MOUNTAIN PORTRAIT
Jim Perrin recalls tackling this fine Scottish ridge in his ‘spring-heeled youth’ – and counts himself lucky to have had wise guidance
THE FIRST TIME I heard of Aonach Eagach (‘the notched ridge’) was in the bar of the Manchester Arms, which used to stand on the corner of Wellington Road and Petersgate in Stockport. I’d tail along there on Thursday nights throughout my teens in the hope of a lift at the weekend to somewhere interesting. Usually these lifts were to the Mynydd Mountaineering Club’s cottage in Crafnant – a cosy little den often thronging with boozy old idlers (though not all of them by any means were thus!). But one Hogmanay, I struck lucky and was offered a place in an old side-valve Ford Anglia bound for Glen Coe. It was to be my first trip to Scotland. I’d borrowed a Stubai ice axe, had innumerable woollen jumpers knitted by my mother and aunts, plus a pair of Ellis Brigham mountain boots, gaiters and molecord breeches, and on the Friday night I was duly picked up from a street corner in Cheetham Hill.
We spent the next ten hours crawling up the A74 to Glasgow and the heater didn’t work. On Loch Lomondside we stopped at a snack-bar that sold stewed tea and a mysterious delicacy called a Scotch pie. I had two. “What kind of pies do you have?” I’d politely asked.
“Aye, meat!” came the gruff response.
Eventually we were crawling and slithering across a snowy Rannoch Moor, before dropping down with relief into Glen Coe. By now the sun was infusing the grey tones of Bidean’s stately bulk to the west as we pulled into the parking at GR17335674, by Hamish MacInnes’s cottage at the head of Glencoe, from which Wade’s Road over the Devil’s Staircase climbs over to Kinlochleven. This is the way by which the navvies involved in the building of the Blackwater Reservoir clattered between the valleys in their hobnails, and many of them died of cold and exhaustion along the way. On our wintry dawn back in the early 1960s we piled out of the car, stretched and stamped, and set to on the ascent that led to the start of our objective.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, the wise old heads who’d planned this jaunt had done their homework. East to west is certainly the best option, as you’d realise if ever you’d chosen to ascend the rough scree west of Clachaig Gully. The record of accidents along Aonach Eagach over many years makes interesting reading. You might think, as you cruise down the road to Loch Achtriochtan, that the plethora of dingy gullies which seam the ridge’s southern face might offer favourable options. They don’t. As the cowardly King Mark of Cornwall screeches in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, “And but we avoid lightly there is but death”. There have certainly been too many of those hereabouts over the years.
I remember from my Liverpool days hearing of the deaths of the brillia
