackmount and across by Loch Quoich which try to persuade walkers to restrict their movements even on shoot-free Sundays. Sadly there are plenty of walkers gullible enough to regard such statements as a requirement and it intrigues me how so many of us have come to view things this way.
Look at it another way - how would the popular perception of shooting rights and wrongs have evolved had the early hill guidebooks been written by different people? I think I'm safe in saying (although my co-columnist Ken Crocket is welcome to correct me here) that the early Scottish Mountaineering Club guidebooks were, by and large, written and edited by hill men whose views on land access were not a million miles removed from those of the landowning gentry. Let's say that they probably read the same newspapers.
The bold Munro himself, for instance, harboured a "strict, almost fanatical recognition of the exclusive rights of private property in land", according to William Garden, quoted on p38 of Robin N Campbell's The Munroist's Companion. Garden went on to provide an account of a 1908 ascent made with Munro, in darkness and heavy rain, of An Sgarsoch, and Campbell notes that "certainly Munro made many other ascents in summer under the cover of darkness". (We shouldn't scoff, though. The fears and motivations behind such behaviour were given a modern slant during the spring of 2001 when not a few walkers opted to climb their hills at night to reduce the risk of "encounters" during the foot and mouth paranoia.)
The extreme deference of Hugh Munro and his colleagues ought not, however, to be seen as belittling either their character or their pioneering hill prowess. It's just that in those early 20th-century days, before the democratising arrival of information technology and the rise of the middle classes who now swarm all over the hills in their lovely gear, a large proportion of the members of the SMC and other hill clubs would have come from the "professional classes" and wouldn't, in a way, have known any better.
This in turn informed the original wave of SMC guidebooks, which started to appear in the 1920s and 1930s. One of the first pages of Henry Alexander's great Cairngorms guide (first published 1928, although I'm quoting here from the 1950 third edition) is devoted to a schoolmasterly note about "Proprietary and sporting rights", and booms out five paragraphs' worth of sonorous warnings, "The Scottish Mountaineering Club desire to impress upon all those who avail themselves of the information given in their Guide Books that it is essential at all times to consider and respect proprietary and sporting rights. During the shooting season...much harm can be done in deer forests and on grouse moors by people tramping through them. The walker may in all innocence disturb the game and ruin sport for days...The sort of mountaineering ought not to be conducted so as to interfere with the sport of shooting." And so on.
The tone of such statements gradually eased over the years - eg although the phrase "proprietary, sporting and farming rights should be given due respect" was to be found in the 1974 Western Highlands guide, by the time of the most recent Munros guidebook (1999) this had mellowed and matured into the reasonable, "[Shooting is] important for the economies of Highland estates, and disturbance...is likely to be detrimental to these estates and the communities which live and work in them." This in turn was written in the context of encouraging the Hillphones scheme and so the tone of the statement sounds much more we're-all-in-this-together than in the earlier versions.
What, however, if the original guidebooks had been written not by the clubbable core of the SMC but by the likes of Jock Nimlin and the Creag Dhu, hillgoers from the working-class end of the spectrum? They would have had a very different take on land and access, and given the history of bad blood between hill gangs and tweedy types (see the writings of Borthwick, Weir, Connor etc), it's unlikely that any gentleman's agreement over access restrictions during the shooting season would have slipped so readily into place. If nothing else, the Red Clydesiders and hard-as-nails east coasters didn't for a minute regard themselves as gentlemen, so how could there have been any cosy agreement?
What might then have happened is impossible to envisage but any early move to expose the sham-legal "requirement" to keep off the hills in the autumn - and consequently to argue that the access laws gave rights to every "stakeholder", be they prince or pauper - would most likely have provoked a series of on-hill conflagrations not unlike the mass trespasses led by Benny Rothman on Kinder. Some kind of "forced consensus" would probably then have come into existence two or three decades earlier than it did, and we might have had something along the lines of Hillphones a good bit sooner - although quite what form this would have taken in the days before answerphones is itself impossible to assess.
Then again, such ahead-of-its time democratisation might not have been a entirely good thing, as regulation and formalisation tend to bring their own problems - just think of how many access campaigners started to panic last year when the access implications of the Scottish Land Reform Bill suddenly came into focus. The pre-Bill situation might not have been ideal, but it wasn't terrible either. As soon as the lawyers and legislators become involved in anything like this, the estates and the moneymen tend to be further empowered as they're good at manipulating situations to retain the status quo.
Whatever. Any radical set of guidebooks would also of course have had to negotiate endless conservative caution at the editing, printing and publishing stages and even had some enlightened press been found it would have remained very hard to make such material widely available. But had there been a less cloying, kowtowing approach in the early days then we might now have a much more broadbased understanding about access rights and all learning to live together.
We would, in other words, have got to where we are now a good bit sooner - and, given that there is still a very long way to go in terms of the democratic process being applied to access laws and their acceptance on the ground (think of the Invervar gate, of the Attadale tracks), then that would have been a good place to be, whenever it happened.
Dave Hewitt
29/8/202
*The Hillphone areas - and the contact numbers - for 2002 are
Grey Corries/Mamores: 01855 831511
Glen Dochart/Glen Lochay: 01567 820886
North Arran: 01770 302363
South Glen Shiel: 01599 511425
Drumochter: 01528 522200
Glen Shee: 01250 885288
Callater/Clunie: 013397 41997
Invercauld: 013397 41911
Balmoral/Lochnagar: 013397 55532
Glen Clova: 01575 550335
Paps of Jura: 01496 820151
Atholl and Lude: 01796 481740
Calls are charged at normal rates. For more information contact either Sarah Roe in the press and public relations office at SNH (0131 446 2270) or Mike Dales, access officer at the MCofS (01738 638229). More details available at the MCofS site www.mountaineering-scotland.org.uk/access/hillphones2002.html
Dave can be contacted at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
