In this extract from his book Upland: A Journey through Time and the Hills author Ian Crofton describes the ascent of Ben Nevis made by the poet John Keats in 1818, with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. They had walked on foot all the way from London to Glasgow via the Lake District, where they had climbed Skiddaw, and from Glasgow made their way north, via Loch Lomond, to Fort William.
A poet and a scientist on Ben Nevis
‘I have nothing of consequence to tell you,’ Keats wrote to his brother Tom on 3 August 1818, ‘till yesterday when we went up Ben Nevis.’ It turned out to have been an almighty effort: ‘I am heartily glad it is done – it is almost like a fly crawling up a wainscot. Imagine the task of mounting ten Saint Pauls without the convenience of staircases.’
Keats had already formed an idea that climbing the highest peaks should play a part in his plan for his career as a poet. He was still only twenty-two and had, he felt, the whole world before him. ‘I will clamber through the clouds and exist,’ he had written to Benjamin Haydon on 8 April 1818. ‘I will get such an accumulation of stupendous recollolections [sic] that as I walk through the suburbs of London I may not see them – I will stand on Mount Blanc and remember this coming summer when I intend to straddle Ben Lomond—with my Soul!’
He might have failed to climb Ben Lomond through lack of funds (he could not afford the guide’s fee), but he wasn’t going to miss what he refers to as ‘the highest mountain in Great Britain’ (although the rival claims of Ben Nevis and Ben Macdui to this title were not settled until the Ordnance Survey measurements of 1846–7). He and Brown had begun their ascent at five in the morning of 2 August, their guide suitably accoutred ‘in the tartan and cap’. Keats supplies no details of the first part of his ascent, although it seems likely the party followed the course of the Allt a’ Mhuilinn before cutting up to the Halfway Lochan: ‘After the first rise our way lay along a heath valley in which there was a loch . . .’ It is likely that Keats joined the normal tourist route from Achintee beyond the lochan: ‘After about a mile in this valley we began upon the next ascent, more formidable by far than the last, and kept mounting with short intervals of rest until we got above all vegetation, among nothing but loose stones which lasted us to the very top.’ They still had a long way to go, however: ‘We gained the first tolerable level after the valley to the height of what in the valley we had thought the top and saw still above us another huge crag which still the guide said was not the top.’ It was, Keats says, ‘an obstinate fag’, a labour unrelieved by views as now ‘there came on a mist’, which stuck with them all the way to the actual top – a not unusual occurrence on Ben Nevis. Once on the summit plateau, the mist toyed with them, sometimes parting briefly, before closing in again. ‘There is not a more fickle thing than the top of a mountain,’ Keats wrote, ‘– what would a lady give to change her headdress as often and with as little trouble!’ The going got rougher and rougher: ‘The whole immense head of the mountain is composed of large loose stones – thousands of acres.’ Their progress was tiresome and irregular: ‘We kept on ringing changes on foot, hand, stick, jump, boggle, stumble, foot, hand, foot (very gingerly), stick again, and then again a game at all fours.’ At least, he tells us, ‘it was not so cold as I expected – yet cold enough for a glass of whisky now and then.’ …
Keats was deeply impressed by the succession of great gullies – ‘chasms’ he called them, ‘great rents in the very heart of the mountain’ – cutting down the precipice on his left-hand side. ‘These chasms are 1500 feet in depth and are the most tremendous places I have ever seen – they turn one giddy if you choose to give way to it. We tumbled in large stones and set the echoes at work in fine style.’
Keats’s responses to his day ‘Upon the top of Nevis blind in mist’ were recorded in a sonnet he wrote shortly afterwards:
I look into the chasms, and a shroud
Vaporous doth hide them, – just so much I wist
Mankind do know of hell; I look o’erhead,
And there is sullen mist, – even so much
Mankind can tell of heaven; mist is spread
Before the earth, beneath me, – even such,
Even so vague is man’s sight of himself!
These were the uncertainties the poet realized he had been looking for, uncertainties inspired by the mists of Ben Nevis, uncertainties that informed the great works to come, including the six immortal odes of 1819. He had already, in a letter to his brothers (21 December 1817), coined the phrase ‘Negative Capability’ for the creative state the poet should allow to come: ‘Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason . . .’
The mists of Ben Nevis have triggered other resonances involving uncertainty. It was the mists of Ben Nevis that sowed the seed of an idea in the mind of a young Scottish physicist called C.T.R. Wilson, who, while working at the summit observatory in the summer of 1894, witnessed a cloud inversion and a brocken spectre. Back at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, inspired by these observations, he developed a device called a cloud chamber, a particle detector that could produce images of ionizing radiation. It went on to be used to discover subatomic particles such as the positron and the muon. Subatomic particles belong to the quantum world, the counter-intuitive, topsy-turvy world in which the predictability of Newtonian mechanics no longer applies, a world of such uncertainties that it is not possible to simultaneously determine the position and the momentum of a particle – which is anyway not just a particle, but at the same time also a wave. The everyday, common-sense world of cause and effect, of thing and not-thing, is crumpled up and thrown away…
A cloud inversion witnessed by the author while climbing Gardyloo Gully in January 1987
Keats did not long survive his ascent of Ben Nevis. ‘I felt it horribly,’ he writes at the end of the letter to his brother Tom. ‘’Twas the most vile descent – shook me all to pieces.’ Before signing off, he confesses, ‘My sore throat is not quite well . . .’ Although on his Scottish tour he had shown himself a fit and sturdy walker, he had suffered from a bad cold, so bad that, rather than proceeding to John o’ Groats as planned, he returned by boat from Inverness to London. There he continued to nurse his brother Tom, who was sick with tuberculosis. It is likely that Keats contracted the disease from Tom, who died that December. In less than three years the poet himself was dead. He was only twenty-five.
Two years later, in Don Juan, Byron blamed Keats’s death not on disease, but on a dismissive review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine:
’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.
A life snuffed out leaves little more than a trace, the ripple across the surface of a lochan, footsteps kicked in the snow, a path left in a cloud chamber by something shimmering through, perhaps a particle, perhaps a wave, certainly something – some thing, or no thing – that is radiant for a moment.
And then it’s gone.
Upland: A Journey through Time and and the Hills is published by Birlinn on 1st May