Scotland’s magic mountain

When Lorraine Duncan turned 40, she decided to go “Munro bagging” — climbing Scottish mountains over 3,000ft (914 metres).

One of the best for beginners is Schiehallion, a two-hour drive north of her home near Glasgow. Lorraine, her husband and their two boys enjoyed a spring day in 2017 on its slopes. From the summit they saw distant hills and lochs below. Only when the family started to descend did strange things start to happen. Lorraine felt a tingling on her skin — which she described as like touching a Van de Graaff generator at school. Suddenly her son Rian, then 12, dropped his metal walking poles. He had been electrocuted: on his hands were burns that Lorraine said looked “black like coal”.

Suddenly everybody’s hair stood on end. The selfies Lorraine uploaded to social media went viral. Soon users were warning that the family was in grave danger: that in such an electrically charged environment they were at risk of being struck by lightning. But there was no storm for at least 40 miles. At the time, they jokingly attributed these phenomena to something else.

“We knew the folklore of the mountain,” Lorraine told me. “We knew it was the place of the fairies, and a gateway to the underworld. We said to ourselves: this is the fairies doing this. The fairies are coming to take us away!”

No lightning came, although they were standing on a mountain whose name may translate as either “The Mountain of the Constant Storm” or perhaps “The Fairy Hill of the Caledonians”. Whatever its etymology, Schiehallion is uniquely layered in history and mystery. It is a mountain to which people have continually gravitated to make sense of the world — in endeavours both scientific and spiritual. A mountain where, in many ways, an unseen power is believed to be at play.

One spring evening, I drove the old military road north from Glen Lyon, and green fields rose to bronze moorlands. Schiehallion appeared with a turn in the road: a crisp pyramidal peak, its summit like a blade thrust at a violet sky. Unlike other more famous Highland peaks, such as Ben Nevis, its supremacy over the horizon is uncontested. No neighbouring mountains crowd it out, nor dare obscure its beautiful symmetry.

It is a lone sentinel, similar in shape to Japan’s Mount Fuji, although it is no volcano: it was sculpted by ice, not forged by fire. It measures a modest 1,083m, yet it seems to aspire to a greater elevation. This same road was travelled 250 years ago by Charles Mason of the Royal Society, on a particular mission to find a mountain “of sufficient height [and] tolerably well detached from other hills”.

Mason had famously marked the Mason-Dixon Line in the American colonies: he had also travelled in Africa and been shot at by the French. In 1773, he set out on packhorse into yet another foreign land: an unmapped quarter of the Highlands where English was little spoken and old men still bore battle scars from the Battle of Culloden. The Royal Society hoped to investigate Newton’s theory that every particle of matter had its own gravity. It was thought the mass of a formidable object (such as a mountain) might deflect a pendulum and help reveal the density of the world itself.

Essentially, they needed a peak to be a proxy for a planet. There had been previous attempts to perform such an experiment at Chimborazo in the Ecuadorean Andes. Mason had considered Pen-y-Ghent in the Yorkshire Dales, but Schiehallion emerged as the preferred option. The very same symmetry and isolation that speaks to the imagination made it perfect for such a task.

I camped that evening beside an old limekiln, dozing off to a duet of owls. When I unzipped the fly sheet, dawn rays were creeping down Schiehallion. A soft westerly swayed the conifer plantations as I set out. It was up these same slopes that a party led by Mason’s colleague, Neville Maskelyne, proceeded in summer 1774. The specifics of the Schiehallion experiment can be difficult for a lay person to comprehend, so for the inhabitants of those glens the business of these men from the south would have seemed unfathomably strange.

Heavy instruments (including a quadrant James Cook used in the Pacific) were hauled to huts on the north and south slopes. Like pilgrims on a holy mountain, the scientists made clockwise perambulations of the hill, erecting poles to mark survey stations. There might have seemed something devotional too, about Maskelyne’s nightly search for the meridian — calculated by noting the ascent of stars.

I see it as a spirit mountain of the Caledonians. Even now, people are naturally drawn to it for spiritual reasons

After four months of work, the experiment proved a success. A pendulum was observed to make a discernible movement: a subtle shift. The mountain had its own gravitational attraction. Calculations soon after suggested the density of the Earth to be 4,500kg/m³ (about 20 per cent off the figure accepted today); the density of the planets and the Moon were also calculated.

On their last night on Schiehallion, a ceilidh was held in a bothy. Locals mingled with London men, whisky flowed, fiddles reeled. In the excitement someone might have dropped their pipe or knocked over a candle. When the building burnt down the only significant casualty was a ghillie’s violin that, a dubious legend goes, was replaced by a Stradivarius at Maskelyne’s behest.

The path up Schiehallion begins as a well-maintained track, bridging burns of horseback brown before riding the crest of a long east-west ridge. As it climbs higher it becomes vaguer. Little cairns showed me the way as the land fell away steeply on both sides. To the north, the wind sketched patterns on Loch Rannoch and Loch Tummel. To the south, Perthshire hills lapsed into Lowland plains. Looking down, I thought back to a conversation I’d had some time before with Munro Gauld, a local musician and folklorist.

“Schiehallion I think of as like a mother hill,” he had said. “You can see all the surrounding land from the top of it. The mountain has a wee hold on me. It hasn’t let go.”

Gauld has spent time seeking out Schiehallion’s untold stories. When I called him up, he was recording a Gaelic lament written by a woman who lost her three youngest children on the south side of Schiehallion in autumn 1795. Her song explained that her family was at the seasonal shielings (huts) when fever struck. It was a time of year when the medicinal herbs of the short Highland summer had wilted, and help was far away. “The music takes you back,” he told me. “250 years on, you feel that grief.”

In 2018, Gauld briefly lived on Schiehallion — like Maskelyne, in a yurt — along with the artist Karen Rann as part of a residency sponsored by conservation charity the John Muir Trust. Rann’s focus had been one specific aspect of the Schiehallion experiment: the first known use of contour lines, pioneered by Maskelyne’s assistant, Charles Hutton, as a means of calculating the volume of the hill.

It’s one of the holiest mountains in the world, I had to climb up it. I was linked to the spirit of the living land

Today the contour lines that meander across maps around the world owe their existence to these Highland gradients. Depicted on a modern Ordnance Survey map, Schiehallion is also beautiful — not a tangle of brown lines like other peaks but depicted in clean concentric ovals, almost mandala-like in its rendering.

Gauld, meanwhile, was more interested in the mythology of the hill. There are many folktales related to Schiehallion — a witch with frosted hair, a well with healing waters — but it is chiefly known as an abode of fairies. In one version, the mountain is hollow: within is a fairy realm into which mortals have sometimes trespassed. Gauld suggested such fairies were not merely fodder for bedtime stories but remnants of an ancient animistic belief system: echoes of a time before the first Christian missionaries travelled the glens.

“I see it as a spirit mountain of the Caledonians,” he told me. “Even now, people are naturally drawn to it for spiritual reasons.”

On the last stretch to the summit the footpath disappears altogether. The terrain fractures into a field of quartzite boulders, through which you must scramble with a penitent hunch. Phantom sheets of mist gusted in as I made the final push. The wind carried the croak of a raven. Snow patches clung on from midwinter. Climbing Schiehallion is not technical nor even difficult, but in the right conditions you enter an otherworld distinct from the land below.

The idea of Schiehallion as a “holy mountain” is a nebulous but enduring one, and often linked to its position at the geographical centre of Scotland. In 1905, Reverend John Sinclair wrote a poem in honour of the hill that rose beyond his parish:

The Bible tells of Hebrew mountains grand
Where such great deeds were done in days of old . . . 
But every soul that seeks the heavenly road
May in Schiehallion, too, behold a Mount of God

In more recent times, a niche school of New Age thought has cast Schiehallion as a “Mount Zion of the Far North” — the unnamed peak referred to in Psalm 48, serving as the gathering place for Freemasons. Among those subscribing to this theory was Laurence Main, a druid from mid-Wales who climbed to the summit in a blizzard as part of a 1,404-mile pilgrimage across Britain. “It’s one of the holiest mountains in the world,” he had told me when I rang him up. “I had to climb up it. I was linked to the spirit of the living land.”

Many mountains worldwide have been invested with sanctity. The storms that brew around them are suggestive of an almighty power. Hermits sought revelations in their lonely heights. Old Testament prophets conversed with God on Ararat and Sinai, while Irish pilgrims still ascend Croagh Patrick in honour of the Christian saint who battled demons there.

But Schiehallion, to my mind, had more parallels with Mount Meru, the peak of Hindu cosmology, the centre of the universe around which the Moon and Sun orbit, and on whose peak the weight of heaven rests. Men came 250 years ago to this Scottish peak with questions about the universe and humankind’s place within it, finding answers in the turn of the constellations, and an invisible force coming from within the hill.

Schiehallion’s summit is an inconspicuous one, a sloping pavement of lichen-garlanded rock. I hunched in a crag, waited for a rain shower to pass. I thought of Margaret Ritchie — a young woman remembered in Alexander Stewart’s 1928 book A Highland Parish. Ritchie was caught up in the religious revivals that swept the Highlands in the 19th century, reputedly wishing to converse with angels. Telling no one where she was bound, she climbed Schiehallion and was found dead in her nightgown on its peak, perhaps — Stewart pondered — because “to her mystical spirit [the summit] seemed to be so near to that Heaven in which all her thoughts were centred”. It was perhaps inevitable that, in later years, lively minds speculated she had left for the fairy realm.

The rain grew heavier as I descended. The mountain was lost in cloud by the time I drove the old military road back to Glen Lyon. Schiehallion’s sacred status was questionable, but in other ways it has a powerful spell. It lends its name to a brand of lager, a folk band and an investment fund. It is also the name of the cancer ward at Glasgow’s Royal Hospital for Children. Patients and their families walk past a giant photograph of the hill on admittance and discharge.

The ward’s name is not accidental. “[Schiehallion’s] steep start represents the situation families face when first given a cancer diagnosis,” according to a statement from the hospital. “But the path up Schiehallion is broad, and can be walked by patients alongside family and staff.”

Some months after my visit, I was back in the Highlands: walking the Ben Alder hills as the first winter snows fell. Standing on a rime-iced trig, I spent time identifying white peaks in the distance. Amid them one pyramid stood out, as instantly recognisable as an old friend across a crowded room. About 16 miles distant, its power could still be sensed. I had become one of many who looked upon that beautiful hill and felt something stir in the heart. A discernible movement. A subtle shift.

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