Ben Macdui — Am Fear Liath Mòr

OVERVIEW

The highest of the Cairngorms at 1,309 metres, a broad granite plateau between the Lairig Ghru and Loch Etchachan, often in cloud. Am Fear Liath Mòr, the Big Grey Man, is its presence: rarely seen, described when seen as thin, grey and over ten feet tall, and more often felt — crunching footsteps behind a lone walker, one step to every three of his, and a panic that experienced mountaineers have admitted to.

HISTORY

Professor J. Norman Collie, a chemist and one of the great climbers of his day, told the Cairngorm Club at its annual dinner in 1925 that in 1891, alone on the summit in mist, he had heard footsteps keeping pace behind him and had fled to Rothiemurchus; the speech was reported and others came forward. Alexander Tewnion said he fired his revolver three times at a shape in the mist in 1943. The poet James Hogg saw a giant figure on the mountain in 1791 that proved to be his own shadow on the cloud — a Brocken spectre — and the same explanation is offered for the rest, together with exhaustion, isolation and infrasound from the wind.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Collie's is the founding testimony and he never withdrew it; the footprints photographed by John Rennie in the Spey valley he later attributed to melting snow. The mountain's guidebooks all carry the Grey Man and the entry records him as they do: a recorded experience with a plausible physics.

VISITING

A serious mountain: from the Cairngorm ski car park by the plateau, or from Derry Lodge; navigation in cloud is difficult and winter conditions are Arctic. Not a place to go looking for a fright.