This Place of Beginnings

“Knowing another is endless. The thing to be known grows with the knowing.”

Nan Shepherd

 

How do you begin to know a place? You simply have to begin. In my case I didn’t even know that was what I was doing, but it began with the mountains.

One day on the high plateau I walked among the jumbled rocks and breeze blown grasses, following the way down away from the foot beaten paths to the edge of the Cairngorm plateau. Water trickled from the ground, seeping upwards in clear pools lined with mosses of nuclear green. The confluent waters ran together with growing strength, building momentum, tugging me onward. With growing speed and singing splashes they flowed and foamed across red granite, until there at the edge of the hill they tumbled suddenly and infinitely into space.

The vast space of Loch Avon lay before me in blazing summer sun. Far below in its glacial trench, mountain walls rising on all sides, the gathered waters far beneath were beryl under a sapphire sky, scattering the sun across great depths. Not a cloud to be seen, nor a shadow. From up here beside the rushing water of the Feith Buidhe I could see the length of the whole loch, held like a wonderful secret in the heart of the hills. 

 

I stood right on the horizon of the plateau, where the water tumbles down in a giant staircase before the plummet over the final edge and onto the slabs below. The water runs across a huge granite plate that is almost perfectly flat, and the water is barely any depth at all as it pulses across the stone. The day was baking hot, and the walk in had left me tired and sweaty, so I removed my boots and walked out onto the slab, letting the space-cold water run over my tingling toes, giving it a kick over the edge to watch it fall in glittering parabolas through the air. I emptied my water bottle into the stream and refilled it, drinking deep and slaking my thirst with a gasp. The water of the Feith Buidhe is the clearest and most pure of all water, and a prize well worth the journey here under the hot sun.

I chose a good sitting-rock to settle on and took my sandwiches from my bag, and as I munched down I took a look around. To all intents and purposes this area is the heart of the Cairngorms, and some of the wildest terrain to be found anywhere in Scotland. Cradling the loch are the shadow-throwing cliff heads of Carn Etchacan and Stac Dubha, and the granite torrs that staple the crest of Beinn Mheadhoin in the middle distance. But I was not only interested in the great sights of the mountains, but also in the smaller things. The boulders that lay around me, the growing plants and occasional creatures that come and go. Sword blades of sedge that stiffly poke out of the soil. The bobbing tail of a mountain hare running across the flank of hill. Globules of water that splinter apart as they fly off into space, then burst on granite below. 

Not only these things, either. I was also recalling the memories that lay here and there, strewn all around the hill. It was some years since I first ventured onto these hills, long before the night with the deer, and I had no idea at all of what I was getting into then. That day – my first – the mountains were covered in a wet snow that sagged into the hollows between boulders, and clogged our boots with huge soggy blocks of ice. I barely even knew what hills these were. ‘The Cairngorms.’ That name was literally the only thing I knew about them, save the fact that they might hold the promise of a good climb. I recalled the difficult but high-spirited walk to the Northern Coires, and then the crag spread above us like a great raven wing of black rock, striped with gullies of wet, dripping snow. We pulled on harnesses, strapped on crampons, and brandished axes before setting off. We ought to have turned back there and then, but being young and having good judgement are not necessarily traits that go hand in hand. 

 

The climb that followed proved to be a rather swift education in the nature of these hills. When Nan Shepherd wrote her famous book, The Living Mountain, she opened it with the words “Summer on the high plateau can be as delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge.” Well if this summer day beside the Feith Buidhe was the delectable honey, then that snowy day was the roaring scourge. I quickly learned that besides being named ‘the Cairngorms’ these mountains were both ferocious and unsympathetic. We struggled up a wet snowy gully, got blasted by melting water that fell up as well as down, and then were flattened onto our faces by hurricane strength winds at the top. We had to crawl a substantial part of the way down. But still, that memory has a certain fondness for its sheer adventure, and it did not put me off. Many more mountain days followed, in winter and every other season besides. Growing in skill, tempering youthful confidence with judgement and experience. And most of all, starting to know the place.

Just a few yards away from the boulder where I sat eating my sandwiches was the spot where I pitched my tent, the first time I came here, to this place beside the Feith Buidhe. I was still ignorant of the wonders that lay around. Wind drenched and weatherbeaten by a summer storm, worn down and on edge from concentrating on map and compass. That day too had been a roaring scourge. All morning and afternoon we walked in a ghostly grey room that pressed and bullied us constantly with its vagueness, just as much as the buffeting wind and sly rain. The firmness of the little circle of ground around us seemed so strange when everything else was in flux. The world was reduced to a constantly changing aspect of cold grasses and stones rising and falling beneath our seemingly stationary bodies. Hours of walking produced no meaningful change, but eventually our maps told us we had arrived somewhere. We put up our tents just a stone’s throw from this very spot, and let me tell you that I never had a more miserable night. I never again want to feel the wind inside my sleeping bag.

But the wind and rain relented eventually, and as it did I ventured outside, and watched spellbound as the mist rolled back like a white curtain, a shaft of sunlight piercing through the clag and sweeping across the stage like a spotlight. The scene was unimagined, unanticipated. Our maps carried no warning of the beauty of the land. The ground seemed to soar down away from me, beautiful distance suddenly born out of the close foggy air. Colour, light and form erupted from nothing. Awareness swelled out from the stony circle around my feet and the soggy plastic of the map cover, to real mountains and skies. Suddenly the day was given context, and spirits soared upwards and outwards with the simple pleasure of being shown where we stood. And there, beneath it all, the incomprehensibly beautiful colours of Loch Avon, shining out from beneath a grey world.

I tried to call that captivating moment to mind again as I look down upon Loch Avon once more from my lunch boulder. But this day was different. Each day carries only its own power, though they may hint at days gone by and days to come. Far below on the loch a ripple of light ran from shore to shore as a silver glimmer of wind dashed itself upon the surface. This day had its own power indeed, and I decided to go see if I could find more of it.

My feet soon dried again in the warm sun, and I pulled my boots back on before setting off around the side of the hill. The way turned inward to the hillside – the view becoming closed off behind me as I progressed. Carefully I picked my way from rock to rock, contouring along imaginary brown maplines around the headwaters of the Garbh Uisge Beag – The Little Rough Water. A pair of dotterels rose from the boulders and kept me company for some while, or perhaps they’d rather have seen the back of me, but either way they hopped and fluttered along from rock to rock, bright wings translucent in the sunlight.

This part of the mountain was remote and silent in the red hot sun. You think you’ve experienced silence until you encounter a hot, still day in the mountains. There’s a kind of deadness to it, the asteroid silence of eternity, of pre and post life. Sound fell away into it like an echoless abyss. It was impossible from there to see any sign or sound of humanity save for the tiny threads of tracklines that wind their way along the shores of the loch far below. Banks of moss were untrodden, loose stones still lay in their beds. Harsh black shadows poured from every edge of stone. The quietness deepened, the scuff of boots on stone and the trickle of water fell weakly on still air.

 

As I turned the corner of a small ridge I came across one of those treats of the Cairngorms – a bank of summer snow. This tiny fragment of winter lay like a dying thing among the stones. It gave little clue as to the relentless and unsympathetic power of the winter weather here – the weather I have dared face at its full force only a handful of times. Whatever pure blizzard laid it down, the wilting snow was now gritty with bits of grass and dust, sprawled out among the slopes and slants, yet still filling their interstitial gaps. The snow patch was shrinking. It fit around the stones but did not touch them, like a torn out page lain back in place.

 

I needed to cross it if I were to continue this way, and chose a rising line that traversed the patch. My walking boots bit into the soft surface, ridged and scalloped by wind and melt. I had to avert my eyes from the glare of the sun on the snow, which was blinding. Step by step I traversed the patch to the far shore of bare stone, where the hillside folded down upon itself in a gully. This was the main channel of the Garbh Uisge Beag. Here it seemed as if two disjointed pieces of the mountain met at strange and oblique angles, as if it were two halves that just didn’t quite fit. The water flowed down the seam, only today the gully was filled with snow, running in a line that filled this shady spot with brightness and leveled out some of the join like plaster in a crack.

One of the strange things about walking here on the plateau is that you do not always feel like you are on a mountain. Away from the edges of the plateau the land is rugged but rarely steep. At the edge you can look out and down on the rest of the world, as I did bathing my feet at the Feith Buidhe, but here in the middle is a place of close horizons and strange empty spaces. The mountain seems to have vanished into the earth. You have no general perception of height or of verticality like mountains are supposed to give you. You feel like you ought to go higher to find it, but there is no longer any mountain above you. The mountain seems both everywhere and nowhere – far away and yet unsettlingly close. Then you turn a corner, crest a rise, and you’re engulfed by infinity. Mountains and mountains and the mountain itself as far as the eye can see.

It was not a vista but one of those strange close spaces that I found myself descending into, as I reached the head of the snow patch that filled the Garbh Uisge Beag. Here the liquid waters of the stream flowed into it – under it – and there was a cavernous opening in the snow. I stepped down and down, into the water that trickled over the red granite, closer and nearer to the opening. Here the silence of the mountain was kept at bay by the singing notes of the burn, and I felt like I was descending into the earth, not walking on a mountain top. I stepped onto a huge boulder and it shifted slowly under my foot like a seesaw. My body reacted automatically, withdrawing the weight, and a resonant thunk rang out like a bell in an empty church. But the dark stones and blue sky offered no further comment as I stepped around, down into the water, and stood there staring into the interior of the snow tunnel. The walls of the snowbed were deep on either side of the water, arching up and over in a thin layer above. I decided to go further, and took my first steps into the mountain itself.

Perhaps this was a bit more literal than Nan Shepherd meant when she wrote of the Cairngorms having an interior, of journeying in the living mountain. But I’ve always taken her words to mean a journey into your own self as much as it is a journey into the hills. You walk yourself into the place, and in turn something of the place walks out of you in your thoughts, ideas and memories. But either way, literal or metaphorical, there is a restless compulsion always to go further in.

Within the snow tunnel it was a different world. After the heat of the sun the coolness was sudden. Beneath me the water flowed around my ankles and down through its rocky bed beneath a luminous arched ceiling. Its surface was scalloped like the ribbed vaulting of a cathedral, but vastly more complex and beautiful. It was raining with meltwater from a thousand tiny inverted peaks of ice. And the ceiling glowed with an extraordinary lucent blue which was the transformation of sunlight by snow. The most blissful shade of cobalt was cast within this secret space. The coldness and the sound of rushing, tumbling water was drawn out and focused, echoing toward me with unsuspected richness that was a delight after the dead silence of heat on the plateau. In the distance, where the ice-tunnel twisted and fell, the glow of open sunlight flooded in, beckoning.

I hesitated there on the threshold, crouched on a boulder above the cold flow. Dare I go further? Through, maybe? It did not seem so far to reach the light at the other end. But then I imagined myself seen from outside, as it were, vanishing into the interior of the mountain, and never emerging. There was no reason the well packed snow should collapse today, but less likely things still happen. And, although I’m always happy to wander alone in the hills, I felt acutely aware of the fact for a moment that no-one knows where I am. There’s a thrill in that, and a freedom, but I decided I’ve no need to make a rite of this particular snow passage today. So I contented myself to crouch there in the rushing flow of the doorway for a while, gazing absently into the water. I imagined myself as water; melting away into the hill and flowing down beneath the sun to the deep waters of Loch Avon.

 

I always find that questions arise in me as I sit in contemplation. Is the water aware of its journey? Does it want to flow? Or can it simply not help itself? Does it know that the light at the end of the snow tunnel represents only the start of its course? Out into the sun, spreading and splashing across the rocks of the high places, down and down and down into the gathered waters of the loch. And then drifting, waiting, rolling in the wind blown waves before flowing out again into the swelling river beyond. Joining its course to other ways, all with the same inevitable oceanic destination. But it all starts here, in this place of beginnings.

 

I couldn’t help but wonder, then, if I am like the water too? Does my path from here converge with inevitability, like the rivers, or does it go the other way? Spreading out from here into myriad possibilities like the branches of a tree? This tunnel in the snow may be the destination of today’s walk, but it could also be the beginning. Even the tunnel, even the mountain itself, is not an end or result, but a constant beginning. Time is a sculptor, and behind every crag and facet lie infinite variations of the mountain, waiting to be revealed.

I sat on my rock beneath the snow, waiting at the threshold, listening and looking. Dare I go further in? I ask myself a second time. And then I realise that from here every direction is further in, whether it is upstream or down. The mountains have me now.

By the time these thoughts have coalesced from the water and snow, my legs were aching from crouching. It was cold in here too and I was starting to shiver, which released me from a kind of trance I had had no intention of entering. Time to go. I splashed back to the mouth of the tunnel, and out into the warmth of the sun, but not without a last look at the prismatic blue curves and gemstone droplets that melted from the ceiling, making the river by their fall. I clambered up out of the gully, climbing back out onto the exterior of the mountain. Heat warmed me. The noise of water diminished, remaining in its home. Step by step I came to the top of the plateau, and picked up the well trodden path once more. Then, without caring whether my path was converging or diverging, I started on again, knowing that whatever path I walked I would surely end up here again, with blissful inevitability.