Are mountains to be conquered or feared, revered or enjoyed? Dawn Hollis wonders whether ‘slow mountaineering’ is the best way to appreciate our highlands
Climbing mountains with small children gives you a different perspective on things. To start with, one’s definition of a ‘mountain’ becomes very much qualified. Last summer, I took my small humans up Latrigg, a 386-metre hill nestled among much higher fells just north of Derwentwater, in the Lake District.
My eldest, just turned four, raced ahead. Before we started, we had talked about how important it was to stay on the path to avoid eroding the mountainside, and she both obeyed and policed this rule fiercely, scolding us every time we stepped onto the grass to make way for faster walkers. My youngest, not yet two, struggled with our clearly arbitrary desire to reach the very top. It hardly seemed necessary for us to go any further than the fabulous little mountain stream that crossed the path halfway up, and which represented to his toddler self the greatest pleasure he could possibly imagine. A bench a little further up provided a similar distraction to his elder sister, who did gymnastics on it while staring out at the view over Keswick.
Shameless parental bribery – the promise of a chocolate bar – ignited a sense of summit fever in the younger party members and we finally reached the top. On the way back down, my eldest noticed that hanks of sheep’s wool had become caught in the plants that lined the edges of the path. She filled her pockets with them, and I still find clumps of wool secreted in various spots around the house to this day.
Back at the car park, I looked up at the other path leading away from it – right up the side of Skiddaw, 931 metres high. I had climbed it several times, pre-children, but I had also studied it in my work as a historian of mountains and of how people in the early modern period had experienced them. Skiddaw, in fact, spoke for himself in a wonderful 17th-century text called Poly-Olbion. Written by Michael Drayton, a friend of Shakespeare, the text is a quirky poetic guide to Great Britain. In it, rivers and mountains ‘speak’ in praise of their local environment.
Michael Drayton’s Skiddaw is a proud, imperious mountain. There is ‘not a nook’ into which he, with his ‘glorious height’, cannot peer. The other peaks around him are no more than his ‘pages’, as if he were a valiant knight. He describes himself as a weathervane for the whole region – ‘when my helm of clouds upon my head I take’. The local inhabitants know to fear storms, just as when his summit is clear they know to anticipate fairer days. The Lake District hiker knows this to be all too true; as the highest of the Northern Fells, the weather upon Skiddaw’s summit is a good indicator as to whether rain might shortly be descending onto the lower tops, or whether it’s a day to plan ambitious, higher routes. Skiddaw – who is depicted in Drayton’s map of the area as a dignified gentleman wearing a large hat or helmet – concludes with satisfaction that the spirits of the surrounding landscape ‘hold me Skiddaw still, the place of your delight’.
This type of writing about mountains is strange to the modern eye. Indeed, the early modern period – broadly encompassing the 15th, 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries – has always fascinated me for precisely this reason. It lacks the distant strangeness of the medieval past and yet, in many ways, the way people thought and felt about things was quite different from today. It’s a rich historic era to be a traveller in.
I discovered this same combination of the familiar and the foreign within the pages of a 350-year-old book, the Voyages and Travels of Adam Olearius. It tells the tale of a group of diplomats who travelled all the way from Germany to Persia in an age when the fastest means of transport was a sail-powered boat or, on land, a horse.
My favourite passage in the book relates to a mountain adventure that occurred on Christmas Day 1636. The German diplomats were staying by the shores of the Caspian Sea in Persia – in modern-day Azerbaijan – when they devised a splendid plan to while away their festive hours: to ascend to the top of a mountain. Like many a modern-day hiker, they missed their path and found themselves committed to a steep shortcut, scaling ‘dreadful precipices’ in order to reach the summit.
It was, however, worth it. The grass was ‘all covered with white frost as if with sugar candy’. They rested for a moment and sang Te Deum, a Latin hymn of joyful praise to God. Reading between the lines of Olearius’ discreetly formal phrasing, before they descended, they passed around a flask of something alcoholic. Early expeditions to Mount Everest incorporated bottles of champagne within their essential gear; I doubt whether they sang any Latin hymns while drinking it.
A lifetime ago, I dreamed of following in the footsteps of the first British mountaineers to seek the summit of Everest. I would work out at the gym, the North Face of Everest – where George Mallory and Sandy Irvine vanished almost exactly 100 years ago – clear in my mind’s eye. I had it all mapped out: the Alpine skills course I would attend, the gradually higher and higher mountains I would climb before the ultimate test of 8,848 metres of altitude. The more I read, however, of both modern mountaineering and of mountain encounters in previous centuries, the more conflicted I became.
Today, the very top of a mountain holds the highest appeal. When mountaineering in its modern form first began, in the middle of the 19th century, members of the Alpine Club progressively ticked off a series of ‘first ascents’. Today, most of the world’s significant peaks have been climbed countless times over, and new challenges have been devised: for an individual to climb the ‘Seven Summits’, the highest peaks on all seven continents, or to set new speed records or to become the youngest or oldest person of a particular nationality to climb a given peak. In May 2023, a Norwegian climber, Kristin Harila, broke records by climbing all 14 of the world’s 8,000-metre-plus peaks in less than four months, a feat that made use of helicopters to deposit climbers at base camps and supplies further up, saving time at the cost of CO2. Harila’s record attempt made further headlines when drone footage was released showing her climbing past a dying porter on her way to the summit, although she later insisted that her team tried to help him even if she didn’t.
More than 50 years ago, three other Norwegian climbers were already pushing back against the modern approach to mountains. In 1971, Arne Næss, Sigmund Kvaløy Setreng and Nils Farluund set out on an ‘anti-expedition’ to Rolwaling Valley in the Himalaya. Their aim: to not climb a mountain.
The anti-expedition was a response to the ‘heavy, army-like expeditions’ that typified mountaineering at the time. These expeditions sought, in the name of national glory, to conquer mountains that local communities viewed as sacred, and employed hundreds of local porters to carry equipment and supplies up the mountainside in support of the Western climbers.
By contrast Næss, Setreng and Farluund spent several weeks living in Beding, the village at the foot of a mountain called Tseringma (7,034 metres), and ultimately agreed with the village lama that they would go no higher than 6,000 metres, respecting the local reverence for the peak. They took just two young men from the village up the mountain with them, where they treated them not as porters or servants but as ‘rope-mates’. In 2023, Canadian travel guide Bob Henderson retraced the journey of the anti-expedition group. His goal was to ‘get to know one valley well, not many valleys superficially’.
The mountains of early modern Europe had many visitors who passed through quickly. There’s also evidence, however, that they were full of people who inhabited them and knew them very well. Indeed, before the word ‘mountaineer’ came to refer to a person who climbs a mountain, it was used to describe the people who lived in them. A guide to the Swiss Alps written by Josias Simler in 1574 attests to the expertise of these ‘real mountaineers’. They memorised the paths across their nearby glaciers that would safely avoid crevasses, knew how to reduce the risk of avalanches and even knew how to attempt a rescue if anyone was caught in one.
Roughly four and a half centuries later, I spent my honeymoon in the Tarentaise Alps, where I discovered one of the many physical traces left by early modern mountaineers. This was the ruin of a chapel, now only a footprint a few stones high. It stood in an awe-inspiring location, overlooking the valley and with a clear view across to the summit of Mount Pourri (3,779 metres) and the glaciers tumbling down its sides.
This chapel wouldn’t have been in use all year round. Instead, it served the inhabitants of the nearby ‘alpage’, who came there every summer to fatten their cattle on the rich mountain grass. This kind of settlement could be found across early modern Europe, by different names: the shieling for Scotland, the hafod for Wales, the seter for Scandinavia. There’s evidence to suggest that the move to these summer pastures was a special time: oral testimony from the last Scottish shielings of the early 1800s describe evenings spent in making music and dancing.
The enjoyment of the mountains is also a theme in the writings of Conrad Gessner, another character whom I encountered on my journeys through the mountains of yesteryear. In 1555, he published an account of climbing Mount Pilatus (2,128.5 metres). He wrote in great detail of the many pleasures to be experienced on the mountainside, from the sensations of warm sunlight contrasting with cooling winds to the sounds of birds singing in the woods and the taste of cold water drunk straight from a mountain spring. Today, visitors to Mount Pilatus can avoid all of Gessner’s delights by taking the ‘Dragon Ride’, a cableway that reaches almost to the summit.
In fact, Gessner, spent little time describing the summit itself – he was far more interested in waxing lyrical on the subject of the sweet scent of mountain flowers, or the enjoyment to be taken in the conversation of one’s walking companions. Over my years of research into the way mountains were experienced in early modern Europe, I have found my own experience of mountains slowly changing, too, and falling far more in line with Gessner’s attitude than I would ever have imagined as a teenager dreaming herself to the summit of Everest. I’ve found myself less driven to the summit for the summit’s sake, far more likely to notice the small details of the mountainside, its plants and animals. Visiting the Lake District with my children showed me I could slow down even more: why keep walking when there’s a bubbling stream to stop and admire?
Slow tourism – spending longer in a single place and being mindful of the environmental impact of travel – is a familiar idea today. I wonder whether a similar idea, of ‘slow mountaineering’, is worth considering. The early modern mountaineers, the 1970s anti-expedition group, and the children who’ll be inheriting our scarred but beautiful Earth all have something in common. If we pay attention to them, they can teach us different ways of loving mountains.
