Scotland’s mountains are not high by world standards, but
they are stunningly beautiful. There are only 282 Munros (peaks above 3000ft),
of which only a tiny handful reach 4000ft above sea level. Yet – they are so
accessible, visually stunning and varied that people travel from all over the
world to walk, climb, cycle and photograph them.
Since arriving in Scotland as a student, I have been ‘Munro-bagging’. For the uninitiated, this means climbing each of the 3000ft+ peaks in Scotland which constitute the current version of “Munros tables”, the Scottish mountain classification first published in 1891. I am of course aware this hobby is in one sense as pointless as it is arbitrary! There are many fine mountains which don’t exceed 3000ft and so
are excluded from the exercise, as the 3000ft demarcation is irrelevant in the landscape. Equally if health and fitness were the only aim if the exercise, I could have joined a gym. If being sociable were the only aim, I could have gone to the pub.
Yet – something draws me back to the Munros again and again.
In fact, this week with a crowd of friends and family, I climbed the
final one. Steadily ticking off hill names on Munros tables has taken me
through high waterfalls in spectacular gorges, to soaring peaks towering over
distant lochs. I have waded peat bogs and crossed rivers; cycled mountain
tracks and dangled from ropes. I have scaled the ridges and precipices of the
western mountains, and the lofty glacial plateaus of the East; scrambled over
the Black Cuillin of Skye and trekked into lonely Knoydart where golden eagles
soar. I have slept under canvass, and listened to Stags roaring through the
mist in high corries of Argyll.
And I am not alone. The hills are alive – with the sound of hillwalkers.
People are irresistibly drawn to the beauty of nature, and here in Scotland we
have an embarrassment of riches. All over The Highlands car parks and laybys
fill up every weekend with people who cannot resist the beauty of nature.
SIZE
There is something which seems to move us quite viscerally
when we are confronted by the size of the mountains and our own smallness. The
sense of wonder it provokes is captivating, and some would say even spiritual.
Sitting on top of mighty Slioch and gazing out over the vast wilderness of
Fisherfield is an overwhelming experience – and something medieval cathedral
builders invoked when they flung their vast structures skywards. In the
busyness of our lives and our deep tendency towards self-centredness, the
physical act of climbing a mountain upon which one appears the size of ant;
makes us look beyond ourselves. Professor Alister McGrath at Oxford, once
described two men arguing about whether there was life beyond the desert island
upon which they lived. One day they found a message in a bottle washed up on
the shore. They debated its meaning, and concluded that it didn’t prove the
existence of others – but it was a clue that someone was probably out there.
The point is that that when gazing down the Lairg Ghru from on high – that great
glacial trench through the Cairngorm plateau, we are not meant to merely take a
photo and move on as if that were the end of the matter; but to receive it as
sign of something greater, or a message in a bottle.
BEAUTY
The Scottish landscape is irrepressibly beautiful. Landscape photographers do a great trade in prints and calendars; with that most photogenic mountain, Glen Coe’s Buachaille Etive Mor being a perennial favourite. When the summit of Skye’s Bla Bheinn is reached, and the sight of the Black Cuillin over Glen Sligachan assaults the senses – mouths hang open and adjectives and superlatives fail to do justice to the scene. But again, why does beauty move us so deeply? Why is bleak functionality not all that matters to us? What is it about beauty, especially unspoilt natural beauty that provokes a response in all of us that makes the A9 to the North so overwhelmed with traffic all summer?
Again, I am unpersuaded that naturalistic, atheist answers
to this question do not reduce humans to being mere machines, and that attempts
to posit some evolutionary advantage to aesthetic responses hacks away at
something of the very core of what makes us human. It seems to me that this is
yet one more message in a bottle washing up on our shore, pulling us towards
the conclusion that there is something, or someone more than what we see;
calling to us from afar.
This view of beauty is embedded in the Bible. In one of my favourite verses in the creation narrative is says of a fruit tree that God made it both good for food and pleasing to the eye. Think about that for a moment; the claim is made that the world is made to be deliberately both functional and beautiful; and that you and I are designed to both function and with the ability to know and respond to beauty. Beauty is a real thing, something which is fundamentally good – not merely a preference. Equally wonderful is the thought that we have been given the ability to appreciate beauty.
Many a primary school assembly in the
I think too that while much of our daily experience is of a
world polluted, of graffiti, of litter and of damage to the beauty of the
world; mountains speak to us about the way the world was meant to be; indeed
ought to be. Surveying the Mamore range of hills near Fort William from the
summit of Sgurr a Mhaim is an undiluted delight. The Mamores are perhaps my
favourite range of hills which I have climbed many times, in all seasons.
Steep, shapely – with curves, ridges, shoulders, gorges, hanging-valleys, waterfalls,
surrounded by deep glens; The Mamores are dramatic mountain architecture
presented in sumptuous style.
There is something in natural beauty that we instinctively
know is right. The regenerating native woodlands on the north side of Glen
Affric teem with life, insects, tiny birds, and raptors and blaze with colour
as the bio-diverse landscape is allowed to flourish. It is good and beautiful
in a way that fly-tipping is wrong and ugly.
But such categories assume that there is a way that the world ought to
be; which can differ from the way that it often actually is. Such an is/ought
distinction in our world is instinctive and necessary; but doesn’t make a huge
amount of sense if the natural world is all there is. When we see ugliness,
injustice, pain and evil and think ‘this isn’t right’ we make a deeply
Christian response, whether we acknowledge it or not. I know no one who looks
at these things and sighs, “ho-hum this is just where we have evolved up to
presently”. Natural beauty calls to us deeply for it presents us with the
ought, in a world that is often wrong. The Christian story is that God created
a good world, but it has been marred, and the creative intent often hidden and
that we rail against ugliness because we somehow deeply know that something has
been lost. I don’t think like Richard Dawkins that the universe is ultimately
characterised by “blind pitiless indifference”; but that natural beauty is
another message in a bottle washing up on the shores of our perception.
TIME
The mountains we walk through are also incredibly old. We are dwarfed not merely by their size but also by their age. The majestic peaks of Torridon; Liathach, Beinn Eighe and Beinn Alligin as well as
Beinn More Assynt are founded on Lewisian Gneiss; amongst the oldest rocks in Britain. Geographers tell us that the ice which carved the great U-shaped valley in which Loch Avon sits behind Cairngorm did its work 18,000 years ago. To walk through this landscape is to be confronted with our own finitude and mortality. Our lives, the Bible likens to a morning mist, which might arrive with the appearance of permanence but is gone by the time the walkers have left the car park and started to climb.
When I left the car park at Inverlochlairig to climb my
final Munro, I was delighted that so many family and friends were able to join
me. I was also deeply aware that two hillwalking companions who I once assumed
would be there for my final hill were tangibly absent, as they died before I
completed my round. I climbed Ben More from this same car park with David – lost to
pancreatic cancer many years ago. Kevin was a hillwalking legend, an outdoor
athlete with a big heart and a huge grin; with whom days in the hills was
always a joy. Kevin was once of the most truly alive people I ever met – and
yet a decade ago a brain tumour took him from us.
My conversations with Kevin in the hills were wide ranging and fascinating. We planned and schemed all manner of future hill walks; most of which were never to be. We looked at maps and bothies and mountains and canoes – and dreamt up all kinds of future trips and I always just assumed that Kevin would not just be there for my final Munro, but be the life and soul of the party; the prankster, the ring leader and the schemer-in-chief. Kevin was a medical doctor, who knew he was dying; and he spoke about this too. Our last hill together was Ben Wyvis, north of Inverness. As we sat and had lunch on the shoulder of the hill looking out over the vastness of Scotland, he pointed out that smoke billowing from the Norbord factory chimney miles away on the other side of the Moray Firth was the landmark with which to line up where his house and his family was. Then he said to me. “I believe God can take care of my wife and children, and I would love to be part of that. But even if I can’t; I still believe that God can take care of them.” I was disturbed by his words and struck by the profundity of his faith. I knew Kevin was a man of deep Christian conviction, and was both troubled and heartened by the way in which such deep faith in Christ proved itself in the darkest of valleys. Kevin walked through the valley of the shadow of death – and there
found that Christ walked with him. Before I had much of a chance to respond, Kevin was on his feet with a smile. “I think we have a hill to climb” – and so we did.
How many countless generations have these
hills seen come and then depart? We come, we go – but the hills seem to remain.
These ancient rocks do not only humble us with our physical finitude; but also
with our tragic temporariness. But again what can it mean? Why do we lament
loss. Is bereavement just a necessary part of the survival of the fittest and
the species marches on; or is the loss we sense when we bury or friends
something more. I am persuaded that this too is a message in a bottle; washing
up on the beaches of our experience calling to us about a far bigger reality
than one we have yet encountered. Death is a tragedy, not just a biologically
necessary mechanism, because human death is grotesque intrusion into God’s good
world. Again the biblical story is of death being the fall-out from the human
descent into sin. The appearance of permanence we see in the great hills calls
out to us because we were initially intended for such. The Christian hope I
shared with Kevin is that through the death and resurrection of Jesus – we can
be restored to eternal life with him; if we will but call out to him and
receive his forgiveness.
BOTTLES
EVERYWHERE
As Munro bagging has taken me all over Scotland – through so
many seasons and conditions with a large cast of colourful characters; I have
been pondering what makes the mountains so magical, so alluring, so almost
mystical. I think that it is something to do with their size, their beauty and
their age – and that these things communicate deep spiritual truths to us about
ourselves and the nature of reality. I am struck by Alister McGrath’s notion
that all these things are like messages in a bottle, washing up on the island
of our experience. And while each bottle is not a knock-down mathematical proof
of the Christian faith, more and more bottles are coming in on the tide.
Beauty, music, truth, justice, altruism, love, and our desire for hope, are
just some of the bottles that arrive. If we are willing to open these messages,
and see where they lead and what makes sense of the world and ourselves we’ll
find Christ; the saviour, who has in fact been looking for us the whole time.
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An abridged verion of this article was published at https://www.solas-cpc.org/scotlands-mountains-grandeur-that-speaks-to-our-souls/
