When I was nine years old and living in Norway I joined the Scouts. I lived in Scandinavia from aged nine to fourteen but it was such a formative experience it might well have been my entire childhood. In the Scouts we learnt how to chop down trees, make shelter, trap animals to eat, fish, make igloos, ski, and use anything nature could provide to help us survive outdoors. I could ski cross country, use an axe, catch fish through ice then prepare and cook it and make a shelter in the snow by the time I was ten. I had no major concerns about snaring a rabbit, preparing it for eating and then making a fire for cooking. I could shoot air rifles for hunting before I even got to Norway because my grandfather was a farmer and taught me how to shoot. I knew every knot, I could handle a knife like an adult, I could start a fire in minutes and could navigate with a map, a compass and, at night, the stars. I loved being outdoors, particularly in the woods.
But when I returned to England I got out of these habits, I was back in the city and life was pretty normal. I spent a few weekends camping in a tent when I was a teenager but otherwise I stayed indoors until only a few years ago, my late thirties.
I began to rediscover my need of being outside when I started running for fun. Running by the sea a mile from my house was exhilarating and running next to the hills and cliffs a mile in the other direction was awe-inspiring. But there is nothing like running through a forest. The undulations of the terrain, the columns of trunks holding up the sky, the damp smell, birdsong, a thousand shades of green, they all point to one very specific emotion deeply hard wired into the fabric of my brain by two million years of human evolution- they make me feel safe. In the woods I will find water, food, shelter, sanctuary. In the woods I am home.
My interest in bushcraft and camping have returned and so, when I felt able to justify buying the equipment I would need, and with amazingly loving encouragement from Claire, I set the idea in my mind of wild camping, fire-making, hiking and nights out under the stars (a major change though is that I am now vegetarian so there would be no hunting and that my ethos now would be based on leaving no trace behind).
So last year I bought some bushcraft and camping gear- rucksack, lightweight one-person tent, goose-down sleeping bag for four seasons, cooking equipment, and fire making tools- axe, sheath knife, folding saw, firelighters- with the express purpose of wild camping. Each weekend passed through 2017 and for one reason or many the conditions were never quite right for camping. Until now.
Last Saturday I woke to an eye-wateringly bright sun, 24 degrees celsius and a windless, cloudless sky. I decided to combine a hike up to the top of Slieve Donard in the Mourne Mountains with an overnight camp on a different hill which, in hindsight, was a misreading of my abilities. I also decided to take the more winding and stony path if ever there was a choice (on the rare instances that I took a path) but otherwise committed to hiking in straight lines off-path, traversing the shortest point from A to B. I drove two hours to Bloody Bridge, the gateway into the mountains, threw my green canvas Swedish army rucksack over my shoulders and I tramped up and around, up and around, over streams, across gullies and eventually to the base of Slieve Donard. The final 850m ascent took three hours and was such extraordinarily hard work I had to rest for twenty minutes at the top and, before the descent, do a "body scan" for any telltale signs of arrest or collapse. I seem to be in one piece although melting in sweat ("sweat is fat crying" I was told by a personal trainer) but happy and very, very humbled. My knees were shaking and my quads were burning but I was buoyed by awe.
From the summit of Donard I had the perfect view, the Mournes were spread out across the west like a Tolkien fantasy, hazy with mist and shadowed by each other. To the north was Belfast. To the east was the sea as blue as Earth from space, dazzlingly so, and to the South was my goal, Chimney Rock Mountain. It was only a few miles away but I had to go down, down, down to the valley between mountains and then up the other side. So I followed the beautiful dry stone Mourne Wall (which totals 22 miles long over fifteen peaks) from the top of Donard, down to the valley, up towards Chimney Rock and then a final scrabble to the top for more views that dumbfounded me- Donard, the rest of the Mournes from a new angle and, most excitingly, the sea to the East where I would aim my tent for a 4am sunrise.
I pitched my tent on a small flat spot near some smooth rocks that were my table and chairs for the evening, cooked dinner, put on some warmer clothes as the temperature dropped and I watched the sun set over the mountains. I thought about my mum who would have loved it on the mountain even though she would not have ever been healthy enough to climb it. Of course I thought of Ruby too and I cried because she wasn't there to share it with me. I cried with the sheer beauty of it all.
The Mourne Mountains are old stone. If you pick up a pebble you would be surprised at its unexpected weight. The mountains are of the densest granite with a potentially overwhelming solidity. I could sense their mass, immovable against even the unstoppable force of time. That night, alone on the mountain with no-one for miles around, I felt utterly calm and protected. The mountains were sentinels watching me and watching the world move past because they are immense, quiet, without fissures, without fuss.
They reassured me into an early sleep and I woke at 5am to the most beautiful sunrise I have ever seen in my life, blasting onto the front of my tent, beckoning me. Then oats for breakfast, pack away, rucksack on, thank the mountain, walk towards the sun, leave nothing. Quick paddle in the ice-cold stream stained rusty from filtering through peat bogs on the way down to the sea. Back at the car park I sat incongruously in my air-conditioned car just behind its internal combustion engine spewing the result of burnt fossil fuels drinking a machine-made coffee and eating a highly processed chocolate bar. The cognitive dissonance was almost overpowering and I had a strong urge to climb back up into the mountains.
There is a great deal of discussion in mental health about "being in the present" and about being mindful of "the now" and there are fewer more profound ways of being in the present than being in mountains. Out of necessity I was utterly in tune with myself, my surroundings and their interactions throughout my weekend in the Mourne Mountains- I was astutely aware, with immediacy, of the air temperature, the humidity, the wind speed and its direction and steadfastness, compass bearings and the time of day due to the sun's position, when it last rained, the limitations of my own body, my hunger, thirst and so on.
In the end these essential things are simple, they are shelter, food, water, mobility. They are the basics, the bare minimum I need for survival, the very least I need to call somewhere home.
