Book reviews: Ski Mountaineering in Scotland | The Corbetts
The updated edition of the much-loved Ski Mountaineering in Scotland takes the best of the original and adds to it, writes Roger Cox
I can’t think of many tougher tasks for an editor than updating a much-loved guidebook. Stray too far from the original – in terms of content or spirit – and you risk upsetting those who have not only enjoyed the earlier edition but may well owe some of their happiest memories to it. Fail to incorporate enough in the way of updates and new material, however, and you run the risk of seeming out of touch. Any way you slice it, it’s a tricky old tightrope walk.
My copy of the first, 1989 edition of Ski Mountaineering in Scotland, edited by Donald Bennet and Bill Wallace and detailing some 80 ski tours in Scotland’s mountains, is a mess, with page corners folded down and illegible notes scribbled in margins. It’s stuffed full of random pieces of paper too, including a 13-year-old print-out of a Mountain Weather Information Service forecast for what sounds like a pretty good day in the Southeastern Highlands (20mph southeasterly winds, isolated snow flurries, 90 per cent chance of cloud free Munros) and a hand-drawn avalanche rose (very carefully done too, so clearly dating from the pre-kids era when I had endless amounts of time on my hands).
There’s even a print-out of an email I sent to extreme skier extraordinaire Jamie Johnston back in 2013, inviting him to join me and some friends for a weekend in the Ben Lawers Range, where we were making a short film about the history of skiing in the area. There’s a copy of his reply too: “Unfortunately I’m scheduled to be floating around the Baltic Sea from 3 April to 1 May... however, I’m attaching a link to the SSC ‘official’ Meall Corranaich / Beinn Ghlas piste map, which funnily enough misses out the best and most obvious line in the coire...” – the very line, as it happens, which we ended up featuring in the climax to the film.
Anyway, I digress – the point is that I’m very attached to my copy of Ski Mountaineering in Scotland version 1.0, having spent many hours daydreaming my way through its pages, and I’m sure there are plenty of others who feel the same, so when Colwyn Jones agreed to edit a new edition for The Scottish Mountaineering Press he must have had at least some inkling that his work was likely to come under a good deal of scrutiny. Happily, having spent the last couple of weeks dipping in and out of the new edition, I’m able to report that he has created a best-of-all-worlds update, one which expands massively on the original (387 pages vs 121), adding a whole host of new routes, while at the same time leaving intact much of what made the original special.
Guidebooks aren’t really supposed to be great works of literature – their primary goal is clarity – but some of the writing in the original (notably by the late Adam Watson) is effortlessly transporting. Where edits and updates have been made, a quick compare and contrast shows that these have been sensitively done, preserving as far as possible the odd literary flourish (so, for example, the revised version of Watson’s Beinn a’ Bhuird guide still has its “spacious high plateau surrounded by wild, plunging corries.”) The new material is excellent too, and whereas the emphasis in the original was very much on getting from A to B and back again, in the new texts there is more consideration given to the quality of the descents on offer. See, for example, Heather Morning and Bob Reid’s guide to skiing on Meall a’ Bhuachaille above Glenmore, which concludes by offering various downhill options, some of which are clearly there because they’re fun, not because they’ll get you home any faster.
Speaking of getting home, much as I’m a fan of Jim Renny’s cleverly stylised maps in the original book, with triangles denoting peaks and thick, sinuous black lines denoting ridges, there’s no doubt that the maps in the updated version, incorporating both contour lines and relief shading, are easier for the brain to translate into three dimensions. And as for the photography... well... while I love the vintage pictures of guys in gaiters and skinny skis traversing windswept hillsides in the original, some of the images in the new book deserve to win awards, and not just those taken on the higher, more celebrated peaks: Doug Bryce’s shot of Gavin Carruthers blasting through fresh powder in the Pentlands, near Edinburgh, looks like at least as much fun as anything in the pictures taken further north.
Size really isn’t everything when it comes to mountains, and if that seems like an odd thing to say about landforms that are most commonly described and organised according to height, then you should check out the new edition of The Corbetts by Rab Anderson, also published by The Scottish Mountaineering Press. As Anderson says in his introduction, among these 222 hills of between 2,500 and 3,000 feet “there are many of great interest, character and beauty that are the equal of all but a few Munros.”
His route descriptions are so richly detailed that in some cases you feel you could rely on them to the exclusion of all other navigational aids (don’t do this, obviously) and, like the best of Adam Watson’s writing, they have the power to transport you to the place being described. His book also contains plenty of reminders that the division between Munros and Corbetts is entirely arbitrary, not least the entry on Beinn Dearg on the north shore of Loch Torridon – a Corbett by just 70cm, but arguably as impressive as any Munro.
Ski Mountaineering in Scotland, edited by Colwyn Jones, and The Corbetts, by Rab Anderson, are both available from The Scottish Mountaineering Press, price £35, see www.cottishmountaineeringpress.com
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