HIGH SOCIETY

Cyclists are magnetically drawn to the mountains but why do these hulking lumps of rock cast such a potent spell over us? We chart the story of an obsession...

- Mark Bailey

To cycle up a mountain is to pedal into a world of paradoxes. Mountains are a playground and a torture chamber; an opportunity for wonder, a guarantee of pain. A mountain can drag you to despair but leave you soaring with joy.

When we think about cycling, mountains erupt into our imagination: a snaking Alpine pass or the curling grey ribbon of a Pyrenean hairpin. The most iconic moments of the Tour de France have taken place at altitude; photobooks of snow-capped cols adorn our coffee tables and riders make pilgrimages to legendary peaks. But we rarely pause to think how strange this fascination really is. Road cyclists aren't drawn in the same way to forests, fields or flatlands, although those landscapes feature in our rides and races. Mountains form the architecture of our cycling dreams. But this obsession cannot be explained simply by the physical challenges of elevation. And neither did this story begin with the Tour de France.

As the author Robert Macfarlane describes in his seminal book, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination, for most of the human history mountains were regarded as dangerous, forbidding, and worthless places. They were feared as a realm of dragons and mysterious beasts; an abode of bandits, thieves, and social outcasts; an extreme terrain of dangers and disasters. Hard as this may be for us to grasp, mountains weren't even regarded as beautiful. Until well into the 1700s, as Macfarlane writes: "Alpine travellers often chose to be blindfolded to avoid looking at the vertiginous landscapes. Mountains were an ugly irritation, which prevented the free range of the eye and the free movement of our legs, over the cultivated landscape in which humans lived and worked."