As Scotland's first two National Parks come into being, Ronald Turnbull looks at how they do it at the other edge of Europe, and wonders if we could do with some Carpathian Commissars?
I wrote to the Cairngorms consultation exercise and they seem to have taken my advice. The Mountaineering Council of Scotland wanted the new National Park to have teeth so it could bite off half of Scotland.
But the consultation people have agreed with me (and no doubt one or two other respondents) that Ben Alder really isn't in the Gorms, that the A9 hills are actually among the less wonderful bits of Scotland and that the Angus Glens are very nice but aren't actually in the Cairngorms either. They also agreed with me about the name - the Cairngorms national park should be called the Cairngorms National Park. They've decided to name it in Gaelic as well. The last Gaelic-speaker in the Cairngorms lived in the 1950s but thuagh a' thaill...
They didn't accept my suggestion that the Lake District people down in England had made a reasonable fist of the developers versus nature impossibility, and that the Gorms ones should get to be the planning authority. Instead they've settled for a botch - but at least it's a Scotch botch.
Abroad is another historical era. They'll do things differently then. Scotland, just at the start of National Parks, is just at the start of National Park problems. England's Lakeland has those problems fully developed - and those problems are, of course, people. I'm just back from a National Park with people versus the place problems that make the Lake District seem like somewhere a cloud could experience a certain amount of loneliness. The solutions they have come up with at the other edge of Europe are profoundly un-Unna, and altogether alien to the Scottish genius.
Facts of the Tatras
The Carpathians take up where the Alps leave off - a 4000-mile crumple-zone from the Vienna Woods to the Black Sea. The Tatras, half in Poland and half in Slovakia, are their pride and highpoint. The High Tatry is a wonderland of granite spires that's - er - three times the height of the Trossachs (up to 2654m) but not quite as wide.
Among the world's big mountain ranges, the Tatras are the smallest. Nevertheless, this hill group, roughly the size of Section 7 (Angus Glens and Lochnagar) in Munro's Tables, has the arduous duty of being the main range in Poland. And there are a lot more walking Poles in Poland than walking poles in Lochaber and the Lake District added together. In addition, the Tatras are the main range of Slovakia - and the Slovaks are no slouches. At the same time the Tatras are a proper National Park - they have wolves and bears and a few unhappy eagles flapping around looking for a flat bit without a picnicking Pole.
Scotland needs a symbolic cemetery
Some of the problem people ought to be harmless to parks as they're already dead. But your descendants, they plaque you up. It started with Gough falling off Striding Edge and his faithful little dog moving not just Wordsworth but Walter Scott as well to bad verse. But now every tiny top in the Lake District has its brass plate and plastic flower.
The Slovak solution - put all the plaques onto one little hill - a pretty hill, with cedars and tumbled boulders. Put the yellow-flashed trail through the middle and charge the punters ten Crowns. They call it the symbolic cemetery. It is - can we call it fun? Yes, I think so. Once we'd paid our ten Crowns the guardian with regret said no symbolic Scottish people have got places in the cemetery. To get in these days, you not only have to die in the hills but do something useful for them while still alive.
Here in Scotland an informal symbolic cemetery is coming into being at the top car park in Glen Nevis, on the roches moutonnes at the foot of Nevis Gorge. But drearily discreet and protestant, no crucifixes peasant-painted to look like totem poles, no bas reliefs of the fatal avalanche, no aluminium eagles ascending to heaven or at least the summit of Gerlachovsky stit.
Stalinist summits
The Tatras whether Polish or Slovakian are ex-communist hills. Some of the ex-communist commissars have ended up in the National Park. In Poland they wear a red jumper, in Slovakia they wear a green fleece and a badge, and they do like to keep you under control. You may not walk after an hour before sunset, or before an hour after sunrise. You may not cycle or camp. You may not hang-glide - it bothers the eagle. (The Polish Tatras, like England, have just one eagle.) The paths are marked with stripy signs in red, green, yellow, blue and black, and on the paths is where you must walk (except between November and mid-June, when you may not walk at all).
Those paths are, on the whole, pitched paths. Rugged stairways of granite wind up through the dwarf pine scrub into bouldery corries, twiddle around a bit among some lochans and zigzag fearsomely up a slope of stones to a tiny pass between two granite spires. The last few metres to the col are a simple scramble assisted with a fixed chain and through the gap you see a new stony corrie, some more lochans and some more granite spires. Attractive walking but perhaps a little bit tame.
Apart from Orla Perc
Orla Perc (give that c a little upside-down hat and pronounce it like an English ch) - Orla Perc is where the waymarked way forgets its cobbled stonework and its considerate zigzags, abandons its knotty pinetrunk signposts and goes for a swing and a dangle along the ridge.
It's as if one of the more tricky sections of the Cuillin - Mhadaidh to Druim nan Ramh, say - were fixed up with iron rungs and extra footholds put in with an angle-grinder. And then, to avoid that inconvenient business with the magnetic rocks, white and red paint marks every ten yards.
Mountains are born free but everywhere in Europe we see them in chains. And no, I don't want an iron ladder up the In Pinn, though there is that awkward pitch above the top of the Bhasteir Tooth, it is a bit out of place when the rest of the route is so easy... But Poland's not my country, and I don't have to agonise and heartsearch about the morality of it all. I just have to agonise and heartsearch about the iron ladder with 1000ft of empty air instead of a bottom rung...
Dung not diesel
A bit of Stalinist legacy can allow certain short cuts. (No, not the short cuts between the zig zags of the waymarked path - there's a man in a red jumper and an on-the-spot fine for them...) They don't ask the climbing clubs if their members would like to stop parking their horrid motors in the mudbath at the top of the Chocholowska valley and they don't ask the Chocholowskans how happy they are about the possible drop in ice cream revenue. They just close the road. And then they re-open it to a troop of horse drawn taxis that are just as slow as walking but a whole lot more expensive.
Straight away, the valley smells of dung rather than diesel and the hills have got a bit bigger. And just imagine this applied to Scotland. Park and ride all the way along the Highland Line, with a return of the steamer service up the West Coast from Glasgow. Applecross, Sir? Just hop off the Stornoway ferry into a little rowing boat. Lochnagar a two-day walk in from Kirriemuir, or maybe take it from the train at Blair Atholl or Aviemore - why, that makes Lochnagar as big as the Matterhorn.
And as you walk past the Polish pole barrier at the bottom of the closed road, what's this but a rustically shingled, log-sided, ethnic traditional tollbooth? They make you pay for the park! What you pay is three Zloty, the equivalent of 40p in our money. But never mind that, it's a fundamental principle of democracy that footpath damage should be paid for out of general taxation. It costs to go to the opera and that's quite right because opera is for toffs. But the parks are for the people and the people don't pay. It is in the Declaration of Arbroath.
It wouldn't work in Scotland because they wouldn't charge us 40p, they'd charge us £15. And once they started excluding, they'd exclude us from all Knoydart for the sake of a sea eagle. And in Scotland, so far, there just isn't the people pressure. When the man with the people-counter won't let you up Giewont (the Sleeping Knight), it's because Giewont's top is about twice the size of the top of Sgurr nan Gillean, and last summer someone at one end sneezed and someone at the other end fell over the edge.
Wild Places for Nature and People - this is a slogan at the moment of the John Muir Trust. This is like the washing up liquid that's tough on grease but kind to your hands. It's like the energy bar that's nourishing but not fattening. If you want both people and nature, then both people and nature are going to take a bit of punishment but personally speaking, you can hang me in chains from the Orla Perc anytime.
Ronald Turnbull
17/10/2002
Want to see the Tatras? Try these links Poland - www.cs.put.poznan.pl/holidays/tatry
Slovakia - www.vysoketatry.com/en.html
Want to go there? Try Go-fly England (Stansted/EMA) to Prague and sleeper to Krakow/Poprad
Dave Hewitt will be back in a fortnight
