Dave Hewitt speaks to Boardman Tasker Prize short listed author Mike Cawthorne about his amazing journey over 135 Munros in winter and the book of his travels Hell of a Journey.
Mike Cawthorne didn't win the Boardman Tasker prize, but he had an interesting time all the same.
Three weeks ago the Inverness-based writer risked the vagaries of Railtrack to attend the Alpine Club in London's Shoreditch, where the £2,000 literary prize - the hill and mountain equivalent of the Booker - was presented to Peter and Leni Gillman for The Wildest Dream - Mallory, his life and conflicting passions, their labour-of-love biography of the Everest pioneer.
Cawthorne was thus one of four disappointed short-listees, but "had a thoroughly enjoyable day, friendly and inspiring, hobnobbing with legends of the climbing world". And, prize or no prize, his Hell of a Journey remains a fine read deserving of a wide public.
For those yet to pick up a copy, it's an account of the former geography teacher's extraordinary 20-week stravaig around 135 Munro summits above 1000m. Entirely on foot, in winter, as you do.
It's one thing to successfully execute a Highland expedition of this sort but it's quite another thing to adequately convey the strange mishmash of effort, logistics, climate and emotions that swirls around any sustained hill tramp. This Cawthorne does well and this is why he reached the short list.
Whereas many expedition narratives focus unwaveringly on objective surroundings, ice-flutings, epic storms, frostbitten unmentionables, it is much rarer to find, as here, an account where the deeper personal aspects are, to use a musical analogy, brought forward in the mix.
Hamish Brown's account of his 1974 Munro round, Hamish's Mountain Walk, remains the best known, and simply the best, example of the all-my-own-walk genre, but Cawthorne succeeds in capturing the conflict of big-idea enterprise undermined by irritating minutiae such as yet another damn compass going missing.
Arguably the 1997-8 walk drifted from Cawthorne's original strict criteria, as he failed to top out Ben Avon's icy summit tor, somehow swapped Clach Leathad for Creise in his height listings and at times appeared to be working from a bespoke edition of Munro's Tables.
But it was an endearingly crazy expedition, one that would leave the average hillgoer not knowing whether to shake their head or shake Cawthorne's hand. Chances are they would do both.
Neither is the book perfectly realised either. There is occasional coyness, as when Cawthorne fails to explain the "whole catalogue of reasons" for starting six days' walk from his first hill.
Nor, perhaps, does the reader ever quite grasp why the undoubted hero is such a hapless navigator, again and again backtracking over storm-battered summits having initially plunged down in completely the wrong direction.
But perhaps even Cawthorne doesn't really know, perhaps he's just being honest in his vagueness. After all, while April might be the cruellest month, winter is without doubt the messiest season.
Certainly Hell of a Journey makes for a better read than the traditional well-funded, smooth-running expedition account, a style of book that often feels remote in more ways than one. Cawthorne writes elegantly, even beautifully at times, especially when embroiled in the wintry wastes of the central Highlands.
Rather than becoming grumpy in the Grampians, he is excellent on the raw basics of battling, battering on. As Kathleen Jamie noted in her citation at the ceremony, Cawthorne's book is "born of a deep sense of connection and love", such that he "even describes the cold with warmth".
So what now for the bold walker-writer? "I'm keeping my idea for my next Scottish expedition close to my chest," he says, "but I have an idea of walking across the Himalayas in 2002".
Whatever he goes for, he should certainly write about it. There is a theory that the Boardman Tasker periodically comes round to a British (usually Scottish) book. If so - or if he simply writes something great, as seems within his capabilities - then Cawthorne's time might yet come.
Just as he has achieved the rare feat of following one major expedition with another - he and a friend completed a round-the-Munros trip back in 1986 - so he is capable of following this promising first book with another and again making a bid for mountaineering's literary summit.
Hell of a Journey: On foot through the Scottish Highlands in winter, by Mike Cawthorne, published by Mercat Press, ISBN 1 84183 005 4, £12.99
Dave Hewitt
15/12/2000
