Following our Fathers - new from 'best foot books'

My latest ‘best foot book’ is officially published in a week’s time. Following our Fathers: Two Journeys among Mountains is non-fiction mountain literature with personal stories at its craggy heart. As the blurb says:

‘Two men make significant journeys on foot, one in Nazi-occupied Norway, 1944, and one in the Swiss Alps, 1952. Both die as young men from cancer in 1961. More than half a century after their journeys, the writer finds their routes still ‘way-marked’ by memory. By sharing their footprints, she makes memorials to the men as fathers – one of them her own.’

It includes maps, photos and illustrations I’ve drawn myself, has been packed into a neat 120 page pocket book, and self-published; this project has been a long time ‘cooking’. The post below tells how it came about. You can read more or purchase a copy of the book for £7 inc p&p from my website www.lindacracknell.com and it has a facebook page where you can follow its progress if you 'like' it.

My father was a mountaineer. He was also a motorcyclist. I know about the latter because my mother used to talk about the time she fell off the back of it. It became one of the repeated legends from the early life of our family.

I am also a bit of a mountaineer; a bit of a motorcyclist. A genetic inheritance or a coincidence? It seems unlikely I was influenced by a man who died on 31st January 1961 when I was 18 months old and he was only 33.

In the summer of 2004, I filled a 55 litre rucksack with stove, tent, books and clothes to join an old friend, Yuli Sømme, and her siblings who were following their father’s escape route 200 miles across the mountains from west coast Norwayto neutral Sweden, pursued by Nazi soldiers in 1944. It was a celebration of his life as well as his journey. At nights, wild-camping and mosquito-ambushed, we read extracts from his own account of the escape aloud. His euphoric sense of freedom often came across more strongly than fear of his predicament. He was breaking away from a settled life and work to make his own way in the mountains; he observed the spray kicked up by the heels of a herd of reindeer, ate cloudberries, and sang.

For Yuli and her family it was an emotional journey. But it was for me too, reminded with every footfall of my own lost father. As we walked, and talked about what we knew of our fathers (who died of cancer in the same year) and their passion for the mountains, I began to think about a walk to pay homage to my own father of whom I had no memory. I thought it might be either a journey he had always wanted to do, or retracing one that he had done. But the family’s collective memory was hazy.

The journey that was best recalled, because it generated lines in a newspaper which were duly stuck in a photo album, was an ascent of Finsteraarhorn, the highest summit in the Swiss Bernese Oberland. My mother photocopied the photos for me and the process polarised the black and white, so that the dark rock spars in violent angles and steep slopes up to a fierce point, the blank paper showing a formidable banking up of snow. There was also a small photo of my father, Richard Cracknell. Facing the camera, hands on hips, he wears rough canvas trousers and a long-sleeved shirt with big pockets and a cravat. Under a lop-sided, broad brimmed hat, his face is shaded but there is a small hint of white teeth, a smile, a suggestion of my own brow.

So this mountain (which became treacherous and traumatic for my father) presented itself to me in 2008. Standing at 4,274 metres and with a very long walk in, it was a considerable challenge, requiring mountaincraft. How to go about it? By coincidence, my friend Rick was planning an Alpine climbing trip with his friend Colin as a way of marking both their fiftieth birthdays, and Finsteraarhorn was their first choice. When we discovered this, they bravely agreed I could join their expedition. I knew they would be good companions – both first and foremost passionate about the experience of being in the mountains, having fun, appreciating flowers, and notobsessively ticking off conquests.

My first Alpine climb was an exciting prospect, but as a rather cowardly climber, it also jangled my nerves. I’ve climbed plenty of winter hills in Scotland, learnt some basic belaying techniques on ice, done a bit of rock climbing and have been at altitude a few times over the last 20 years – although not always comfortably. But I knew it would challenge me technically in terms of ice, snow and crevasses and there were a number of unknowns – how my veteran body would cope, the timing of the right weather window and what the party’s fitness would permit. I reassured myself that to be in the alpine environment would feel a meaningful pilgrimage in itself, even if we failed to summit.

The emotional challenge seemed to match the severity of the physical task. I hoped this journey would bring me closer to the memory of my father, the man I know was a well-loved friend, a chemist with a gift for languages, who cooked and cared for his children before he became ill. A man who loved mountains and motorbikes.

Following our Fathers overlays accounts of my own walks in Norway and Switzerland with the journeys taken by Sven Sømme and my father. One of the great joys of being a writer, and especially of taking excursions into non-fiction, is that I can relive and re-celebrate an experience such as this as I craft it into words for a page. It’s taken its time and I won’t pretend that finding an effective way to write about it hasn’t been a steep climb too…!

All Hallows on Dùn Coillich

Communion with past spirits; a waving off of summer; fancy dress; freakish acts of nature. It’s Halloween. And I’m lured away from these seasonal concerns towards fresh air and a snatch of big bright daylight on the summit of Dùn Coillich.

I take the route newly marked to pass a number of archaeological features. Relics of shieling huts have been located to the south of the summit and the practice of taking animals up to the summer grazing there is memorialised in the sunken paths that climb steadily across the land between Dùn Beag and Dùn Coillich. They are marked now by the rustle of bleached grasses underfoot and the absence of heather.

The route turns off this track to the north, into a lovely corrie above the shieling huts, up a small gully, and takes you zigzagging onto the summit. This last part needs more pioneer feet to establish it, and this is a good time of year for it. The bracken is weak now, crisping back into the ground and giving the hills their gorgeous tawny autumn colour. It’s forgiven its thuggish summer stronghold of sap and fibre.

It feels appropriate on this day where living and spirit worlds open to each other, to follow the people who walked before us, their trails and piles of stones still ghosting the land. I like to think that by walking old ways such as these, we forge a link across the centuries. It hasn’t taken long to find myself back in Halloween territory.

I’ve climbed to the top of Dùn Coillich by many routes but this one will now be my favourite and is perhaps the quickest at under an hour. The last steep gasp is rewarded by the lively thrash of wind and a panoramic view revealing the local lay of the land. Schiehallion heaves skywards to my west wearing a small bonnet of cloud. Loch Tummel and the hills beyond; Farragon; Glen Lyon’s hilltops. Cloud parts to give sudden fox-coloured illuminations of larch and bracken and to glitter glass on day-trippers’ cars way down by the Lochside. I can also see new layers of archaeology being formed around me – Griffin’s wind turbines; Balfour Beatty's ‘electric road’ working its way down the valley towards Coshieville alongside General Wade’s 18th century way; the new road stretching into the netherland between Dùn Coillich and Schiehallion for a hydro-intake.

A walk always rewards with observations and feelings -- the unseasonably warm blush of sun on my face; the buzzards mewling; a chainsaw yawing faintly. It also reminds us of things we know or have experienced before. But if we walk with a curious mind, we learn even more.

Today I place my feet carefully, tiptoeing around trails of large dark hairy caterpillars, each sporting golden-yellow stripes. They bask on the grass as if it’s summer. Fortunately the hut that I return to is a mine of information (and one of the good reasons to become a HPCLT member). Here I answer my curiosity. Recent sightings and ‘hearings’ in the visitor’s log include raven, hare, stag and 'fox moth larvae'. I look the last up in the Moths and Butterflies book and there is my ‘fancy dress’ caterpillar and the fox-coloured moth that it will become after its hibernation in these hillside grasses.

However, the second mystery of the day remains unsolved. Jellyfish lying on open grass. OK, they turn out not to be jellyfish, but they are great gobbets of a jelly substance, some bearing clusters of black caviar-like eggs. A quick search on Google when I return reveals that heads have been scratching over these wobbly phenomena over the last years, and probably far earlier. 'Star Jelly', remnants of a meteor shower, perhaps? Slime mould; or the regurgitated innards of frogs taken by predators? Or, as some have suggested, the freakish secretions of alien visitors or fairies?

Take your pick. The eve of the Celtic New Year approaches…

Dùn Coillich is a lovely hill owned by the Highland Perthshire Community Land Trust. It needs more feet on it to lay and revive trails. The route described is easily found from the hut (on the left of the B846 just north of Glengoulandie as you head towards Tummel Bridge). Cross the burn below the hut on the obvious stepping-stones, climb the path between two gates up to the head dyke, from where bamboo poles with red and white flags will lead you to the summit. Be prepared for some rough and wet ground but for a very pleasing walk.

Waking up with Will Self

Will Self's ten minute programme on Sunday morning, 'In Praise of Wind Turbines' was a fine thing to wake up to, even though I did have to listen again to properly absorb his argument rather than just floating to consciousness for the stinging metaphors and gobbets of wit. In his usual acerbic style, he questioned the attitudes of those who consider wind turbines ugly and unnatural, pointing out that landscape is a human-made construction in this country anyway. For him, objectors are merely living in a rural idyll - or rather, his point is that they're not living in it, just observing what they interpret as pristine landscape from urban homes. And as he pointed out, most people will be driving past wind farms on roads, which are at least equally as intrusive in the landscape, but with an existence on the whole unquestioned. People are generally unprepared to face up to the infrastructures that current lifestyles demand

With the super-sized pylons currently being erected on my doorstep and a massive wind farm growing on the hill above me, I've been watching, assessing, contemplating my own attitudes to these industrial objects gathering on the hilltops and in valleys. I certainly agree with him that there is no measure of objective 'beauty' or 'ugliness' that can be applied. People I know seem equally divided, and equally amazed when they hear a contradictory aesthetic judgement on the spin of white blades.

My recent walk over the Corrieyarack Pass (see two posts ago) raised my awareness of pylons. I sometimes think we've grown so accustomed to them, they can seem invisible. But all is to change apparently. The Guardian reported at the weekend on a pylon design competition which has been won by a Danish company with a pylon in a T-shape, somewhat resembling a small wind turbine. Apparently '...the T-Pylon – or something close to the competition entry – will soon enough be stepping politely across the hills, dales, sunlit uplands and rain-drenched lowlands of Britain'. I suddenly, perhaps ridiculously, feel a little protective of 'our' familiar girder-ish, humanoid, striding pylons (as, apparently do the 'Pylon Appreciation Society'!). By being less intrusive, and more polite, they will suddenly be very visible... So perhaps I am (are we?) just conservative, change-averse.

The PEN is mightier..

I've just returned fom the 77th International PEN Congress in Belgrade. Very interesting and important in many ways, it involved long hours in an assembly of writers from 90 countries. However, I was also able to get out and walk around the city, which was where I came across this fellow, Dositej Obradovic (1742-1811).

He caught my eye for several reasons, not least his dynamic posture with hat and walking stick, his coat swirling, books in hand. He appears to stride out of the sky and autumnal foliage. A writer and a major figure of Serbia's Enlightenment, he is captured in the monument as 'hero of the pen, travelling the world in quest of knowledge'. Apparently he stated as his personal motto : 'I shall be writing for the mind, for the heart and for human natures, for my fellow Serbs of whatever faith and creed. '

I enjoyed encountering him in my wanders in the City as I mulled over the issues of freedom of speech, and solidarity with endangered writers, literature and languages around the world; the subject of our indoor debates. (There's more on the experience of the Congress in our Scottish PEN blog.)

A few blocks away, the buildings bombed by Nato twelve years ago still gape hollow wounds, now latticed with straggling saplings. A chilling reminder.

power lines, uprisings and cattle droving

'You'll maybe no be welcome in there now,' the driver said to me as I got out of his pickup at Laggan Stores. 'It’s Chief Anti Campaign Woman runs the shop’.

He was referring to the fact that ‘Balfour Beatty’ was emblazoned along the side of the vehicle in which I'd just hitched a lift – the company now installing a much resisted power line between Beauly and Denny. In fact, I knew ‘Chief Anti Campaign Woman’, and so I was welcome. But the BB boys had already told me how they were barred from certain B&Bs, pubs and even roads, because of their association with the project.

This had a familiar ring. I live in the heart of Scotland, where large-scale hydroelectric systems were installed as part of a socialist vision in the late Forties to give work to men returning from war and to modernise some of the glens of the Highlands still in the dark. Not everyone welcomed the large-scale engineering that poured concrete across crevices in the land, dammed and tunnelled and diverted water channels. Opposition was so fierce that in Pitlochry, where the village of Faskally was flooded, all but one of the local hotels refused hospitality to any workers associated with the scheme. The fear was the loss of tourism value of the area. Today 500,000 visitors a year flock to see the dam and fish ladder.

I had no idea when I decided to take the Corrieyairack pass from Laggan in the upper Spey valley 25 miles through the Monadhliath mountains to Fort Augustus, that my chief walking companions would be striding pylons and the BB boys. What attracted me was the history of cattle droving on this route, still common till the second half of the nineteenth century, and the paving of the way by General Wade in the early 18th-century as part of attempts to quell Jacobite uprisings. It’s a brave way, crossing a high mountain pass of nearly 800 metres and answered my attraction to old ways and through routes -- paths with a purpose. It was a link for me between East and West, offering a new mental map, altering geographies largely determined by the twin track references of the easterly A9 and westerly A82, which both stretch towards the north.

Having done little long distance walking recently, I also wanted peace, fresh air, mountain heights, the possibility of a last gasp of light before autumn set in. I hadn't expected BB to be slicing new roads along the glen for pylon construction access; to be accompanied by concrete mixers, bleeping diggers, the flash of fluorescent jackets along a parallel track to my north for the first six miles.

General Wade's roads are famous for the beauty of their stone bridges. Framed within one of the lovely double arches of Garva Bridge was a busy scene of contemporary bridge construction just half a mile away. I'm fascinated by engineering of any sort and would love to know what principles of construction and tools both Wade and Balfour Beatty had in common, and what has changed.

It seems to me that although we now revere Wade’s well-laid roads and stone bridges that have sunk and meshed themselves into the landscape, the disruption and mess and mass of men working might well have seemed intrusive at the time; an alien force moving north and west, demanding order from wild tracts of land. The drovers certainly resented them, claiming that the paving would harm their beasts’ feet, finally leading to the practice of shoeing cattle. The drovers were also hostile to enclosures and to the new dykes which restricted their movement in an effort to protect arable land. I was reminded of reading somewhere that dry stone dykes, when first laying out their great, straight intrusions with glittery bare stone, were considered an abomination on the landscape.

Enclosures. Wade. Balfour Beatty. Change. We don’t like it. I find the controversy over these giant pylons interesting. Ugly but necessary to link renewable installations to the grid and save us from climate change? Or an act of vandalism? Such thoughts kept my attitude to the BB work curious rather than hostile, as I ambled on alongside the march of the existing – more petite – pylon line. I’ve sometimes been appalled by their intrusion, but sometimes visually enjoyed the lines they make through a chaotic landscape, and sometimes thought how early on in the lighting up of the Highlands, they might have been seen as a symbol of great progress and modernisation by communities affected.

At Garva Bridge, I left Balfour Beatty behind and started to climb gently on a road of Roman straightness. Overhead ravens croaked and groups of geese flew against me, trailing sadnesses east. It felt like the real journey had begun, and all the usual pleasures of walking alone returned to me along with sore feet and the ache in my hips from carrying a full pack. As seems inevitable when you walk west, a wall of wetness awaited me somewhere ahead; lumpen masses of cloud brooding over the hills I was to cross.

Over a rise in the road, came the suggestion of a horn sounding, then over its brow poured a red-brown cavalcade of cattle, jostling hoof and horn, complaining gently as they were pushed forward by a dog, a Land Rover and its horn -- the modern day drover’s tools. The cattle passed me coyly, curiously, skittling off the road to leave me a wide berth, and then gradually quietening into the valley behind me.

On into the wide gentle strath, and some sunshine, I was definitely now alone with the pylons, the stone bridges, the cobbled road that then began leading up more steeply towards a rake of zig-zags to the summit of the pass. A rising wind rang in the power lines, making them sing out and growl above me. Views opened to the west – the spiky outlines of Knoydart’s peaks jammed up against each other, navy blue; a matching weight of sky seared with blizzards of white light.

I started to descend towards the wooded ravines of Glen Tarff, found a green bank on which to pitch my tent. Shivered as the wind lashed, and the wet weather encroached.

The next morning, I followed the silvery strip of wet road down to gentler climes, welcoming the return of colour in beds of heather and flashing rainbows, the muted reflections of Loch Ness. And I met Balfour Beatty again, climbing upwards with a similar clamour of engine, splattering mud, bleeping warnings on their road-cutting toward the other team. From Fort Augustus, I journeyed on to Moniack Mhor, where I was guest reader on a travel-writing course run by the fabulous pairing of Chris Stewart and Mairi Hedderwick. It was wonderful to arrive, windswept and dishevelled off the Great Glen Way, refreshed by the sort of travel that I love best.

Eccentric Wealth on the Isle of Rum

I'm delighted to see that Alastair Scott's book 'Eccentric Wealth' about the relationship between Sir George Bullough and the Isle of Rum is out now. This is the background to my story (published in a pocket book format) of the servants' walk from Kinloch 'Castle' across the island to the laundry in 'Whiter than White'. I'm looking forward to reading it, and learning more about the extraordinary Edwardian industrialist's flamboyant creation amongst the mountains, the deer and the Hebridean weather.

Walking Men

I love this art project by Stephen Wragg - a photographic record of the painted men who walk under our feet, striding, dancing, or mincing across the tarmac. Better still, he's inviting photo submissions, so keep your eyes peeled for your local walking men!

You might imagine we live in a country with tight design standards and control - but no, self-expression is flourishing in Highways Authorities throughout the land. This is a project, begun in 2004 by Stephen Wragg to document the unique diversity of painted 'walking men' on the streets of the UK. Take a look; the collection of photographs on the pages men and street are arranged by country: England & Scotland,and in alphabetical order by county and metropolitan districts.