Yeti by Graham Hoyland

Author:Graham Hoyland [Graham Hoyland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

As Piltdown Man was a cricket-playing English yeti, we should mention the Scottish yeti, which I have seen. In 1890, the Scottish climber Professor J. N. Collie had this terrifying experience while alone in fog near the summit of Ben Macdui in the Cairngorms: ‘I began to think I heard something else than merely the noise of my own footsteps. For every few steps I took I heard a crunch, and then another crunch as if someone was walking after me but taking steps three or four times the length of my own … As the eerie crunch, crunch, sounded behind me, I was seized with terror and took to my heels, staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles.’ Collie recounted his experience at the 1925 Annual General Meeting of the Cairngorm Club, and soon afterwards received a letter from the noted Scottish explorer Dr Alexander Kellas, the first man to recognise the value of Sherpas in summit climbs.9 Kellas said that he and his brother Henry were approaching the summit of Ben Macdui when they saw a giant figure approaching. It disappeared into a dip but frightened the men so much that they retreated before seeing if it would reappear. This Scottish McBigfoot is also known as the Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui, or Am Fear Liath Mòr. There have been other reports of him on this intimidating mountain, the second highest in Scotland. During the Second World War, the Big Grey Man was even shot at by the experienced mountaineer and naturalist Alexander Tewnion:

In October 1943 I spent a ten-day leave climbing alone in the Cairngorms … One afternoon, just as I reached the summit cairn of Ben Macdui, mist swirled across the Lairig Ghru and enveloped the mountain. The atmosphere became dark and oppressive, a fierce, bitter wind whisked among the boulders, and … an odd sound echoed through the mist – a loud footstep, it seemed. Then another, and another … I peered about in the mist here rent and tattered by eddies of wind. A strange shape loomed up, receded, came charging at me! Without hesitation I whipped out the revolver and fired three times at the figure. When it still came on I turned and hared down the path, reaching Glen Derry in a time that I have never bettered. You may ask was it really the Fear Liath Mòr? Frankly, I think it was.10

If only more climbers were armed, we might have more luck in collecting a specimen.

I, too, have seen the Big Grey Man in Scotland. Climbing with my father along the narrow and rocky Castles Ridge on the Isle of Arran in the 1960s, I became aware of a fast-moving vertical screen of fog lifting out of the valley below. The air around us was clear. The sun was behind us, and all of a sudden we were confronted by a huge grey shape marching out of the fog. It must have been ten feet high and in our case was surrounded by a huge circular rainbow with a diameter of perhaps 30 feet.

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