Book Review – Cairngorms: A Secret History by Patrick Baker

I very much enjoyed Baker’s more recent book, [book:The Unremembered Places: Exploring Scotland’s Wild Histories|53403479], and read this, and enjoyed it almost as much, while in the eastern Cairngorms. He manages to balance his own adventure, with the nature, history and literature of the area really well.

Amongst his chosen histories of the range, he searches for the El Alamein Refuge, built by soldiers of the 51st Highland Division on a minor and seldom-visited ridge because of a navigational error, unreached by paths, and therefore left untouched when the other mountain shelters were dismantled in the 1970s. He hunts for the location of ancient gem mines, and skeletal aircraft remains on the summits of Braeriach, Ben Macdui and Beinn a’ Bhuird.

And, most appealingly for me, investigates the legend of the Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui, a giant, yeti-like creature, stalking the hillside, often in conditions of mist and snow. He was first spoken about in 1925, when Professor J. Norman Collie, addressing the Cairngorm Club, which is now the oldest surviving climbing club (formed in 1887), in 1925..

“Every few steps I heard a crunch, then another crunch as if someone was walking after me but taking steps three or four times the length of my own. I said to myself ‘this is all nonsense’. I listened and heard it again but could see nothing in the mist. As I walked on and the eerie crunch, crunch sounded behind me I was seized with terror and took to my heels, staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles nearly down to Rothiemurchus Forest. Whatever you make of it I do not know, but there is something very queer about the top of Ben Macdui and I will not go back there again by myself I know.”

More on the Grey Man.. there’s a BBC audio version of a story called The Grey Man and other Lost Legends, which is well worth a listen, a sort of hybrid of the supernatural and sci-fi, cleverly done (link here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000h8q4 ). Rather than dwell on superstition for too long, Baker looks also at [author:John Geiger|29872]’s study into [book:The Third Man Factor: The Secret To Survival In Extreme Environments|6147265] in his book; which I’m keen to read as soon as I can locate a copy.

All in all, this is a compelling narrative bound together by the incredible landscape and the history of mountaineering.