SCHIEHALLION
The path begins as a rumour in the gloaming, a pale thread spooling out from the road and into the deep hush of the summer morning. Mist has claimed the world overnight, snagging itself on the larch woods and draping the lower slopes of Schiehallion in a soft, white silence. To climb into such a fog is to walk into a forgetting. The world below, with its hard lines and certainties, dissolves. All that is left is the immediate: the damp press of the air, the scent of wet heather, and the mountain itself, waiting.
Schiehallion. The name is a story in itself: Sìth Chailleann, the fairy hill of the Caledonians. It feels apt. The path, now a well-made causeway of pinkish stone, seems less a human construction and more a feature of the hill’s own dreaming. It pulls you upwards, into the cloud’s core. Underfoot, the ground changes. The peat and grass give way to a clatter of pale scree, a river of shattered rock that flows from the heights. This is the mountain’s bones laid bare: quartzite, sharp-edged and ancient. I pick up a piece, its surface a mosaic of crystalline grains, cool and hard against my palm. It is a stone that speaks of immense pressures, of a seabed buckled and thrust into the sky. This is the very stuff that Nevil Maskelyne used in 1774 to weigh the world, turning this entire mountain into a vast scientific instrument.
Higher still, where the ridge begins to narrow, the world is reduced to grey stone and grey air. And then, a flicker of movement. A ghost-ripple against the rock. A ptarmigan, its plumage a perfect mimesis of the lichen-spattered quartzite, holds its form for a heartbeat. Its eye is a bead of black ink, a point of fierce life in the monochrome scene. Another appears, and then a third, their summer feathers of mottled grey and brown making them spirits of the stone. They are birds of the high and lonely places, their croaking, guttural call the only voice the mountain has today. As I draw near, they explode into the mist, a sudden, startling whirr of wings that is swallowed by the silence almost as soon as it is born.
The summit, when it comes, is no grand revelation. There is no sweeping panorama, no triumphant view. There is only a cairn, a jumble of stones piled upon other stones, and the swirling cloud. But to stand here is not to feel cheated. It is to feel the mountain’s true nature. The view is not outward, but inward. It is a presence felt in the soles of the feet, on the skin, in the lungs. It is the hard reality of the quartzite, the memory of a feather, the taste of the mist. To leave the summit and descend is to walk back into the world, carrying the weight of the mountain not as a burden, but as a quiet, stony knowledge.