Dave Hewitt continues his theme of multiple hill ascents with a look at his regular beat.
At the time of writing, I've been to the top of Ben Cleuch in the Ochils 369 times - most recently last Sunday evening to sit in happy solitude and watch the sun set just to the left of Ben Lomond. At some stage, as mentioned last week, I'll offer thoughts about the reasons why people climb the same hill a lot of times (and 369 is by no means a massive - or even a middling - number in these terms).
For now, though, I mention my affection for Ben Cleuch only because the 366th ascent (7 September, a medium-length circuit over Wood Hill, Ben Ever and round to King's Seat Hill) prompted a few calculations based on having climbed the hill the equivalent of every day of the year.
As reported last week, there are those such as Alan Douglas who have climbed a hill on every calendar date (in his case Ben Lomond), and 366 ascents is the first point at which this becomes at least theoretically possible. But a simple total of 366 is highly unlikely - massively unlikely - to serve up 366 different dates. To adapt the old analogy, an almost infinite number of monkeys could randomly climb a hill 366 times without managing to chalk off every single date.
The first time that this particular monkey climbed Ben Cleuch was on 13 March 1986. I was living in Glasgow at that stage, having not long moved there from Aberdeen. This makes it feel a very long time ago, as I was to stay in Glasgow for 12 years and even that period now seems a good while back. I can recall little of that first ascent, even to the extent of being unsure whether the radio mast near the summit was there at the time.
(I think it was, but this could be false hill-memory syndrome prompted by the mast's recent reappearance on the Explorer map of the area. It must have been removed around 15 years ago; if anyone has precise dates do let me know. I'm more confident that what is known as the "new" track - the one around the west side of the Nebit and zigzagging into the upper reaches of the Alva Glen - hadn't been ploughed at that time.)
I was alone that March day and a battered notebook records that I did pretty much the same circuit as on ascent 366, the main differences being that I would have gone up Ben Ever via the Silver Glen track rather than the steeper and more pleasant Wood Hill / Millar Hill route, and would have come down off King's Seat Hill using the full length of the Gannel path rather than staying high as is my habit nowadays.
Evidently I liked the Ochils from the off, as six days later I was back, accompanying a bloke named Jim Taylor who was later deported from China for mysterious reasons and who had just seen the publication of a short story called A Row of Japanese Secretaries. It's funny what sticks in the mind - I haven't seen or heard from Jim in 15 years but the title of his story has stayed with me, perhaps because I now live with a Japanese teacher who has a secretary (although not a row of them). Anyway, we went up the brutal spur of the Law from Tillicoultry, then jinked back east from Ben Cleuch and walked along to Innerdownie before descending. I can recall feeling something of an old hand already at this Ochils lark, despite having less than a week's knowledge of the place.
A month later - 18 April 1986 - I was back again, this time doing a basic Law/Cleuch/Ever loop with Linda Small (the then wife of my eventual Angry Corrie sidekick Perkin Warbeck) and Ricky Ross (soon to be moderately famous as the frontman of Deacon Blue). My only memory of this day was that we stopped for a breather at the prominent boulder halfway up the Law and Rick contrived to drop Linda's camera, which started trundling down the slope. It was raced after and retrieved before any lens-trashing damage was done but the rest of the climb was a tad tense.
And so it went on - another visit in September that year, just one the following year (when I was otherwise engaged with the Scottish watershed for much of the time). Then nothing in 1988 - the only year when I've missed out completely - but three more ascents in 1989, two in 1990, six in 1991 and so on. There was also a Cleuch-less Tarmangie/Whitewisp circuit in 1991, and such outings have occurred occasionally (Blairdenon direct from Sheriffmuir or via the Bengengie/Colsnaur ridges are other versions); but Ben Cleuch is a hard hill to avoid once you're up there and even at that stage I was almost inevitably taking it in on each visit.
I'd discovered that (a) I really liked these hills, and (b) they were easy to reach by public transport from Glasgow. I didn't have ready access to a car during those years, but with the Ochils it didn't matter. If the timings were nailed, it was possible to be on foot in Alva less than an hour after having locked the door in the Gorbals. A brisk 12-minute stroll to Queen St station, the fast 25-minute train to Stirling, then across the street and straight on to the no.62 bus along the Hillfoots. Even if the slow train was caught or the bus connection missed, 90 minutes usually sufficed. There was something very satisfying about this, and I kept going back for more.
Glasgow has other easy-access hills of course - the Citylink coach reaches Arrochar in under the hour, while day-trip possibilities on Cowal via train and ferry deserve to be better known. But the Ochils provide one of the simplest options, and ascents tend to mount up. When I moved to Alva at the start of April 1997, Ben Cleuch was already by some distance my most climbed hill. Various Lomond-side Munros had been climbed close on 20 times but Cleuch was up to 32 even at that stage.
Living on the doorstep was a different world however, and at first it felt like one long, rolling holiday. My arrival coincided with a spell of settled spring weather and every day for the first week I was on the hill when I should have been unpacking, almost always using what were, for me, new routes (one or two of them precariously steep). The Ochils is an extensive range, and there are plenty of spurs, ridges, gullies and the eponymous cleuchs - steep sided grassy side-glens. Those seven consecutive ascents remain, easily, my most sustained period on the hill, and massively enjoyable though they were, by the eighth day I would have taken a lot of persuading (or a hefty payment) to go back up again. But by the tenth day I was at it again and by the end of that first year I had added a slightly bonkers 73 ascents to the total.
Although there have been no more sevens (nor are there likely to be), there have been very occasional three-in-a-rows, usually prompted by fantastic winter or temperature-inversion conditions, or by the unexpected arrival of a keen-for-a-walk friend just after I'd already been up. Also a fair few twos - eg polling day and its successor in 1997 when long sunny traverses were made from Alva to Stirling, via Ben Cleuch, Blairdenon and Dumyat, then back by much the same route through Blair's Brave New Britain. It looked much the same the second time I have to say.
I stayed in Alva for three years but the move in 2000 was only to the eastern side of Stirling - almost as handy. From the study where this is being written, much of the southern front of the Ochils is in view if I twist my head, while leaning back in the chair gives a very fine outlook to Stuc a'Chroin and Ben Vorlich, with Uamh Bheag also seen once the leaves on a neighbour's willow tree starts to thin out. The current Ben Cleuch "rate" is just over one per week but I'm not totally obsessed (honest), and I try to balance this with an approximately equal number of non-Ochiline trips elsewhere.
A whole book, never mind several columns, could be written about all that I've learnt and enjoyed in 366 ascents, but there's not the space for that here just now. So no real mention of the regular nightwalks over the tops (not all by moonlight, and including one crossing so dark and dense that I couldn't see the summit fence even when trying to follow it from five metres away).
Similarly no space to enlarge on the dozens of times I've been up there in the gloaming, seemingly the only person on the whole range, with daylight fading and the great web of streetlights coming on across the plain of the Central Belt. Or of the swifts swooping to pick off insects round the summit on summer evenings, or of the family of kestrels hovering at 200-metre intervals along the Millar Hill ridge, the youngsters being taught to hunt by their parents. Or of the hare which nonchalantly strolled (well, hopped) past the Cleuch cairn one high summer lunchtime, obviously heading somewhere and completely unbothered by me.
Or of oddities such as hearing the dull boom of the Kincardine power station chimneys being demolished, or watching a procession of helicopters fly over the summit, carrying golfers to posh hotels in Perthshire the last time the Open was played at Troon.
Much could also be written of favourite routes, and of people met...but my subject just now is the idea of the calendar round, and so next week I'll attempt something that quite possibly hasn't been done before - some kind of analysis of how 366 ascents of a hill break down. The rhythms and routines of multi-ascending, in other words.
Dave Hewitt
26/9/2002
You can contact Dave at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
