Hamish's Mountain Walk by Hamish Brown

Author:Hamish Brown [Brown, Hamish]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Thursday 30 May – Trig points round Loch Treig

Easain and Mheadhoin were the local Inverlair hills for many Braehead kids, known always as This Yin and That Yin, names transferred to a pair of Wullie Dugs back home. The ‘‘Stob Corries’’ are a fine pair of hills, bounded by Loch Treig to the east and Coire Lair to the west. Their main joy is the setting, for as hills they just fail to enthuse, all the features seem just short of being good. My log dismissed them in six lines but revelled in the descent to Coire Lair with its pastoral scene of cows browsing on the bright green of grass among the brighter green of new birch growth. After the sterile days past it was as refreshing as a dram. Stob Coire Easain and Stob a’ Choire Mheadhoin sound like malts.

I looked for, and saw, cloudberry, chickweed wintergreen (summer star) and dwarf cornel – a trio of exceptionally beautiful alpines. This was a bit of country we had combed with the kids, for the lodge of Inverlair was given to us by British Aluminium and we wanted to have it as a centre. It could have been a great scheme but it was strangled with red tape. Instead, we had the freedom of Scotland, which we used to the full; not that I could see it ever having developed into a placid sausage-machine, timetabling stereotyped courses, boring the staff, disenchanting pupils and soiling the very landscape which should delight – which is the end result of far too many outdoor education schemes.

We were self-contained groups, doing the sort of thing ordinary people did on the hills. Each term a programme would be produced for the next term. All pupils received this, and then applied for what they liked. They were never ‘‘sent’’. You might juggle a bit to make balanced parties; but then you knew the boys and girls already. They were not impersonal statistics to be suffered for a week. The trips were real too. We might be dropped, say, in Glen Strathfarrar and collected ten days later at Loch Duich – and until then we were on our own, self-contained, self-reliant, not playing at things, nor conning the kids with simulated adventure. They revelled in it and it has made me cynical about the way the Educational Establishment has developed. At Inverlair, for instance, we were banned from living in the building while working on it. Too dangerous – but we could camp on top of the Ben in midwinter. We camped outside and worked on until work was stopped – it was not right that kids should take work away from tradesmen. (So back to the simulated in the school workshop.) The teaching profession I think deserves much of the trouble it gets.

Not being based on one spot the kids came to know Scotland as a whole. They could rile adult Munro-baggers with accounts of visits to the most out-of-the-way summits. I recall one perky visitor to Inverlair asking a fourteen-year-old for his tally of Munros, he having all of fifty.

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