‘S
ummer on the high plateau can be as delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge.” From the summit of Ben Nevis I could just make out the silhouette of the Cairngorms, the mountain range more than 100 miles away in the eastern Highlands of Scotland about which the poet and hillwalker Nan Shepherd wrote those arresting words in 1945. I’d lucked out. On this particular July morning with barely a hint of breeze, the gods had afforded me one of the “delectable as honey” days.
Lifted above the clouds, I felt positively Lilliputian trying to make sense of the limitless view. The sharp peak of Càrn Mòr Dearg, one of the tallest mountains in Scotland but destined to be eternally overshadowed by its 4,413ft neighbour, sat just below me, lacy wisps of fog tickling its sides. From there, the outlines of the Torridon Hills, the Grampians, the Monadhliath Mountains, the Isle of Rum and countless other peaks melted into one another, vast waves of rock undulating into the distance, their eastern flanks drenched in sunlight. I turned to my guide, James, who I expected to be impatient to begin our descent. Instead, he sat quite calmly at the foot of the ruins of the old Ben Nevis observatory, a snow bunting picking at crumbs beneath his feet, and said: “We have all the time in the world.”
