The Great Outdoors – August 2019

[above] Bod an Deamhain, the Devil's Point, rises high above the Lairig Ghru

laid these rocks, unknown years in the past.
I think of the families who lived a life in a
place called the Devil’s Arse, a place shared
with bandits and thieves. Of the miners
who eked a living pulling lead out of the
hard rock.
Bod an Deamhain, the ‘Penis of the
Demon’, is, well, a descriptive name for a
1004m mountain. A three-day backpack in
the Cairngorms last year allowed me to see
both heaven and a very particular vision
of hell. Alone, I started out below the ski
centre, backpack loaded with three days’
worth of provisions, and traced a route
directly to the Lairig Ghru, pausing for
shelter and a sandwich in the Chalamain
Gap. A couple of years earlier, I’d climbed

up the other side of the Lairig Ghru to

Ben Macdui, in awe of the two silhouetted

figures I could see tracing a route up the

ridge towards Braeriach, the third-highest

mountain in Britain. They may have

been looking at our group and thinking

the same; for me, it was the first time the

scale of these mountains, or the Lairig

Ghru itself, shifted into focus. It made my

stomach churn, sent a visceral thrill up

my spine.

I may have become accustomed to

walking in the mountains, my campcraft

has improved, my skills and confidence

continue to develop, and I no longer worry

when the visibility is low or the snow is

falling, but that sense of awe (defined

as ‘a feeling of great respect sometimes

mixed with fear or surprise’) never leaves.

It’s an innate human sense, perhaps why

we choose to spend our time in these

mountains. Ask any hillwalker why they

do it, and the answer is almost always

unsatisfactory: ‘I like to spend time

outdoors’, ‘I like a challenge’, ‘it’s good for

the soul’. But it’s that sense of awe, hard

to put into words, that so attracts us – the

same sentiment that once repelled people

(and still does).

Philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-

97) tried to explain that feeling when we

stand on the edge of the mountains. In

his treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into

the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and

52 The Great OutdoorsAugust 2019