It's Time To Give Back

The ambitious campaign aiming to restore our much-loved pathways

- Cameron McNeish

NAN SHEPHERD published her little book about the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain, in 1977 although she had actually written it years earlier, during the '40s and '50s. One quote from the book that may be sacrilege to the modern hill-bagger is this: "To aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain. We must abandon the summit as the organising principle of mountains."

Comparatively few people were climbing Scotland's hills and mountains in Nan Shepherd's day, and very few of them were Munro-baggers. Our earlier hill-goers were predominantly climbers and the others were generally botanists, geologists or ornithologists. Climbing the three-thousanders is a comparatively modern obsession.

When Shepherd finished writing The Living Mountain in 1955 only 24 people had climbed all the Munros, according to the Scottish Mountaineering Club's list of "compleaters". By the time it was published 22 years later, only 160 folk had registered with the Scottish Mountaineering Club as compleaters and when I completed my first round of Munros in 1991 I was listed as No.913. The end of that year saw the first thousand Munro compleaters, 90 years after the Rev AE Robertson's very first recorded round.

Fast forward 32 years to the present day and the list has exploded to somewhere in the region of 7,500-8,000 - and I think that gives us a perspective on the growth in the number of people walking, running and biking on the Scottish mountains. It's perhaps not surprising that our mountain footpaths, many of which were originally built for only a handful of stalking parties a year, are suffering from overuse, and such overuse can have severe consequences for the wider environment.