THE INLAND OCEAN
WHEN YOU’RE GIVING a slideshow talk to a whole lot of Scottish mountaineers just after World War Two, it helps to know your audience. Tobacco smoke drifts through the beam of the projector. The next slide clunks across, and up comes your really nice shot of Agag’s Groove (grade V Diff) on the Buachaille. “This climb,” you point out helpfully, “commands a magnificent prospect over the Moor of Rannoch.”
And the audience, unseen in the darkness, sniggers.
The cheeky beggars! Do they think you were making a joke? Do they think you’re the kind of climber for whom the view of Rannoch Moor really doesn’t matter? As you move on quickly to the slide of January Jigsaw (Grade Severe) you decide to skip your concluding words about the Deeper Meaning of sunset seen from the Tower Gap. You decide you won’t be talking to this shower again unless they up your fee by quite a bit.
And you decide something else as well.
For, after all, “The cliffs of Buachaille Etive Mor, towering over the vast flatness of the Moor of Rannoch: these are a harmony of the vertical and horizontal, simple, serene; its effect on the mind a perfect calm; ideas that in Greek architecture culminate in the Parthenon.” So as soon as it’s summer, you’re going to take a
