Great British Journeys by Crane Nicholas

Author:Crane, Nicholas [Crane, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780297865407
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2010-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

THOMAS

PENNANT

1772

Highlands and islands

The planet’s wildest places remained secret till the last. In Britain, that wilderness lay in the far north-west, where mountains, sea and climate conspired to make travel – and existence itself – extremely challenging. As late as the eighteenth century, the highlands and islands of Scotland were a mystery to most who were not natives. Thomas Pennant’s journey of exploration in 1772 opened the door to tourists like Dr Johnson, who claimed that Pennant was the ‘best traveller’ he had ‘ever read’. Packed with insight, danger and uncomfortable truths, A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides; 1772 is the work of an explorer and natural historian who found himself on a mission to alleviate the suffering of an oppressed population.

*

On a crystalline autumn evening, I followed Thomas Pennant’s route up Beinn na Caillich. The ‘hill of the old hag’ is a massive, curved bulwark which occupies the full width of the island of Skye, between the salt waters of Loch Slappin and Caolas Scalpay. To Pennant, on the deck of his ship, Beinn na Caillich was ‘one of those picturesque mountains that made such a figure from the sea’. He liked his mountains to be rounded, or ‘mamillary’, as he put it. Today, few mountaineers give this 2,400-foot hummock a second glance as they speed along the coast road towards the chiselled spikes of the Cuillins. Pennant climbed from the east, an energetic scramble up tongues of scree and heather, with no apparent path and plenty of opportunities for twisting an ankle. I couldn’t help wondering whether I had got the right mountain, but once the gradient eased and the stones thinned to gale-rubbed turf, I recognised Pennant’s summit, ‘flat and naked, with an artificial cairn, of a most enormous size’. With the wind rattling my jacket, I dropped my pack at the foot of the cairn and turned to the four points of the compass. Northward, an arm of platinum sea ran between Raasay and the Applecross peaks towards The Minch. Southward, I could just see the island of Rhum, a boulder resting on polished slate. To the east, lights were beginning to twinkle on the darkening mainland. But westward, backlit by a bleeding sun, a ferocious palisade of ancient rock was ripping low-flying cloud into tattered streamers. ‘The prospect to the west,’ Pennant had written with awe, ‘was that of desolation itself; a savage series of rude mountains, discoloured, black and red, as if by the rage of fire.’ There are parts of Scotland that have not changed for thousands of years.

You only have to look at the emergence of Scotland from the last Ice Age to detect a spectacle in the making. The glaciers pulled back to expose tottering walls of rock, serrated ridges and immense U-shaped valleys streaming with meltwater. Vast areas of the far north had been levelled by the ice into polished plateaux, strewn with rubble. This frigid tundra was gradually colonised by hardy little shrubs such as juniper and willow, and prowled by wandering herds of bison, woolly rhinoceros, giant elk and mammoth.

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