On Skye’s Cuillin ridge, Bethan Roberts finds commonality between motherhood and the mountainous landscape.

I’m sitting on the couch when a friend sends me the details for ‘Couch to Cuillin’. I’d spent many hours on this couch since moving to Skye and becoming a mother — learning how to breastfeed, breastfeeding, looking out to sea, all at sea, more breastfeeding. After three years it felt like the time to get off the couch and into the hills. I liked the ethos behind ‘Couch to Cuillin’ — a four-day course run by local Skye Adventure specifically aimed at people living locally. This wasn’t about guiding tourists, a ticket to bag another Munro or to get a picture scaling the Inaccessible Pinnacle. It was about engaging with place in a different, more meaningful way, gaining the skills and confidence to get out into an intimidating landscape. With the added aim, of course, of getting up on to the ridge itself. 

For the Cuillin ridge is known for its ability to intimidate, to unnerve even the most experienced mountaineer. The Cuillin were the last of Britain’s mountains to be climbed. Sometimes termed Britain’s Alps, the ridge zigzags across twelve kilometres in twenty-two peaks, never dropping below 2,500 feet, with fourteen of its peaks rising to over 3,000. The Inaccessible Pinnacle is the only Munro in Scotland that requires a rock climb to reach the summit, and much of the ridge requires — often dizzyingly exposed — rock climbing. This is Sorley MacLean’s ‘Rocky terrible Cuillin’, the ‘grim Cuillin’, ‘The great dim sea of gabbro waves, / Knife—edge of high narrow ridges, / Belt of the dark steel surge: / an ocean whose welter is tight in rocks’. 

This is a landscape formed and forged by violent forces, fire and ice. It’s a story of continents ripping apart, of fissures and fractures, the formation of volcanos. The opening of oceans. Ice gouging and tearing, frost shattering. Into ridges, drops, crests, pinnacles, boulders, scree. A different story is that the Sun flung down his spear, scorching the earth in a huge blister which grew and grew until it burst, and the Cuillin were formed as a molten mass, glowing and smoking for many months. I can’t help but hear the echoes of the experience of birth in the Cuillin’s story of transformation upon transformation, the violence, the ripping apart – of rock, of self – that’s made this landscape on which I now stand, some might say, transformed. 

This was the mountain home of the Amazonian warrior Scáthach and her daughter Uathach. Scáthach taught Cúchulainn, hero of the Irish Ulster cycle, how to fight and from her he mastered his famous aggressive leap. She gave him his spear, the Gàe Bulga. He gained ‘the friendship of her thighs’. Her name might mean shadow, shade, shelter, under protection of. Her name might have been given to Skye itself, Dùn Scàith.

While I’d never set foot anywhere near the ridge, I’d been there in my mind. The accounts I’d read built up the Cuillin into a thing to be feared, a fierce, disorientating place. Since moving to Skye, I’d found it hard to coexist with these hills, to reconcile them to my experience, especially of motherhood. They seemed to represent two different worlds — the domesticity, the endless days of caring, nurturing, drudgery; and the violent, ragged mountain world. At first the ridge was nowhere near my consciousness, I didn’t even conceive it as somewhere I’d go, or even that it was somewhere you could go. Yet, slowly, it pushed its way into my awareness. You can’t avoid it on Skye, its silhouette stamped there on the horizon, wielding its strange, intoxicating, sightline power. It was something I often wanted to get away from, especially in the early vulnerable days of motherhood. How to be with, how to be in these hills? 

I’d been up mountains, of course. Having spent most of my life between North Wales and Liverpool, Eyri — Snowdonia, was a short hop away, although I’d opt for safe, non—challenging routes: the Pyg and Miner’s tracks, rather than Crib Goch. And there was also the difference of a sense of returning home from days out in the Welsh hills, a heading back to a place tucked away from the mountains. On Skye there was none of that. While the Black Cuillin ridge wasn’t exactly on the doorstep it was always there, even when hidden in low cloud, a presence intruding on daily life. It felt different to live in the mountains’ realm. 

‘Couch to Cuillin’ comes around. We’re an all-female group and while the course isn’t exclusively for women, it has almost exclusively been taken up by women. During the course, we start off learning navigation and hill skills amidst the vivid green and unearthly landslide shapes of the Trotternish ridge in north Skye, then it’s onto mountaineering rope work and rock climbing west amid the seastacks. We get closer to the Cuillin on the third day, consolidating what we’ve learnt so far, before we head to the ridge for day four. Due to circumstances — living far from family, a lack of childcare — I’ve not been away from my daughter for more than a couple of hours at a time and have mainly socialised on Skye as a mother — at baby groups, at the park, conversations centred on sleep and tantrums. Strange, confusing, good to converse about other things — music, work, the politics of living here — to dredge up some remaining elements of self. 

To get out into the Cuillin is to be faced with so much rock, right in your face, above and below, to that side and the other, sgurr upon sgurr upon sgurr upon sgurr; vast, indifferent, interminable, grey (there are definitely more than fifty shades). I have the feeling of being inside this rocky world, which was, after all, once the inside of something – the exposed magma chambers that once fed the volcano. I worry that the experience of living on Skye has hardened me. It has meant acquiring a new resilience but with that I’ve lost some of my gentleness. My softer edges eroded, I’ve become hard and brittle like the rock. Resentful. Quick to anger against the pressure of unmet needs, a lack of sleep. I’m adamant this rock is an entire landscape of grey, yet I glance down and up again at the face of a vast rocky slab and the light has shifted, illuminating an entirely new spectrum, shadow and light playing across a shoal of fragmented colours dancing in reds, purples, yellows, whites and greens. 

It’s strange to enter into that 2D shape, the silhouette stamped onto the horizon and imagination. As we walk in its cracks open, emerging into 3D around me, yielding its mountain language of gully, coire, slab and scree, emerging into the detail of grasses and mosses, saxifrage and curling black caterpillars. We are heading up to Sgurr a Mhadaidh, peak of the fox, part of a kilometre-long ridge within the ridge, running north-east to south-west over four tops, of which Sgurr a Mhadaidh is the highest. It’s a long and pleasant walk in from the Glen Brittle roadside, following the banks of the Allt a’Choire Ghreadaidh, a tributary of the river Brittle. Compasses don’t work out here in this disorienting place due to the magnetism of the rock, so following written description is the main way to navigate and much of this is done via the way water writes the landscape — river, gorge, tributary, pool and gully. Water pushing its way down to the sea as we follow it up. We ascend past a gorge and a natural waterslide, then it’s up scree to the bed of a gully, up boulders and slabby rocks. 

I enjoy the physicality of the scramble, alone in my body, with my body, with the hill — so used to being clambered on, with no physical boundaries between me and my daughter; once in, now out and all over me, tugging at my breasts, my hair, clambering round my neck up from my feet. It’s not just the physicality of course, but the mental ardour of parenting, the loss of a certain psychological freedom. Over the preceding three days of the course, the consciousness of motherhood has come and gone on my mind, periods of anxiety at being away from my daughter (the separation anxiety that no-one tells you goes both ways, confusingly, despite your desire to have time away) interweaving with periods of forgetting. As we ascend, I notice how free I feel, perhaps for the first time in over three years of motherhood. It feels, at times, strange; at others so familiar, like slipping back into a pre-existing way of being in mind, of experiencing, of moving through the world; back into my own prehistory as I walk. 

The mountains have a sound. What is that? I ask. No-one else seems to be able to hear it. At first I think it’s the scour of a waterfall, or even rockfall, but no. Can I hear the mountain? Its elemental spirit? The noise comes and goes in between a deep descending disturbing quiet. As we ascend I notice that a skylark that has been rising above us for much of the day is now below us. I never see it, wrapped in its cloak of musical invisibility, and I don’t see or hear another bird throughout the whole day. There are tales, however, of ravens’ increasing prowess at accessing supplies stored on the ridge by those making a traverse — recently they’d drunk a box of red wine, pecking the bag open. In days gone by Cuillin crows smoked the ends of cigarettes. I’m not sure which impress me more, the humans who drink and smoke up here or these hardened birds. 

We scramble up to reach An Doras — a dip in the ridge between Sgurr a’Mhadaidh and Sgurr a’Ghreadaidh. It seems entirely fitting that I step onto the ridge for the first time via An Dorus — the door. The door opens as I peep through upon the Cuillin mountain world. And then we’re on the ridge. And that’s it. The views are beautiful. Loch Coruisk spills and pools beneath, whilst other peaks and knolls loom in and out of cloud and mist. Another short section of scrambling out of the north side of An Doras and we’re onto the inclined slab that forms the summit of Sgurr a’Mhadaidh. 

I’m struck again by the shift in my positioning, to look down from rather than at the ridge from day-to-day life. There is the wonder of the ‘view’. I’m not disappointed, as such, but I’d been expecting to feel differently up here — afraid, to freak out, to want to go home. But it’s all fine, it’s all fun. Notwithstanding, there is a seriousness up here, a gravitas I’d not encountered on any other peak and a sense that all those things I’d expected lurk close by, waiting for another time. But I’d forgotten, amidst all the reading of abysses and rockfalls and human falls, that getting up high is fun. The freedom and the lightness, the shaking off of cares, mental and physical, what Nan Shepherd calls ‘feyness’. To get up high is to connect with a mountain energy, to the feeling of every other peak you’ve ever climbed. I’m giddy as a skylark. Compasses might not work up here, but I’ve gained something of my own bearings today, a re-found sense of my internal geography, my identity. Perhaps. 

Driving home, towards my daughter, the Cuillin at my back, I’m suspended between these two worlds. I look back at the ridge as I turn off towards the cottage. Do I feel differently about it? It’s still imposing, grave, but it feels more friendly, encouraging. Protective. Like it’s OK with me being here. Like it might even have my back, a bit (it does not). I’ve gone from here to there and back. I get home with a new liberated exhaustion quite separate from that of parenting. My daughter throws herself into my arms. I hold her — I am her mountain once more. The mountain holds me. Did you go up the mountain, mummy? She asks. Yes, I say. She beams. She shows me her new toy. Back we go to carving out our lives together in the mountain realm.

With big thanks to John and Sarah from Skye Adventure, and to fellow Couch-to-Cuilliners Shona, Erica and Marian. 

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Bethan Roberts is a freelance writer, researcher, and editor living on the Isle of Skye who enjoys thinking and writing about nature, literature, music and film. She is the author of ‘Nightingale’ (Reaktion Books, 2021) and is currently working on her third book, about life on the Isle of Skye.