Wherever I wander, wherever I rove / The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.
Robert Burns
These mist covered mountains / Are a home now for me.
Dire Straits
i.
When I last visited Glenshee Ski Centre, I was in the final year of my GCSEs. Last year I finally got the chance to return. I’d forgotten how wonderful skiing in Scotland could be, on the right day. Propitiously, the conditions for skiing were excellent: little wind, fresh powder, unbroken blue skies. Chipper lifties listening to Creedence’s ‘Fortunate Son’. I even saw a snow hare flitting over the tundra, one more memory to add to the others. A happy occasion, one that felt akin to a homecoming of sorts.
The previous visit to Glenshee wasn’t quite so romantic. The snow was brittle with ice particles. Low lying cloud shrouded slopes which were pock-marked with weather-ravaged patches of rock. The wind was so brutal it laced its way into the jacket and caressed the skin with icy fingers. A particularly violent squall blew one of my skiing companions over, and after she cracked her head on one of the wooden fences lining the pistes, she was brought down from the mountain in a pistie beastie. The two of us vowed never to ski there again, returning to Blairgowrie, where we drank into the wee small hours. The next day we nursed hangovers in the bar of the Angus Hotel, slurping Jack and coke and sharing cigarettes, while our respective fathers gave Glenshee one last go. I was sixteen years old, and life was a permanent vacation with no place in it for such extreme travails.
Returning, it is plain to see much has changed. Passing through Blairgowrie, as is customary on the A93 from Perth, an air of prosperity hung over this familiar, yet foreign, town. New shops, houses, industrial sheds and timeshares had sprung up. The Angus had been given a lick of paint, although the bar next door, where my friend and I soused our adolescent selves, had disappeared. Blairgowrie itself has more than a touch of Scotch grittiness, a washed-out greyness: the effect of persistent rain on pebble-dash. With a plethora of shops touting tartan shortbread, its high street was far removed from the chain-store ubiquity of most English towns.
Beyond Blairgowrie, the effects of the slump in tourism that forced Glenshee and its sister ski area Glencoe into administration in 2004 were painfully apparent. As we as we progressed along the A93, rising up into the monadock hills towards the ski centre, Blairgowrie’s bustling centre yielded to roadside bleakness, places left to wrack and ruin, a trail that tourism forgot. The scars were still raw: several restaurants and pubs on the road to the ski area had closed, apparently recently, their glass windows punctured by holes the shape and size of a fist.
Just before reaching the ski centre we passed the wrecked shell of the Spittal of Glenshee Hotel, ruined by fire in 2014, just a few years after a major refurbishment. Once a popular destination, and for me a talismanic landmark en route to the slopes, it was a depressing sight.
Scottish skiing finds itself in a bedevilling predicament. On a great day, the landscape can make homegrown skiers forget the expensive and overcrowded Alpine resorts. On a bad day, the weather will make them wish they’d never been born.
Working as a liftie at any of the Scottish ski areas must be one of the toughest jobs in Scotland. It’s also one of the most precarious. Glenshee Ski Centre employs over 100 people, but if there’s no snow, there’s little work.
Nevertheless, Scottish skiing appears to be undergoing something of a renaissance. Glenshee’s management company reported over 83,000 visitors in February alone this year. Major investments, such as a Scottish Enterprise-funded three-man chairlift costing £800,000, have followed significant investment, including a new funicular railway, over at the rival Cairngorm Ski Centre.
At Glenshee there are no magic carpets, no ski-to-the-door chalets, very few Hooray Henrys, zero vin chaud, and, as you have to drive off the mountain, absolutely no apres-ski table dancing in a Jägermeister-induced haze. Instead of igloo-styled ice bars built into the slopes, there is a caravan which has been blown onto its roof by the punishing wind.
It is perhaps the only place where you can find anything remotely resembling a unique, utterly authentic and pleasantly unpretentious skiing experience.
What it’s all about.
ii.
For many, this paean to the joys of skiing may fall on wilfully deaf ears. Some, quelle horreur, actively detest the sport.
The anti-skiing brigade usually fall into two camps: those who find the notion of throwing yourself down a mountain with only some bits of wood strapped to your feet entirely alien, and those of a more Marxist bent, who resent it as the preserve of the aspirational bourgeoisie. Both critiques are fair, and fairly accurate.
The 2014 film Force Majeure, for example, uses skiing as a metonym for the icily ambivalent and self-indulgently narcissistic impulses which exemplify the behaviour and attitudes of our atomised contemporary epoch.
And it is true that many European ski slopes are now cluttered with effete, self-aggrandising imbeciles. It would be easy to attribute the rising cost of one week ski pass (£200) to the socio-economic influence of the global super-rich, but skiing and affluence have always gone hand in hand, most notably in its role as a highly visible signifier of wealth and status during the 1970s and 1980s.
Its increasing expense today has simply returned it to the domain of the very wealthy and their entitled offspring – in other words, those who popularised the sport in the first place. The rise and rise of the Anglo-centric Alpine music festival further indicates this shift from genteel leisure activity to raucous, uber-cool hedonistic retreat for the Rich Kids of Instagram. Book yourself on a quiet week in Les Trois Vallees today, and chances are you’ll end up sharing a chairlift with three dickheads on a stag do.
I equate skiing with total freedom – no small irony given the amount of equipment you need to get up and down the mountain – a spiritually-neutral Dasein drawn from its pure physicality – the balanced mechanics of sweeping effortless arcs through the snow – and one’s proximity to the Sublime: the magisterial mountains, the absolute stillness, their icy air. A frozen wilderness soothing the tortured psyche of the urbanite: “above all summits it is calm”, to quote Goethe.
Skiing was once such a significant part of my life that its absence now feels akin to the loss of a limb, or a loved one. It was – still is – the only thing I can do with any degree of confidence, competence and skill. I was lucky enough to start skiing when I was just five years old, and as I family we usually spent one week per year in France or Austria, plus a weekend in Scotland. I spent a number of years as the only English-speaking child in ski school, until I was old enough to join the adults skiing. Through a process of teaching, emulation and terror I became a competent, though completely uncompetitive, skier.
After my ski season, however, I skied a further three times in the following years. After that, a decade passed before I skied again. But it’s like riding a bike: you don’t forget. And, let’s be clear, its infinitely superior.
A high wind doth blow.
iii.
After my father was bitten by the skiing bug in the early 1980s, he gravitated from skiing the paltry hills outside Buxton towards braving the feral climate of Scotland, with the eventual aim of seeing the blissful, sunkissed Alps. Ski Sunday was a mainstay of our TV viewing on the weekend, slotting into a schedule that included the Antiques Roadshow, Songs of Praise, Heartbeat and poorly-roasted beef. We’d watch Permin Zubriggen, Peter Wimsberger, Franz Klammer, Marc Girardelli and the British Bell brothers attempting terrifyingly-precipitous downhill races, their excessively elongated planks chattering over a course that seemed to consist solely of rutted hard-pack ice. Very occasionally, we might catch a Bond Film on the TV, usually The Spy Who Loved Me or For Your Eyes Only, both of which help sell the glamour, and danger, of skiing to the British public.
My parents and their friends the Stubbses on their first, foolhardy trip to Glenshee. Note the lack of warm and waterproof clothing. And the smiling faces, which suggest that they haven’t been further than the car park.
Every March a crop of steely-eyed Round Tablers – the majority from Sandbach and Tarporley – would decamp to Blairgowrie for their annual weekend of downhill racer emulation and, rumour has it, wife swapping. This annual shindig came to be dubbed the Round Table Skiing Weekend, but skiing was normally fairly low on the list of priorities after drinking, dancing, snogging your mate’s wife (allegedly) and wallowing in regret. The Saturday night was always fairly debauched: a boozy gala dinner in the basement of the Angus, followed by dancing to local band The Stingrays and their repertoire of mid-1980s MOR hits – their dancefloor gyrations every bit as bad as their ski technique.
My father was made of stronger stuff. He was all about the skiing, and rarely let a hangover get in the way. Our family usually made the journey to Scotland from south Cheshire at high speed in his crimson Saab 900 early on the Friday morning – pausing briefly at Lockerbie for a hastily-consumed Little Chef Breakfast – before winding our way through Perth to hit the slopes before lunch (dropping off my ski-agnostic mother and little brother in Blairgowrie). A supplementary stop would be made just outside Glenshee to hire ski equipment for me: painfully uncomfortable red Nevica boots, ancient Dynastar skis whose base had been scored and gouged by glacial rock, and a pair of unbranded and bent ski poles of differing height which looked as though they had been recently mangled under the wheels of a pistie beastie.
The winding journey from Blairgowrie to the Glenshee ski area frequently left me suffering from acute car sickness, courtesy of my father’s enthusiastic/aggressive/irresponsible driving and the rear seatbelts of the Saab, which were perfectly engineered to squeeze the contents from a child’s stomach. By the time we arrived I was almost senseless with nausea. We’d hastily pull on our ski gear on the sleet and wind-lashed car park (garish all-in-ones from C&A, Carrerra goggles and Gore-Tex headbands) before clip-clomping like marionettes to buy our lift passes and ascend by poma into the vicious winds whipping the sugar-like snow off the slopes and sandblasting our exposed faces.
The A93 bisects the Glenshee ski area, separating it into the valleys off Glas Maol and Meall Odhar, or the slopes off Cairnwell or Carn Aosda. Glas Maol boasts a 2K red run, which feels like 10K if skiing into a stiff headwind. There is no back country skiing to speak of. Anyone who goes off-piste will find themselves lost on the monadocks, facing a long walk home along the A93, or near-certain death. Skiing in Scotland is particularly hard work, frequently verging on the lethal. One of my dad’s friends, Paul Stubbs, broke his leg in an innocuous fall on an early visit. A few years later, the same guy tried to ski across a patch of mud, only for his skis to suddenly stop and eject him face-first into that self-same peaty morass. I once attempted an off-piste short-cut only to be upended by a well-concealed patch of heather. Crashing into the piste-dividing wooden fences often comprised an acutely painful way to end the day. More inexperienced skiers in our group were frequently cracked in the face by the lashing whip of a T-bar.
In all the years we skied there good snow was rare, but such was our collective desire that we’d ski on anything, in anything: the slithers of slush on Sunnyside, the wind-blasted sheet ice of the Tiger (the terrifying black run that I still haven’t tackled), patches of heather and grass. Mud. One family decked their kids out in sailing gear, the only way to keep the horizontal rain from reaching their skin.
iv.
In the late 1980s my father bought week in a timeshare at Craigendarroch, near Balmoral, a purchase which coincided with a protracted period of snowlessness in the Highlands. It sounded the death knell for our Scottish skiing adventure, and we rarely donned our gear on that wind-coursed car park again. Passing slowly along the A93 we’d stare wistfully at the immobile poma tows, the half-empty café, the desultory cars in the carpark. It could have been the summer, but more often than not it was February, the make-or-break month for the ski centre’s coffers.
Those journeys north of the border gave me my first sense of place, of the geographical constitution of the United Kingdom and the mythical power of the Scottish Highlands. The landscape and climate began to change around Cumbria, so that by the time you hit Gretna you sensed a geo-political shift. (That, and the massive sign saying ‘Welcome to Scotland’ presaging the anti-English roadside graffiti.) Vehicles became stouter and more mud-bespattered – a reflection of their agrarian-utilitarian purpose. The roads became more winding, the surfaces more uneven, the monadocks bleakly beautiful. The A93, a former military road itself became a palimpsest of previous journeys and past experiences, future hopes.
I loved the Highlands. They spoke to me in a way I didn’t yet understand.
My emotional bond with the landscape was reinforced by my old man’s music selection: the effect-laden atmospherics of Dire Straits, and the gruff vocals and sharp guitar work of Chris Rea. Dad-rock in every sense. (Clarkson-rock if you want to be hypercritical.) On those repeated journeys we soaked up our musical diet of Brothers in Arms and New Light Through Old Windows, the lachrymose lyrics and lugubrious licks of two songwriters from the north east appropriately encompassing the panoramas of the Cairngorm peneplain.
I now find myself wondering whether there is a deliberate intertextual link between Brothers in Arms and Robert Burns’ poem, ‘My heart is in the Highlands’. There’s a certainly visual connection between the Cairngorms and the rocky outcrops of the Falklands, the conflict which Mark Knopfler sought to commemorate with his song. Knopfler’s fascination with the historical-mythological power of Gaelic landscapes found its first expression in the soundtracks to the films Local Hero and Cal, both of which were produced prior to the production of Brothers in Arms, and which helped define that album’s epic sound.
We listened to those records over and over, almost obsessively. Poring over the tiny lyrics printed in the gatefold sleeves of the two cassettes, I had my first encounter with lyrical poesy. Staring out of the window, I saw poetry of a different kind. There is an emotional bond in those songs, my inability to listen to ‘Brothers in Arms’, ‘Why Worry’ or even ‘Stainsby Girls’ without a well of emotion rising: being back there again, in the lap of my family, a young boy sick with excitement, ready to clip on his skis, whatever the weather. And beyond that, the hard-fought history of the Highlands, the impact of the Clearances, the enduring battle between individual communities and the environmental-economic realities of their age, within which tourism and the ski industry play but a small part.
Despite all the blood, sweat, tears and mud, there is nowhere I’d rather ski than Glenshee. So when my kids are of skiing age, that’s where I’ll be taking them. Not because I can’t afford to go anywhere else (I can’t), but because if you can ski in Scotland you can ski anywhere. Indeed, sometimes you will wish you were skiing absolutely anywhere else. But there’s only one place like it. Next time it snows heavily over Scotland, get up early, take the car and go. See for yourself. And make sure you take a nip of whisky. You’ll need it.
Skiing on concrete. That’s me on the right.