John Purser: Lessons from a Scottish rock climbing legend

If David Hume was, philosophically, the world’s greatest sceptic, unable to prove conclusively any connection between cause and effect, then Scotland’s climbing environment is perhaps the finest almost daily proof of chaos theory. We live with uncertainty and learn to love it.

“Like the true philosopher, the true mountaineer can look forward with rejoicing to an eternity of endeavour: to realisation without end ... Rock, snow, and ice sometimes claim from a man all that he has to give. Sometimes the strain on body and nerve may be high, discomforts sharp. But the mountaineer gets all the joy of his craft: his mastery of it is, in reality, the mastery of himself. It is the foretaste of freedom.”

Thus, WH Murray (above) in his book Undiscovered Scotland. What he discovers goes well beyond new routes and lost valleys. It is a journey of the soul.

I was lucky enough to get my first lessons in rock climbing from Bill. He was thoughtful and patient and was and, long after his death, still is one of Scotland’s most revered climbers. As a family we came to know him through his neighbours on Loch Goil, Colonel and Mrs Forman, who lived at The Lodge. Bill, later with his wife Anne, lived at Lochwood, which was situated on a rocky promontory. I only visited it once in Bill’s later years. Bill and Anne were very private people – she a fine poet, he a great writer.

Few ever expected that Bill would marry but even on the briefest of acquaintance with Anne, it was obvious that these two were made for each other and that their minds were set upon higher things.

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My first encounter with Bill could not have been more iconic or appropriate. It was in the early 1950s. I, my brother, sister, and cousin, all wanted to climb The Cobbler near the head of Loch Long and Bill was prepared to be our guide. It was winter and there was a good deal of snow, though it wasn’t actually snowing.

I was the youngest, still wearing shorts, and we all three had no better than stout walking shoes, woollen sweaters and good raincoats. I remember Bill looking back at this trail of ill-clad youngsters to check were we up for it. But we were used to the mountains and to minor hardships and we were all Irish and nobody was going to even dream of turning back.

The higher we got the more bitter became the cold, with sharp spindrift cutting the flesh raw at the backs of my unclad knees, but we made it to the final tower, the cobbler himself, cross-legged and bent over his cobbler’s last.

Bill reconnoitred through the hole in this final lump of rock that leads to a ledge and on to the flat top – but he declared it too icy for safety as none of us had ice-axes, nobody had a rope, and there was a gusty wind. So we left the last 20ft to themselves and headed back down.

Only decades later did I learn that it was in just such conditions “without an ice-axe or nailed boots, without map, compass, or warm and windproof clothing” that Bill’s own first climb was on that same mountain. Perhaps it was on account of that day that, some years later, he was willing to take me on my first rock-climbing experiences – just he and I and the Buachaille.

It is known as The Buachaille to climbers, but its true name is Buachaille Èite Mòr. In English this means The Big Shepherd of Etive, a wonderful name for an imposing mountain that guards the entrances to Glen Etive and Glen Coe. At its foot is the picturesque cottage of Lagangarbh, the Rough Hollow.

How Bill put up with a garrulous teenager as his sole companion in Lagangarbh – the Scottish Mountaineering Club’s base in Glencoe – for a weekend of uniform grey and wet, I do not know.

We started with Curved Ridge and the next day climbed North Buttress. The rock was cold and wet, mist enveloped everything, but I sufficiently concealed my nerves for Bill to abandon using the rope on the first day.

On the second, a Sunday, the weather was even worse, so as soon as we reached the top of the Buttress, Bill turned and announced our descent, leaping like a wild goat into the swirling mist that enveloped what I had just climbed with caution.

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I had no option but to follow or be lost and we reached the bottom in about 10 minutes. That was adventure and I was properly scared but since Bill was little more than a darker shape in the mist several feet below me, he could only guess at my state of mind from the time I was taking to follow him.

When we reached the cottage we were still, unsurprisingly, the only occupants. Bill then set supper in motion. A huge pan was filled with water, lentils, onions and carrots to which were added some very old army biscuits which we broke up with an ice axe as nothing else could penetrate them.

Bill then headed for the Kingshouse for a drink. I was left in charge of the pan and told that when I stood a wooden spoon in the centre and it took six minutes to fall to the side, it was ready. I remember feeling slightly abandoned. The Kingshouse Hotel was a wet walk away and Bill was, no doubt, in no great hurry to regain my company.

But on reading Robin Lloyd-Jones’s remarkable The Sunlit Summit: The Life of WH Murray, I see it in a different light and Bill realised that this callow boarding-school youth needed to be challenged on the hill and left in charge of the cooking and of himself, all in order to nurture his independence.

At that time I knew little of Bill’s wartime experiences as a POW and I don’t recall what we talked about, apart from the relative merits of nailed boots versus the new rubber-soled Vibrams that were the coming thing.

Bill told me I was better starting off on nails as they taught balance. Tricounis and clinkers were the names given to the types of nail on the boots. He also recommended a slater’s hammer for ice climbing – which I still have.

Clothing in those days was, however, every bit as good as today. Pure wool, unwashed, was warm when wet and Black’s Ventile anoraks had developed a breathable water-resistant technology better than and decades before the modern American equivalent.

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As for equipment, driving pitons into rock was seen by many as a kind of desecration, ropes were hemp and heavy, and ice-axes were long and wooden-handled. Karabiners were only just coming in and “the married man’s karabiner” (a karabiner with the addition of a threaded lock) was an object of derision.

But then it was not so much a sport in those days, nor so competitive. Yes, it was a way to prove yourself but even for the most hard-bitten the mountains were always in command, always to be respected, and there was a rarely mentioned sense of spiritual release.

This quiet understatement (if anything were said at all) was, at the time, given poetic voice by Bill himself in his classic books Mountaineering in Scotland, Undiscovered Scotland and The Story of Everest. On Bill’s suggestion, I joined the Junior Mountaineering Club of Scotland and enjoyed many weekends with equally patient climbers, one or two of whom were, however, prepared to trade their respect for the mountains in favour of dancing an athletic Highland reel in tennis shoes on the very edge of perdition.

I do however, owe a special apology to Roger Robb, one of the many encouraged by Bill. I was a teenager and had no car. Roger picked me up at my home and did not check what I had brought. He had the tent; I had forgotten my sleeping bag.

It was midwinter and we camped on deep snow a few hundred feet up on Ben Lui. Roger gave me his old inner sleeping bag to use, through the seams of which daylight was occasionally visible, and I was consigned to the outer edge of the ground sheet, which was not sewn in.

I spent a cold night with the snow seeping through the layers, but we were rewarded by the Northern Lights and by a good Spartan breakfast of porridge. It was through the generosity and schooling of people such as Roger that I began to get an inkling of human companionship beyond that of family.

Later, as music students, a group of us would go rock climbing together, nearly always in Glencoe as it was accessible in two hours from Glasgow, but occasionally on Skye where the gabbro of the Cuillin wore down our fingertips so badly it was excruciatingly painful to press them down on strings. Four of us were string players – one violinist, one violist and two cellists. Now and again a bassoon.

There were accidents. The most important thing about climbing accidents was that one’s parents should not discover the truth. In this we were mostly remarkably successful.

My friend David Stewart, having saved my life as I swung across Crowberry Gully on Buchaille Etive Mor, was dragged on to a sharp rock by the rope with which he held me. A sizeable wound in his thigh was eventually stitched up in Alexandria and we all kept mum.

Another, whose name I still dare not reveal, concealed his multiply shattered leg for many months from his parents who knew and know nothing of it.

On the other hand, my wife’s first husband was in justified fear of his life on a rock climb and barely saved himself from a long fall. On reaching home, his mother asked him if he had been in danger at a particular time, for she had suddenly dropped a teacup, sensing his life in the balance. It was at precisely the time John’s life was indeed, and literally, in the balance, so really there was no denial possible.

The workings of the human mind are still scarcely known to us – least of all the capacity for empathy to transcend space and time; and somewhere lurking behind those early days when I first put hand to rock, is a sense of wonder as I approach my final years and look towards heights of a kind that I shall never climb.

Unless, perhaps, Bill has all along been my silent, secret companion leading me to the last pitch of a sunlit summit.