The Pap of Glencoe
California Dreamin'
Fantasy Football started this week, so I’ve been too busy with the important work of choosing a team (and also catching up on my University Challenge blogs) to write a fresh essay. So here is one from last October, about climbing a pointy hill.
The Pap
On our first trip to Kinlochleven, we stopped in the village of Glencoe to wait for the bus down to our new home. From the village, you can see the Pap of Glencoe, a knobbly-shaped mountain which juts up over the back of the village.
Pretty much every time we have stopped at the same place since then, we have said that we should climb it, but it has taken us four months to finally conquer.
First of all we had to tackle one of the mountains opposite, on the other side of the loch - Mam Na Gualainn (so we’ve now done the Mam and the Pap, hence the subtitle) - so that L could prove to herself that she was able to summit big hills, having previously thought of herself as a long, flat hiker rather than a short, tall hiker.
We did that a few months ago, so there has still been a great deal of pontificating between then and now.
Two Thirty
Today we had the perfect excuse - a dentist appointment. Now, it may not be immediately obvious to you the causality which connects a dentist appointment with a mountain climb, but when you live in a rural area without a car, it slots together brilliantly.
Dentist appointment at 10, so we'll get the 9 o’clock bus. If there were more buses, we might have been able to time it better, but this is as good as it gets on that end. The first bus back home would be at 1105, so we’d be waiting around for a while. Meaning that there was no other option than to climb a 750m tall mountain over more than 4 hours. Getting us back on time for the 1505 bus home.
The walk starts with part of the route to Hagrid’s Hut, a walk we had taken with L’s sister a few weeks back. Hagrid’s Hut is a remarkable tourist attraction in that the thing it is named after is no longer there, but it does still look incredibly like the scenes from the movies. Indeed, L’s sister added a sticker of the Hut to a picture she’d taken, and it was so realistic that all of her Instagram followers just thought it was a screenshot from the films.
Onwards, upwards
We go down the wrong path initially, taking a path normally reserved for animals, but realise our mistake when we find ourselves surrounded on all sides (save the one we had just come from) by fencing. Reverse, reassess, we are on our way forwards again.
Or should I say upwards?
This is a walk which doesn’t so much go on as go up. From the off, it is very steep and there is no let up until we reach the top.
A wrong turn at some point - we had been using our notoriously unreliable ‘must be’ navigation methodology - led us astray. This technique, which says that when faced with two options, rather than checking the map, you pick the one which feels instinctively more likely and say to your companion ‘must be this way’, meant that our route up was even steeper than it needed to have been.
L had gotten a filling at the dentist, so wasn’t allowed to drink for a few hours, which isn’t ideal when you are climbing a very steep mountain in surprisingly clement October weather. Fortunately, she has been trained by our repeated forgetfulness in the field of bringing adequate water supplies with us on other walks, so she makes it to the top before dehydration sets in. I, meanwhile, have been slinging it back, sweating like it’s the height of Summer.
My heart rate is pushing 160, which isn’t ideal, and I try to slow down to slow it down, but it only really calms when we reach a scrambly section near the top. At this point, L’s heart rate probably jumped, but out of fear more than exertion, and she urged me to be careful.
Breaking the Rut
Across the glen, we can hear stags rutting. We could hear them yesterday, too, when we walked along the low road for a spot of wild swimming near Seagull Island (in case you didn’t think we were living in enough of a storybook place, there is a place called Seagull Island. The water was absolutely freezing, but the seagulls over on the island didn’t seem to care).
They are louder today, more insensate and righteous, but we don’t manage to spot any of them. Their calls echo off the mountains and ricochet back through the glen, so we are not even sure where they are coming from. There is so much emotion in their grunting, and sometimes their voices break like teenage boys. Perhaps some of them are teenage boys. The sound is hard to describe - it is something like a cow’s moo, but with a level of football chanting to it. Screaming their souls into the wind. I wonder if they realise why they are so horny.
On the summit, we share some bread and hummus (which L struggles with due to her numbed mouth), and a woman offers us her overly energetic dog. We decline, and I thought I saw them on the descent sans dog, assuming that someone else must have taken them up on their offer, but L assures me it was a different couple.
We see more people on our way down, perhaps because we follow the correct path, and we both nearly slip over about five times. Actually, it was more of a skidding over than a slipping over. The scree has a mind of its own, and despite the fact that this patch over here looks the same as that patch over there, one of them will be as sturdy as iron and the other as slidy as the rollers you put your tray on before it gets X-ray’d at the airport. We were on airport trays several times on the way down this hill, let’s just say that.
Community Councilling
L joined the community council this month and was elected as the secretary at the inaugural meeting yesterday. We debrief this meeting and wonder how much work the secretarial duties will entail. The people of the village seem to have many issues, but are the people who actually attend the meetings the only ones who send emails in? Or will there be swathes of unseen problems to deal with, too? Only time will tell.
We are at the bottom, and return to the first place we glimpsed Loch Leven to wait for the bus. I clean out the end of my jacket’s zipper which has somehow become filled with plant-based detritus. I use part of the bus ticket as a tool to scrape it clean and feel like a very enterprising primate.
When we took this bus down to the village for the first time, our eyes were glued to the windows, taking in every tree and hill and stream and rock we could see. This time I listened to a podcast and L read.
I would lament our lack of attention if we hadn’t just spent four hours climbing a big hill. I think we earned this one.