Scotland’s mountains are not high by world standards, but they are stunningly beautiful. There are only 282 Munros (peaks above 3000ft), yet – they are accessible, visually stunning and so varied that people come from all over the world to walk, climb, cycle and photograph them.
Since arriving in Scotland, I have been ‘Munro-bagging’. For the uninitiated, this means climbing each of country’s 3000ft+ peaks. I am of course aware this hobby is in one sense as pointless as it is arbitrary! There are many fine mountains which don’t exceed 3000ft and that demarcation is irrelevant in the landscape. If health and fitness were the only aim, I could have joined a gym. Equally, if being sociable were the only goal, I could have gone to the pub.
Yet – something draws me back to the Munros again and again. In fact, this week with a crowd of friends and family, I climbed my final one. Steadily ticking off hill names on Munros tables has taken me through high waterfalls in spectacular gorges, to soaring peaks towering over distant lochs. I have waded peat bogs and crossed rivers; cycled mountain tracks and dangled from ropes. I have scaled the ridges and precipices of the western mountains, and the lofty glacial plateau’s of the East; scrambled over the Black Cuillin of Skye and trekked into lonely Knoydart where golden eagles soar. I have slept under canvass and listened to Stags roaring through the mist in the high Corries of Argyll.
And I am not alone. The hills are alive – with the sound of hillwalkers. People are irresistibly drawn to the beauty of nature, and here in Scotland we have an embarrassment of riches. The Highlands are full of people who cannot resist the mountain’s draw.
SIZE
There is something which seems to move us quite viscerally when we are confronted by the size of the mountains and then our own smallness. The sense of wonder it provokes is captivating, and some would say even spiritual. Sitting on top of mighty Slioch and gazing out over the vast wilderness of Fisherfield is an overwhelming experience – and something medieval cathedral builders invoked when they flung their vast structures skywards. In the busyness of our lives and introspective tendencies, the physical act of climbing a mountain upon which one appears the size of ant; makes us look out beyond ourselves.
Professor Alister McGrath, once described two men arguing about whether there was life beyond the desert island upon which they lived. One day they found a message in a bottle washed up on the shore. They debated its meaning and concluded that it didn’t prove the existence of others – but it was a clue that someone was probably out there. The point is that that gazing down the Lairg Ghru from on high – that great glacial trench through the Cairngorm plateau, we are not meant to merely take a photo and move on as if that were the end of the matter; but receive it as sign of something greater, or a message in a bottle.
BEAUTY
The Scottish landscape is irrepressibly beautiful. Landscape photographers do a great trade in prints and calendars; with that most photogenic mountain, Glen Coe’s Buachaille Etive Mor, being a perennial favourite. When the summit of Skye’s Bla Bheinn is reached, and the sight of the Black Cuillin over Glen Sligachan assaults the senses – mouths hang open where adjectives and superlatives fall short. But again, why does beauty move us so deeply? Why is bleak functionality not all that matters to us? What is it about beauty, especially unspoilt natural beauty that provokes a response in all of us that makes the A9 to the North so overwhelmed with traffic all summer?
Again, I am unpersuaded that naturalistic, atheist answers to this question do not reduce us to being mere machines, and that attempts to posit merely some evolutionary advantage to our aesthetic responses hacks away at something of the very core of what makes us human. It seems to me that this is yet one more message in a bottle washing up on our shore, pulling us towards the conclusion that there is something, indeed someone more than we can see; calling to us from afar. The alternative is a grim reductionism that sees music as ‘only’ vibrations in the air, great art as ‘some paint’ or love as little more than a breeding arrangement; a way of seeing the world which falls such a long way short of our experience of being human.
This view of beauty is embedded in the Bible. One little known part of the creation narrative says of a fruit tree that God made it both good for food and pleasing to the eye. Think about that for a moment; the claim is that the world is made deliberately functional and beautiful; and that you and I are designed to both function and to know and respond to that beauty. We are hard-wired to appreciate the beauty that creation possesses.
I think too that while much of our daily experience is of a world polluted; of graffiti, of litter in a scarred world; mountains speak to us about the way it was meant to be; indeed ought to be. Surveying the Mamore hills near Fort William from the summit of Sgurr a Mhaim is an undiluted delight. The Mamores are perhaps my favourite r
ange of hills which I have climbed many times, in all seasons. Steep, shapely – with curves, ridges, shoulders, gorges, hanging-valleys, waterfalls, surrounded by deep glens; The Mamores are dramatic mountain architecture presented in sumptuous style.
There is something in natural beauty that we instinctively know is right. The regenerating native woodlands on the north side of Glen Affric teem with life; insects, tiny birds, and raptors and blaze with colour as the bio-diverse landscape is allowed to flourish. It is good and beautiful in a way that fly-tipping is wrong and ugly. But such categories assume that there is a way that the world ought to be; which can differ from the way that it often actually is. Such an is/ought distinction in our world is instinctive and necessary; but doesn’t make a huge amount of sense if the natural world is all there is. When we see ugliness, injustice, pain and evil and think ‘this isn’t right’ we make a deeply Christian response, whether we acknowledge it or not. I know no one who looks at these things and sighs, “ho-hum this is just where we have evolved up to presently”. Natural beauty calls to us deeply, for it presents us with the ought, in a world that is often distorted. The Christian story is that God created a good world, but it has been marred, and the creative intent often hidden, leaving us railing against ugliness, sensing that something precious has been lost. I don’t think like Richard Dawkins that the universe is ultimately characterised by “blind pitiless indifference”; rather that natural beauty is another message in a bottle washing up on the shores of our perception.
TIME
The mountains we walk through are also incredibly old: we are dwarfed not merely by their size but also by their age. The majestic peaks of Torridon are founded on Lewisian Gneiss; amongst the oldest rocks in Britain. Geographers tell us that the ice which carved the great U-shaped valley in which Loch Avon sits behind Cairngorm did its work 18,000 years ago. To walk through this landscape is to be confronted with our own finitude and mortality. Our lives in contrast, the Bible likens to a morning mist, which might arrive with the appearance of permanence but is gone by the time the walkers have left the car park and started to climb.
When I left Inverlochlairig to climb my final Munro, I was delighted that so many family and friends were able to join me. I was also deeply aware that two hillwalking companions who I once assumed would be there for my final hill were tangibly absent. I climbed Ben More from the same car park with David – lost to pancreatic cancer many years ago.
Kevin was a hillwalking legend, an outdoor athlete with a big heart and a huge grin; with whom days in the hills were always a joy. Kevin was one of the most truly alive people I ever met – and yet a decade ago a brain tumour took him from us.
My conversations with Kevin in the hills were wide ranging and fascinating. We planned and schemed all manner of future hill walks; most of which were never to be. We looked at maps and bothies and mountains – and dreamt up all kinds of future trips, and I always just assumed that Kevin not just be present for my final Munro, but be the life and soul of the party; the prankster, the ring leader and the schemer-in-chief.
Kevin was a doctor who knew he was dying; and he spoke about this too. Our last hill together was Ben Wyvis. As we sat and had lunch on the shoulder of the hill looking out over the vastness of Scotland, he pointed out that smoke billowing from the Norbord factory chimney on the other side of the Moray Firth was the landmark with which to line up where his house and his family were. Then he said to me. “I believe God can take care of my wife and children, and I would love to be part of that. But even if I can’t; I still believe that God can take care of them.” I was struck by the profundity of his faith. I knew Kevin was a man of deep Christian conviction, and was both troubled by his words and heartened by the way in which such deep faith in Christ proved itself in life’s darkest valley. Kevin walked through the valley of the shadow of death – and there found that Christ walked with him. Before I had much of a chance to respond, Kevin was on his feet with a smile. “I think we have a hill to climb” – and so we did.
How many countless generations have these hills seen come and then depart? We come, we go – but the hills seem to remain. These ancient rocks not only humble us with our physical finitude; but also with our tragic temporariness. But again, what can it mean? Why do we lament loss? Is bereavement just a necessary part of the survival of the fittest as the species marches on; or is the loss we sense when we bury our friends something more? I am persuaded that this too is a message in a bottle; washing up on the beaches of our experience calling to us about a far bigger reality than one we have yet encountered. Death is a tragedy, not just a biologically necessary mechanism; because human death is grotesque intrusion into God’s good world. Again, the biblical story is of death being the fall-out from humanity’s descent into sin. The appearance of permanence we see in the great hills calls out to us because we were initially intended for such. The Christian hope I shared with Kevin is that through the death and resurrection of Jesus – we can be restored to eternal life with him; if we will but call out to him and receive his forgiveness.
BOTTLES EVERYWHERE
As Munro bagging has taken me all over Scotland – through so many seasons and conditions with a cast of colourful characters; I have been pondering what makes the mountains so magical, so alluring, so almost mystical. I think that it is something to do with their size, their beauty and their age – and that these things communicate deep spiritual truths to us about ourselves and the nature of reality. I am struck by Alister McGrath’s notion that all these things are like messages in a bottle, washing up on the island of our experience. And while each bottle is not itself a knock-down mathematical proof of the Christian faith; more and more bottles are washing in on the tide. Beauty, music, truth, justice, altruism, love, and our desire for hope, are just some of the bottles that arrive. If we are willing to open these messages, and see where they lead and what makes sense of the world and ourselves, we’ll find Christ; the saviour who has in fact been looking for us the whole time.
