Hello darkness my old friend (wild camping part 2)

It turns out Paul and I have a lot in common. He plays the drums. I play the drums. He's a vegetarian. I'm a vegetarian. He's good-looking and knowledgeable. I'm  ...

So anyway. Having ascended every peak in this part of the Lake District, and scaled most of the rock faces, Paul has picked out what he considers an ideal spot for my first night wild camping.

It's not exactly a spot, though, more a vast expanse of marsh and meandering river, cradled by craggy mountaintops. "It's called Great Moss," Paul tells me, as he plots a path across, after three hours hiking. I had pictured something more secluded for my first night under the stars. But Paul knows what he's doing. 

"You'll see the sun rise in the morning over those hills behind us," he says, as we splash across the shallow water. Rejecting several sites as too hard or squelchy he chooses one for me, beside a mountain stream, and another fifty yards away for himself, and we pull the tents from our rucksacks. 

Having learned all I know about tents from Carry on Camping, I expect erecting them to be tricky and time-consuming. But it happens so fast I almost miss it, colour coding and structural ribs made of sectioned tent-poles making it look so easy that I think even an idiot could do it. Fortunately.  

"And there you are," Paul says. "A two-person tent ready for the night."

"How many persons?" I check.

"Two," He confirms. "This one's quite roomy." 

Not to my eyes it isn't. But that's fine. Solo camping is the long-term plan, not snuggling up with a friend – partly because I want to experience the Cairngorm wilderness without distraction, as Nan Shepherd did, and partly because I don't have any friends willing to snuggle up with me on a mountaintop. (Yeah, I asked.)

During dinner, heated on the stoves and saucepans we carried in with us, Paul chats about wild camping around the country. The short version is that, barring a few exceptions, it's legal anywhere in Scotland and nowhere in England*. 

After dinner, we wash our dishes in the mountain stream and Paul gets to his feet, eyeing the track behind us that leads to the peaks. "Do you feel up to it?" he asks. "It'll be easier now you've stowed your rucksack." True enough, I do have a pleasant floaty feeling, but I'm also wearier than I'd normally be after a six mile uphill hike, the after-effects of my second Covid vaccination yesterday. 

It seems a shame not to try for the top, although it's not my main aim in being here, so we set off upwards. But short of the highest point in England, I have to call it a day and we turn back down, to prepare for the night.

The sun is sinking fast now, the warm afternoon yielding to a cool and peaceful gloaming. The air is still, as it has been all day, the only sound the soft splash of the stream we're camped beside, a soothing murmur that should help me sleep. Paul and I chat about the outdoor life as the light leeches away, before he wishes me goodnight and heads for his tent.

So here we are. The moment that's almost haunted my thoughts for over a year. For the next ten hours it's just me, the sky above, the earth beneath and the darkness.

Oh and the thick socks, long pants, thermal vest, woolly bunnet and four-seasons sleeping bag. The forecast is hard frost and I've come prepared. But after an hour I realise I'm not cold. I'm hot. The woolly bunnet stays on, partly because the air is already chilly as the day's heat radiates up through a cloudless sky, but mainly because it's a present from my son.

Not my son the artist, who often appears in these pages. This is another son you've never heard of. My firstborn. We were close when he was a boy. We made each other laugh. But he had a hard time as a young adult and found it easier to cut himself off from us.

Around three years ago he gradually began to come back into my life. We meet regularly now and go long walks together. He's a lovely man. The whole experience, lasting twenty years, has taught me something I didn't know about human biology. You can function at some level with a hole in your heart. But you get to live again when it heals.

The hat stays on, as does the watch he gave me that also shows temperature and compass direction. The socks come off, and the pants and vest. So now I'm stretched out nice and cosy, naked from the forehead down.

Cosy but by no means comfortable. I favoured quality for the rucksack and sleeping-bag, but economy for the mat, a mistake that's borne painfully in on me as the Lake District presses hard on my ribs and hip. I'm convinced sleep is impossible but I'm wrong. 

At around 5 am, when it's - 6 ° C outside, I'm awoken by urgent messages from my nether regions that my arse is freezing off, as are my feet. I pull on socks and pants again and next thing I know it's 7am and I've almost missed the daybreak.

Quickly unzipping the sleeping-bag and tent, I pull on trousers and top and step into a cool morning under a rosy sky, as dawn turns to sunrise and the first rays illuminate the mountaintops, then travel down towards us. It's too good an opportunity to miss, so before packing up, I sit down to meditate, with my back to a rock, facing the sunrise.

Half an hour later, leaving nothing behind us, Paul and I set off, with the sun still warming our way. On the hike down, the chat ranges widely. We compare old injuries, as men do when they're getting to know each other – fractures, sprains, slipped discs, broken hearts. Paul wins the first. I've got him beat on all the rest.

I ask if he considers Ringo a good drummer and nod agreement when he tells me he didn't, but having listened to the thoughts of other great drummers, he does now. He asks if I believe in reincarnation and nods agreement when I say I don't know and it doesn't matter: the principle's the same however you get there – don't harm any living thing.

On the last leg, we again pass the little black lambs who, I 'm guessing, look much better for their night of wild camping than I do. At the cars, Paul and I unload our backpacks and prepare to part. 

I have warm memories of our day and a half together. If I want advice or instruction on any other outdoor activity, he's the man I'll call. We bump elbows, say goodbye and drive off in opposite directions. 

Next stop Ben Macdui in the snow.

Find Paul at Rock n Ridge

* Longer version of wild camping law.

Wild camping

My companion raises
an eyebrow but says nothing, as another manly moan escapes my aching body. Soft words and sympathy are not part of Paul's job on this trip. 

Taking me up to the Scafell range, pushing me on if he has to, and showing me how to survive overnight in what promises to be seriously sub-zero temperatures, despite the fact that the sun this morning is blazing down from a big blue sky ... are. 

Having grown up in the Ayrshire countryside, not far from Glen Afton, I'd done lots of running and walking in the hills, over the years, without feeling the need for outdoor activity lessons. Seemed like asking someone to teach me how to breathe. But having reached the ripe old age of none-of-your-business without ever camping in the wild, I got a craving to try it last year while reading Nan Shepherd's 'The Living Mountain'. I wanted to experience a dawn like she describes, in which "I hardly breathe - I am an image in a ball of glass.”

I also wanted to push myself a little, scare myself a bit, without doing anything as stupid as detaching my retinas by diving head-first off a cliff with an elastic band round my ankles. I'd tried Go Ape in the Trossachs, with a friend, which isn't scary but is exhilarating, especially the initial 400 metre zip-wire over a wooded valley. I'd gone coasteering, which allowed us to pose in figure-hugging wetsuits and jump off cliffs into the sea. 

But feeling enough fear to push past, I've found, gets more difficult as the years tick away and emotional scar tissue hardens into the imprint of experience. Just one source of terror from earlier times might, I suspect, still be in there, biding its time to turn my palms wet and my legs wobbly. The scent of tobacco smoke can still carry me back to black nights with the wind howling, when my Dad would come upstairs and lie beside me, his strong presence soothing my fears and helping me drift off to sleep. 

Yep, as a wee boy I was scared of the dark. Imagination conjured monsters from the night. So spending one inside a small tent up a mountain, when you can't see but can hear what's sneaking up on you, may well trigger some of that atavistic dread. Good. That's what I'm looking for. 

The expedition gets off to a shaky start, however, when I don't find Paul until an hour later than we'd agreed, by which time I'm feeling agitated, having misread the map, parked in the wrong place and got to wondering if I'm going to balls up my keenly anticipated but long Covid-delayed expedition before it starts. 

When we eventually do meet up, exactly where Paul said he'd be, I am reassured by his soft Yorkshire accent and air of calm competence, as he shows me how to insert the tent, stove and saucepan he's brought for me into a rucksack I thought was already packed as tight as six badgers in a biscuit tin. 

That done we head off into upper Eskdale, past a pair of tiny black lambs whose large eyes and plaintive bleats make us both go a little soppy. I think I'm going to like this guy. But I'm already beginning to hate my backpack. Paul is moving light and easy, while I trudge along behind, trying to get the hang of walking with a small, knobbly horse on my back. 

It's a gorgeous morning, the Esk below us sparkling white as it rushes over rocks, and translucent green where deep, inviting pools collect the icy waters from the mountains. We pause briefly beside one of these, for a cup of tea and a chat about the other activities Paul offers.

Besides wild camping, these include navigation, abseiling, rock climbing, via ferrata, canoeing, winter skills and a host of others, including ghyll scrambling. 

"You've heard of canyoning," Paul explains. "Well ghyll scrambling is similar except you go upstream instead of down. It's a lot of fun."

"Do you have to carry a rucksack?" I ask.

"No," he tells me.

"I'm in."

(To be continued.) 

Find Paul at RocknRidge