BEN VORLICH
The air, on this Scottish spring afternoon, is honeyed with the scent of gorse and damp earth. From the shore of Loch Earn, Ben Vorlich’s shoulder is a great, green heave against the sky, a line drawn by a sleeping giant. The path begins softly, a yielding track through bracken and last year’s flattened grasses, but you learn a mountain first through your feet. The ground soon hardens, its grammar shifting from soil to stone, and the gentle inquiry of the foothills becomes a steep and demanding question.
The ascent is a rhythm of breath and footfall, a conversation between body and gradient. The path braids and unbraids, a history of choices made by others who have gone this way. Higher, the world shrinks to the immediate: the slick surface of a quartzite boulder, the miniature forest of a moss patch, the sudden, startling cry of a ptarmigan. The summit cairn, when it appears, is a surprise, a punctuation mark at the end of a long, breathless sentence. Here, the wind speaks a different language, ancient and sharp. It scours the land, and the mind, clean.
But the day’s true lexicon is waiting across the bealach. Stuc a’Chroin – the Peak of the Harm or the Fold – shows its true face from Vorlich’s summit. It is a rough beast of a hill, a geology of ruin. To reach it is to descend into shadow and then to climb into effort. The path dissolves into a scree-run, a vertical scramble up a cascade of shattered rock. This is a climb for the hands as much as the feet. The mountain enters you through the palms: its coldness, its rough-cast texture, its immense and unforgiving solidity. Each handhold is a trust, each foot placement a negotiation. The sound is of chattering stone, a loose and lithic music that speaks of deep time and slow collapse.
On the Stuc’s shattered plateau, the feeling is not of conquest, but of admittance. You have been permitted entry to a wilder place. The view is a map of raw land, of folded glens and the distant, silvered gleam of lochs under the westering sun. The descent is a slow unwinding, a return to the softer world below. The path finds you again, leading you down through the gloaming, back towards the water and the trees.
You carry the mountains away with you, not as a memory but as a feeling scored into the body. The ache in the thighs, the scrape on the knuckle, the ghost-weight of the wind on your skin. You have walked the old ways and felt the land’s grain. And you know that something of the hill has imprinted itself upon you, a quiet knowledge, a hard-won peace, a residue of stone and sky.