Meall Corranaich

I was first given a camera when I was about eight years old: an old camera that had probably been used by my elder brother until he was provided with a better one. Over the years I rarely took photos of other people: the family thought this rather odd on my part. But it seems that people figure more prominently in my earliest photos.

The photos below are scans of slide photos taken in 1969 (according to the processing date I took off the slides when scanning them). Only the first of them would have been taken by me: it shows my elder brother walking into a snow patch on a Scottish mountainside. The other two photos were clearly taken by my brother with the camera that had been passed on to me, given that both of them show me, at the age of nine, with my father.

Even after all these years, I can remember where these photographs were taken. The family were on holiday in Scotland. This holiday took place in the Whitsun half term holiday, as we invariably went on holiday together at that time. As I write this, more memories are coming back to me. Our family was joined by very good friends of my parents from the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington D.C. We travelled to Scotland by "Motorail" from Newhaven (the channel port in East Sussex from where ferries sail to Dieppe in France), putting the family car on the train, and then travelling ourselves in sleeping compartments, jolting around railways circumnavigating the western side of London, and then overnight to Stirling in Scotland. We then drove through the Trossachs, along "the bonny banks of Loch Lomond", up across Rannoch Moor to Glencoe and on to Fort William, out to Mallaig and back, then to Glen Roy (which my father particularly wished to visit on account of geological formations dating from the ice age), on to Loch Ness, keeping an eye out for the eponymous monster, then back through the eastern part of Scotland, staying for a few days at a guesthouse in Aberfeldy in Perthshire. Whilst in the neighbourhood of Fort William I can recall in particular our American friend teasing me with a popular song, the words of which, deliberately slurred together with the exception of the last two, were as follows. "Mares eat oats, and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy. Kids'll eat ivy too. Wouldn't you?" Well, of course I said that I would, whereupon it was explained to me what it was that I had committed myself to eating!

One day whilst staying at Aberfeldy, my father decided that we (i.e., himself, my elder brother and myself) should climb a mountain called Beinn Ghlas. (This name does not appear on the labels written on the slide frames, but it is still etched in my memory.) So we drove out to the foot of the mountain. I suspect that my mother would have spent the day with our American friends. (On other holidays, she was often left sitting in the car at the bottom of the mountain whilst the "boys" made the ascent. I also note that we must have been on the mountainside for quite some time, given how high we had climbed, and there was a limit to how long my mother would be left sitting in the car on such ascents.)

I can recall that the day of our ascent was grey and overcast with occasional rain. As one looked up on the ascent, Beinn Ghlas was to our right, whilst Ben Lawers, the higher mountain, was to our left.

As the photographs show, we reached a patch of snow when we had climbed sufficiently high up the mountain. So we obviously had to stop for photographs. And then the last of the three photos shows me with my father on the summit cairn of Meall Corranaich. Thus it appears, though I had not realized it up till now, that I climbed my first Munro at the tender age of nine!

On our descent the rain set in, and I can recall that we were soaked to the skin when we returned to the guesthouse in Aberfeldy, where there were good fires to warm us up.

Continuing our Scottish tour, I can recall that we had to visit Dollar on account of our American friends, then on to Edinburgh for a couple of nights, then back across the border to Housesteads Fort, on Hadrian's Wall. However most of this Scottish trip was not recorded in my own slides: there are no slides documenting the journey to Mallaig and back, or up the Great Glen to Loch Ness, and furthermore a photograph of Ben Lawers shrouded in mist and cloud is succeeded by one of Housesteads Fort. Thus I am reliant on my own memories to fill in the details of the itinerary, though once international travel becomes possible again, I would be able to cross-reference my late father's slide collection.

Indeed, after having composed the above account of the trip to Scotland from my own memories, it occurred to me that I could check my father's autobiographical notes, a copy of which is stored on the very computer I have been using to create this record of my memories of our Scottish trip in 1969. I had indeed recalled correctly that my parents' American friends had joined us on this holiday, even though they do not appear on any of my own photos. My father's autobiographical notes record that, before the holiday in Scotland in 1969, he had attended a conference in Prague with our American friends, and they had returned with him to England to join us on our family holiday before travelling back home across the Atlantic.