A narrow escape in Britain’s most treacherous mountain range

Twenty-five years ago, my cousin Jock, a Scottish priest, rang in shock. Two priest friends, David and Norman, had been walking in the Cuillin in Skye. As Norman rounded a boulder, it dislodged and rolled him off the mountain. He screamed: ‘David, save me!’ They were his last words.

The Cuillin — or Black Ridge — slice the island of Skye in two. On a map they are a Spaghetti Junction of deranged scribbles. Closer to, they rise up like the fangs of Mordor in dizzying spires with names such as ‘The Executioner’. ‘The Inaccessible Pinnacle’ is something like Orkney’s Old Man of Hoy, only rising not out of the sea, but off the top of a mountain. The highest peak, Sgùrr Alasdair, is more than three times the height of the London Shard, or higher than ten Big Bens. Should you fall off it, it would take you 14 seconds to hit the sea.

‘Bagging Munros’ has a jaunty ring to it, and 11 of the Cuillins are Munros. But, as Simon Ingram tells us, climbing them is ‘harder, steeper, longer, scarier than anywhere else in Britain’. Some of the rock that forms them is gabbro, which grips nicely, like Velcro; but much is basalt, with a surface like wet soap. Even in summer, climbers contend with mist, darkness, high winds, frostbite, deep soft snow, deep hard snow, avalanches, ice-glazed rocks and — perhaps most perilous of all — loss of direction: owing to the magnetic nature of the rock, compasses are wildly confused.

No surprise, then, that since the first official fatality — the Liverpudlian John Thom on 2 September 1870 — there have been many more. As Hamish MacInnes, a Cuillin aficionado, tells Ingram: ‘You get so used to death.