Names are funny things, and ARKLE is a case in point. It says nothing about the mountain, but that doesn’t matter. The mountain has plenty to say for itself, even if some of its secrets have to be earned.
To paraphrase Monty Python, “Let’s not go to Arkle; ’tis a silly name.” And it is.Arkle. You know how a word can lose all meaning if you say it over and over to yourself out loud? How, if repeated enough, a simple noun like ‘watermelon’ starts to sound like nothing more than a vaguely ridiculous jumble of syllables? You only have to say Arkle once for that to be the case. Arkle. There was a racehorse named Arkle, quite a good one by all accounts. Arkle. Daft name for a horse. Sounds more like something a children’s clown-faced entertainer might call themselves – the sort of person who produces balloon animals at birthday parties while simultaneously terrifying half the kids.
Arkle. Arkle, Arkle, Arkle. It is absolutely not an appropriate name for a beast of a northern mountain. Yet that’s exactly what it is.
Here be dragons
Arkle is not exactly alone. In Sutherland, that far north-western region of Scotland where the British mainland tapers into the North Sea with nothing but a smattering of islands between it and the Arctic ice, the mountains are strange creatures. Arkle’s nearest neighbour, Foinaven, is also its closest relative. They share a DNA of Lewisian gneiss – the oldest rocks in the United Kingdom – and Cambrian quartzite, a substrate that glistens and glints when the light is just so. Little wonder that this combination of almost unimaginable age sprinkled with a dusting of glitter lends a fairy-tale air to the hills.
Between these ancient behemoths, vast expanses of ‘knock and lochan’ landscape – a glacier scraped emptiness containing little more than gently undulating contours interspersed by grey-blue lochs and bisected by silver serpentine burns – gives the giants room to sleep. But here’s the thing about sleeping giants; even when they’re laying down, they’re big. Arkle, which is curled and coiled over Loch Stack like a nesting wyvern, is no exception. It may only rise a ‘mere’ 787m above the shimmering saltwater lochs to its north, but this dragon’s teeth are sharp, and its tail is barbed.
Calm and crescendo
Perhaps the best example of the illusionary properties of these northern hills is Arkle’s other nearest neighbour, Ben Stack. On the approach to Arkle along the twisting roads that lead in from the coast and give a perfect end-on view of the
