Mountain Article & Photography Competition 2009 winners
In Association with Edinburgh Mountain Film Festival
We had eleven prose and twelve poetry entries. The judges were: Chris Townsend (current MCofS President), John Donohoe (past MCofS President), Ingrid Parker (past Vice President), Ruth Tauber (The Watermill Bookshop and Café, Aberfeldy) and Liz Cripps (journalist and academic).
The Prose category gave a generally high standard with several vying for second and third places. But it was Roderick Manson’s ‘Monument’ that came 3rd with the judges all commenting on the ‘great sense of the anger’ it conveyed. Second place, just a whisker ahead of Monument was Nick Hamilton’s ‘Awakening’ in which a love story is woven into a climbing experience. Several judges thought it ‘well written with a perfect selection of vocabulary, drawing the reader right into the action.’ But way out in front was Mike Merchant’s ‘dramatic, well written and chilling tale’ of an accident aftermath in ‘Peace after the Storm’. The comments from the judges were unanimous: ‘Excellent: moving and engrossing’, ‘Impeccable writing’, ‘A moving account of a personal experience. Well crafted’, ‘I loved the phrase ‘police tea’!
In the Poetry category, joint 3rd place was shared by Roderick Manson (again) with his ‘Festive Tryptich’, ‘The ending encapsulates a world: “A still-life in whiteout”’ to quote one judge and Rob Wright’s ‘Ice maiden’. For the first time in the competition, both 2nd and 1st place was scooped by the same person. Jim Turner’s ‘Passing Loch Erribol’ had ‘lovely imagery’ and one judge ‘loved the spartan use of rhyme’. However, Jim’s ‘Eagle, Sgurr Thuilm’ won by a substantial margin with its ‘Beautiful rendering of the breathless admiration…’ ‘Great rhythm’ and its ability to ‘capture the moment.’
The first place winners in both poetry and prose are reproduced in the February 2010 edition of Scottish Mountaineer. All the winning entries are found below.
EMFF Photography Competition 2009
There were two categories in 2009 and the winning entries are reproduced here:
| 'End of the Day' | 'Committed' |
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| Winning photo – sea kayaking in Greenland by Tim Willis www.wildernessjourneys.com | Winning photo by Andy Main: see his website images at: www.andymain.co.uk |
Peace after the storm
Mike Merchant
There was tea, mug after mug of tea in the police station while they wrote everything down, and then the long drive back, past Drumochter and Gaick, Errochty and Tilt. All through the calm frozen night the disturbed snow was locking solid again at the edge of the cliff. There was no harm in it and no call to go there till day.
“There’s one of them up there yet”, we were told early that morning in the filling station, while she looked meaningfully at our climbing clothes.
Walking up through the corrie, the livid white noise was still tearing over the cliff rim. We roped up and I followed on an easy snow climb, the Trident. It was quiet in the gully, neither friendly nor hostile, a long, smooth, workmanlike ramp of offwhite snow.
I found it quite steep near the top. No nasty surprises, just a steady rise in the gradient, the black rope twitching over the surface, streams of gritty snow hissing past as Murphy chopped out steps. The convexity eased. In the pale noon of December he sat a dozen feet back from the edge, taking in my rope. Our climb was done, had been permitted. The storm and its white noise had passed over.
We had been flagged down by police at the snowgates and brought to a room in the outdoor centre with a big aerial photograph of the Northern Corries. “Oh, you were on the Trident?” and so it emerged that everyone knew exactly where we had been. The site was pinpointed and the sweep searches could stop.
“I’ve been wondering what that is.” Murphy was sitting beside a mound in the snow. It had the flawless curves of every surface on the plateau. There had been a big wind and the mountain was honed and blasted to aerodynamic perfection. Seamless, hard and granular, the snow was more like plate armour than blanket and was beginning to sparkle dully. It encased the whole mountain; except where a piece of dark green fabric was poking stiffly from the mound.
We had to find out why. The green stuff was as though concreted to the hill, impossible to pull free. But now it did look like a jacket. As we levered and prised at the snow crust with gloved hands there was more clothing under it, a man’s clothing, and something hard under that; hard and smooth as plaster bonded to the mountain top. Hard as a mountain rescue dummy, perhaps.
We sat back, slightly out of breath, but it was apprehension rather than effort. “There’s one way to find out”, Murphy said, and he brushed fiercely at the snow at one end of the jacket. A man’s black beard glistened in the sun.
It had been a hillwalking club trip. They were from quite near by, a town beside the broad grey firth. They had made Ben Macdui, their second sumnmit, and then they were tracking back the two or three miles to their transport. The storm must have hit them on shelterless ground 4000 feet up, and maybe that was why they decided on a quick way off, the goat track down a splintered arete into the corrie. Their navigation was spot on, but one of the party was left.
“Let’s get out of here.” We were rattled; we bundled the rope and headed East, and I don’t think we covered his face against the sun or the birds of the air.
We walked anxiously, boots creaking in the snow, wanting a telephone and someone else to take responsibility. But the mountain was serene. Evening came on kindly beneath drifts of soft cloud, and all the folds of the ground were unmasked, blue in the shadow, golden and then cool pink under the levelling sun.
These are hills I have almost always known, but they never before or since seemed so benevolent, so consoling to us creatures crawling over them. The shock wore away as we walked on towards the ski station.
There was a big man in overalls, probably a liftie going off duty. “Mister… we found a body up there. Can you let somebody know.” He went away. We were cold by then, tiredness beginning, and we wandered on down to the car park.
Searchers had found a single glove in the corrie, an old inflatable glove, service pattern. Also a sandwich with one bite out of it. His leaving behind may have been explained, but the man’s final lonely encounter with the mountain cannot be known, nor should it be.
Hesitantly, Murphy asked: “How do you feel about it?” We were both ambivalent. The paper next day said “Tayport Man’s Grim Find in Cairngorms”, but it wasn’t just like that. After the scrabbling in the snow and beneath the beautiful indifference of the mountain something came over us that won’t leave, and it’s hard to write down, even after many mugs of police tea.
• Mike Merchant has worked as a journalist, editor and technical writer, and was editor of the John Muir Trust Journal from 1999–2008. http://www.merchant.uk.net/ .
©Michael Merchant 2009.
This arrticle won 1st prize in the 2009 Prose category of the MCofs Mountain Article Competition
Eagle, Sgurr Thuilm
By Jim Turner
Your eyes, your gold flaring eyes held me, still.
We met, of course, when least expected. Chance.
My bog-dull thoughts were trundling, heavy, ‘til
Swooping, you stole them with a piercing glance.
Still, I stood, while the air fizzed and droned
And insects smelt sweat and crawled. A bead hung,
Gathered and then with a rush dropped, stoned,
Towards a ground to which I barely clung
Where a heady reek of heather and peat
Swam and swirled up to meet the steel grey rock
Where you stood, still. The crawling noise, the heat,
I lost in your calm cool gaze. I stood, stock
Still.
Your head shifts. A gold rimmed wingbeat
And I’m left, stunned in the thick reeking heat.
This arrticle won 1st prize in the 2009 Poetry category of the MCofs Mountain Article Competition
Awakening
by Nick Hamilton
It was his turn to lead the next pitch. A steep ice-filled chimney with a blue evil looking bulge above them that prevented any view of the route higher up. She was still pumped up from the previous pitch and shouted advice in his ear as they huddled together on the tiny stance she had hacked out. The wind rose and fell erratically, sometimes dropping to nothing and then suddenly rising to an icy blast laden with ice particles that stabbed like showers of broken glass.
‘It looks like the bulge will go on the right hand side. The wall on that side is at a better angle than the left’.
‘Yes’, he shouted back, ‘but it depends where the gully goes above that. I’ll get a better view when I move up from here.
He twisted in another ice screw. As the ice popsicle emerged out of the screw he bent down and took it into his mouth. He grinned at her as he crunched it up and swallowed the bits.
‘You’re disgusting !’ she said with a laugh. She had come alive now that they were climbing; completely different from the quiet, almost morose, girl he had picked up in the dark some hours earlier. She seemed to have shrugged off her grumpy mood that he knew he had been responsible for. He’d been late, forcing her to huddle in the cold, draughty bus shelter at the end of the road where she lived. He’d been late before of course but she clearly found it more difficult to forgive him on a cold, dark winter morning than on those odd occasions through the Autumn when it had happened before.
‘It’s just water’, he replied with a grin and a mouth full of ice, and then added, ‘a bit gritty though’.
This was the hardest winter route they had done together and the trust they had built in each other’s abilities over the previous weeks was proving valuable.
The chimney was hard below the bulge; the steepness and diverging walls gave a sense of insecurity he had not experienced so keenly before and he felt out of balance and very exposed. He had difficulty placing his crampons where he thought they ought to be and more than once he found his feet splayed out at an angle that he knew would look far from elegant when viewed from below. He heard her shout up to him.
‘What are you doing, you look like a crab going up there; hardly Rebuffat style’ !
He was too stretched to shout back but muttered a curse to himself. What did she know about Rebuffat, neither of them were even born when he was doing his ultra-elegant style climbing. Anyway, even Gaston couldn’t have always looked picture-perfect in the way the coffee-table books depicted him.
At the bulge he took the right wall. He bridged out as far as he could, placed his right hand axe in the modest cleft above his head and the left hand axe into a ripple running across the bulge. Pulling up on both he was able to lean out and work his feet higher. With all his weight spread between his left axe and his toes he stretched up over the bulge and hammered the other axe into the ice on top. The placement felt good and he repeated the action with the left axe. Almost immediately he was past the bulge and into the gully above; heart thumping and relief flooding through him.
At the top of the pitch he whacked an ice axe into the hard packed snow ramp and rested a moment. Glancing up he scanned the steep rock face above and quickly assessed the problem that lay ahead of them. Then with a series of sweeps with the adze he cut out a stance just big enough for both of them. Moving up the ramp a few feet, trying to shelter his face from the stinging spindrift, he cut an angled pit and hammered in his snow plate. He clipped in and moved back down to the stance.
‘OK, up you come’, he shouted as loud as he could.
The ropes told him she was on the move. In what seemed like no time at all an ice axe appeared over the top of the bulge followed by another and then her grinning face.
‘That’s how to do it’, she shouted up, as she climbed up towards him.
‘Ah, get lost’, he called back, ‘You’re on the end of ropes, its easy for you’.
Within a few minutes she was beside him; already surveying the rock and ice that terminated in a cornice 30 to 40 feet above them. The rock band looked impenetrable but they knew others had climbed it before them and there had to be a way through; if they were good enough !
‘I’ll have a go if you want me to’, he shouted at her above the moan of the wind.
‘Not likely, this is mine’, she replied. ‘You always get the best bits’.
The first section was hard neve, ramped up at a steep angle to the foot of the rock band. She moved steadily up the slope and in a few minutes was at the first steep move. The band was not more than 20 feet high but almost vertical and criss-crossed with white lines of ice filled cracks. He knew the chance of even one good belay on the rock band was negligible and he braced himself against the pull of the snow plate, bearing down on the ice as if to stick himself to it.
She spent a few minutes placing ice screws. The thumbs up didn’t fool him. ‘Don’t come off’, he said to himself.
She moved up the first few feet, ice axes left and right, crampons horizontally into the cracks and patches of ice. At the half way point she paused; the cracks were fewer and more widely spaced and, from his position, there was not an obvious sequence of moves. He could see that she was working on a line, focused on the cluster of cracks and ice patches to her right and about ten feet above her head. If she could reach that area the rock band was unlocked and the rest would be easier.
His attention was riveted on her outline above him. The movements of her body, even though lacking a clear outline inside her winter clothing, held his attention. The yellow frames of her crampons outlined against the black of her boot soles were the only strong contrast in the foreshortened figure moving away from him. He was impressed, she looked terrific.
Her first tentative moves into the really difficult section were hesitant and seemed to lack confidence. He knew her strength would be waning and that decisive action was needed. Suddenly she seemed to make a decision. She hammered her left hand axe into an almost horizontal crack above her head, her elbow dropped and she gave it a vicious twist. A quick check on its integrity and she committed herself. Leaning to the right on the left axe her right foot came up and she planted the front points in what appeared to him to be nothing but bare rock. In one smooth movement she had moved up, placed the right hand axe into another crack with another twist, removed the first axe and stood upright.
The move that followed amazed him. There appeared to be a crack running vertically up in front of her. With the left hand axe horizontal she placed the point into the crack and levered it downwards. Then she placed the right hand axe just above it and in a repeat movement jammed it into the crack. The two exes were in her face but she lent out, pushed up and smoothly repeated the sequence. In a flash she was at the stance that moments before had looked unreachable. Without pausing she was up to the top of the band and onto the easier ground above. She quickly moved up to the underside of the cornice and hammered in another ice screw. It took a few minutes of burrowing and kicking but suddenly she was through the cornice and the left rope came tight on him.
As he emerged from the cornice she was braced against her snow plate with a broad smile on her face.
‘You took your time, you lazy git’, she said, ‘I’m freezing up here’.
They huddled together in the snow behind the cairn and shared a flask of coffee. Suddenly she turned and kissed him on the cheek. ‘’Thanks, that was great’, she said.
‘Yea, it was different. We’ve climbed together a fair bit but that was something else’. He glanced at her. ‘You reached a new level on that rock band. Those axe placements were fantastic; I don’t know if I’m more jealous or more impressed.
She looked gravely at him; in a movement that he didn’t see coming she lent over and kissed him on the mouth. The warmth and softness, in the midst of the harsh landscape, stunned him and the sweetness took his breath away. He noticed a dusting of snow on the fine hairs on one side of her face and for the first time he was aware of the shape of her mouth, the tilt of her nose and the colour of her eyes.
‘Hey, be careful, if you do that sort of thing you’ll change everything’.
Quickly, she kissed him again and slipped her arm through his. ‘You silly man, don’t you understand, everything’s changed already’.
This arrticle won 2nd prize in the 2009 Prose category of the MCofs Mountain Article Competition
Monument
By Roderick Manson
I was born in the hamlet of Rosal in the broad and beautiful Strath of Naver. Or so I have heard. I have no memory of the place beyond the fact that it was the place of my birth. I have heard, too, that on the day of my birth beauty fled from that place, burned out in the flames of two hundred and fifty houses and that the man who told that tale counted them all, one by one, from a nearby hillside. The whole conflagration was orchestrated by that man of wickedness, Patrick Sellar, who even now roasts on a spit in that darker reach of hell reserved for those who betray their own for personal gain. That I have heard said many times.
I was parted from my parents when I was very young. I have heard tell that my mother was very beautiful but are not all mothers beautiful to those that love them? My father, it was said, was the envy of many for his strength and good nature although many may have that said of them also. The truth of it I know not save that they were my parents.
In time, I came to this place. Golspie. It lies on the coast barely a mile from Dunrobin Castle, the seat of the Chief of Clan Sutherland. When I was born the Chieftaincy had descended to the Countess but she scorned her ancestral duties to her people and gave the running of her estates to her husband. Being English he had no notion of what it meant to be the father of a clan, of the obligations it imposed to protect and nurture his people, for such they now were. He cared even less. His universe was property, profit and power. Those who did not share his vision were “barbarians” to be treated with rigour and severity and the men to whom he delegated the clearing of the barbarous from “his” lands knew well the meaning of mercy. They must have done, so completely to do the opposite.
Some years after the day of my birth, I stood here and watched at the great column of stone erected by a grateful tenantry to the memory of that kind and judicious intruder into our lives. The words, you may be sure, were not ours. What choice did the ragged remnants of our race have but to contribute to this memorial for such a man of vision? Those that had trodden the dark road to exile were fortunate this final indignity could not be imposed upon their broken backs.
In the years since, I have heard many debate what should be done with this statue on a stick of stone. Many have argued that such a man deserves no memorial but his own infamy and the monument should be torn down; others that it should stand as an indictment to heaven of that very infamy. None, I am pleased to say, holds to the view that it should stand as a monument to a great man who made this land what it is today.
I have been here now for more years than I can count, not that I was ever taught. From time to time I see the young (for everyone now is to me the young) walk up the path on Ben Bhraggie to see the monument that dominates the skyline as that man dominated and destroyed all our lives. Sometimes I follow them up. I am still too afraid of the legacy of evil it represents to venture up alone. This is foolishness but this is how I feel and there is little enough I can do about that. Always they look with detached curiosity but no true understanding then go down having seen what they came to see. How can I be easy in my mind when all our suffering is a mere historical curiosity to so many? How can they not feel for what was done in this man’s name and by his command?
It is not yet morning when a car draws up and parks in the main street. I sleep light at my age so I watch with interest as a thin-set, dark-haired man of perhaps thirty summers gets out. He has a face that speaks of these parts, or so it seems to me. He is wearing a kilt. Not the plaid that the true Highlander would wear, a single length of cloth that would keep a man warm in the coldest of winters, but the skirt designed by a romantic novelist for a fat German usurper to wear when he deigned to visit his Scots dominions. I have heard he even wore pink stockings to complete the effect. I have heard many things, some of them true for all I know.
He puts on a sturdy-looking pair of boots, the like of which were never used in the old days. Then clansmen walked freely among their hills and wore little or nothing on their feet in the doing of it. But times change and there are many prices to pay whether they do or not.
I do not find these woods a comfortable place, even in the light of day. They seem to me contaminated as if the darkness imbued in that monument has leached into the soil and poisoned the souls of the trees themselves, if trees could have souls. It does not bid me welcome, this forest, as it rightly should. There is a small church in the village, a place sacred to the good God and his Son. There are places elsewhere sacred to another. The adversary of our Lord is worshipped by many as a God, whether they know it or not, and this place is sacred to him.
I am more content in the open ground, even in this place. It is the native soil of my past, the place where I and mine were meant to be. Where we should live our lives and die in the time set forth in whatever book such things are pre-determined. It is a long time since I have seen the sunrise. Often clouds hide it from my sight. More often, it is the closing of my ancient eyes that has the same effect. Perhaps it is this place itself that blocks out the light from my view.
When we reach the top he regards the monument then bows his head. To a man who would have hacked his off in a moment if it served his purpose. Or at least he would have given the order. His delicacy was legendary. This was, after all, a very civilised man, this man who ruled over us.
He brings his head up with the same studied ease then grasps his kilt. Raising it just the required degree, he pisses on the monument for an impressive duration for one so slight. Replacing his kilt just above his knee, he stands for a moment with every appearance of satisfaction so that I fear I am in the presence of a man with no character or manners to speak of. Then he spits on the monument as well and I realise that the gesture is not of manners but of meaning, an impression which is reinforced when he takes a small bottle of whisky from his rucksack and hurls it at the figure on top. It shatters on the masonry and he steps back with a smile, muttering under his breath, “That is the trinity reserved for bastards like Your Grace”. His accent is strange but there is no mistaking his meaning or the depth of his intent.
My mother has been dead for many years. The giving of life to me in the open on such a cold night in such circumstances of trial was too much for her and if I did not live to see the light of a sunrise on my face then certain it is that she did not live long with her grief. I do not know for sure why I came to this place, to the heart of the evil that befell our clan and to the symbol erected to mock its many tribulations. Even now, I cannot tell the why or the how of it, but I fancy that tonight both she and I will rest easier knowing that we are not alone, even now.
This arrticle won 3rd prize in the 2009 Prose category of the MCofs Mountain Article Competition
Passing Loch Eriboll
By Jim Turner
A wind frets at the shore
While high above Cranstackie draws a veil
Over grey shoulders of crumbling rock.
On the water white horses roar
A brief, gleaming defiance as their tails
Streak, then fade in the dark shadows of the Loch.
We pedal, pushed on now by a wind
Which, swithering over the great angle
Of Sutherland swings north and tugs, teasing
Shreds of cloud that clutch and cleave to the hill.
They blow off. They sail, alone, past a bay,
Past the red rocks where we bask and watch spray
Peel from sunlit waves; they pass out to sea
Where horses still rise, fade and cease to be.
This arrticle won 2nd prize in the 2009 Poetry category of the MCofs Mountain Article Competition
The following two poems shared 3rd place:
