 |
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
gncxx King-Size Canary
Great Old One Joined: 25 Aug 2001 Total posts: 13555 Location: Eh? Gender: Male |
 Posted: 06-10-2013 19:12 Post subject: |
 |
|
|
| A friend of my mum's, her daughter's fiancé disappeared while out walking alone in the Scottish countryside. He was never found, not even a body. The moral being, always tell someone where you're going or leave a note. |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
| escargot1 Joined: 24 Aug 2001 Total posts: 17895 Location: Farkham Hall Age: 4 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 06-10-2013 20:36 Post subject: |
|
|
|
That's really awful. To think that he most probably came to harm out there, and might have been lying injured for however long, waiting for help that didn't come. 
Reminds me of that builder who died a few years back, after going off in December to do couple of jobs on a house he was renovating. He fell off the roof or something, broke several limbs and and froze to death over xmas. Nobody looked for him because he often went off to do work on his own and wasn't too fussed about turkey. 
At least his body was found though. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| Spookdaddy Cuckoo Joined: 24 May 2006 Total posts: 3923 Location: Midwich Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 06-10-2013 20:43 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| gncxx wrote: | | A friend of my mum's, her daughter's fiancé disappeared while out walking alone in the Scottish countryside. He was never found, not even a body. The moral being, always tell someone where you're going or leave a note. |
In the days before internet I remember reading a story in a newspaper supplement about a young man from an urban backgound whose first experience of open spaces was a camping trip in the Scottish Highlands. It was clear that his introduction to this totally unfamiliar landscape deeply affected his mood and behaviour - as if the relative enormity of the spaces around him started to erode his sense of self. Eventually he just walked off and never returned. There was a sense that he almost literally disappeared - and that the process had actualy begun as soon as he entered that environment.
The story really affected me at the time - back then I still entertained delusions of authorship and spent ages trying to work a narrative around the event.
Over the years I've done quite a lot of solo hiking and camping around Scotland, and many times I've stood in an entirely isolated spot - maybe on Rannoch moor, or up around Knoydart, or on a misty morning on the shores of Loch Ossian - and wondered what happened to that boy and whether I, or any of us, are actually that far removed from him.
I've never been able to find any information about the case since then, and although I used to be a compulsive note-taker and archiver of articles that piqued my interest, I've never found anything that related to the story in my old files - which makes me wonder sometimes whether I imagined the whole thing.
(For compulsive searchers, or those with good memories - my own insists it was some time in the mid 80's, and that the young man was from a council estate in Reading.) |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| Cochise Great Old One Joined: 17 Jun 2011 Total posts: 1104 Location: Gwynedd, Wales Age: 58 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 07-10-2013 08:15 Post subject: |
|
|
|
Glencoe and Rannoch moor are truly disturbing to many of us townies, I think. Certainly if seen on a lowering overcast day or at twilight.
It might be the history but maybe more the emptiness.
However, back to the topic, I can quite understand why a search in the US is not going to search _every_ lake in a state - it wouldn't be practical. You'd search the area where people were expected to have gone and no more. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 07-10-2013 08:48 Post subject: |
|
|
|
I ran a youth hostel once, right up in the heart of one of the Highlands big glens. The track through had once been one of the old coffin routes and led from the the West coast right through to the East. The chances some people took were extraordinary. One couple came up from the loch, around the East side and took a wrong fork in the path, heading around the wrong hill into a different, completely empty, glen that headed due north with nothing and nobody for twenty miles or more. Luckily, they must have realised they were heading in the wrong direction when the track petered out and they made their way back around the hill, eventually finding the hostel much later than they'd intended, as light was really failing. The girl was really fuming, blaming the guy's piss-poor map reading skills. I think the two of them got a hell of a fright.
Easily done. I had quite a few Germans through. They used to point out the major difference between the Scottish Highlands and a lot of European wilderness areas, which are usually all very well signposted, with almost too many signs and warnings. Whereas, when you wandered off the road in Scotland, you could be pretty much on your own, with only an OS map, a compass and the stars to guide you, if you were lucky.
People heading off into the hills wearing trainers and not even carrying a coat. The weather would be nice down in the towns, but completely different up in the hills. Trapping the unwary tourist. Guys going mountaineering without checking the weather forecasts that had been warning of a major storm all the previous week. They nearly drowned when their campsite by a quiet mountain stream suddenly turned in to a raging torrent. They lost everything, but the clothes they stood up in. I'm surprised there aren't more disappearances. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| Spookdaddy Cuckoo Joined: 24 May 2006 Total posts: 3923 Location: Midwich Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 07-10-2013 09:47 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| Pietro_Mercurios wrote: | | People heading off into the hills wearing trainers and not even carrying a coat. The weather would be nice down in the towns, but completely different up in the hills. Trapping the unwary tourist. Guys going mountaineering without checking the weather forecasts that had been warning of a major storm all the previous week. They nearly drowned when their campsite by a quiet mountain stream suddenly turned in to a raging torrent. They lost everything, but the clothes they stood up in. I'm surprised there aren't more disappearances. |
It's sobering to think that the formation of the first Mountain Rescue Committee in the UK was actually in the Peak District in the late 1920's.* Sobering because the Peak, although very wild and rugged in areas, is relatively much less isolated or removed from urban centres (actually, of course, that's part of the problem). This is an area with a relatively high rural population and barely thirty miles from busy city centres (and paradoxically, no mountains - lot's of hills, but no mountains). If, in such a place as this, there's so much opportunity to get into trouble that people had to get together to formalise a response, imagine what it's like when you get truly isolated.
As a guy I trained with many years ago said - it doesn't matter if you're ten miles from the nearest hospital or a hundred, we take up the same amount of space, and the circumstances of that space and the reasons that brought you there can make any idea of distance, proximity and the relative safety you think such elements might entail, utterly irrelevant.
| Quote: | | I ran a youth hostel once, right up in the heart of one of the Highlands big glens. The track through had once been one of the old coffin routes and led from the the West coast right through to the East. |
Not Glen Affric, by any chance?
*Edit: There were of course groups of people all over the country who undertook rescues before this, but as far as I know this was the first attempt to create a standing system of organised response. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 07-10-2013 10:05 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| Spookdaddy wrote: | ...
Not Glen Affric, by any chance?
... |
Beautiful, but dangerous. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| Ronnor Yeti Joined: 23 Oct 2009 Total posts: 81 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 07-10-2013 11:09 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| If it was Glen Affric then you may very well have known my Auntie and Uncle, who lived there until the mid 90s. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 07-10-2013 11:35 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| Ronnor wrote: | | If it was Glen Affric then you may very well have known my Auntie and Uncle, who lived there until the mid 90s. |
Where? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| Ronnor Yeti Joined: 23 Oct 2009 Total posts: 81 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 07-10-2013 11:54 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| Plodda Lodge, which is just along the forest track from the ruins of Guisachan House, a few miles from Tomich. My family spent every Christmas up there with them when it was their home but I believe the house subsequently became some sort of hippy retreat. My grandparents lived in Cannich too, so I've spent plenty of time in Glen Affric! |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 07-10-2013 12:01 Post subject: |
|
|
|
I don't think so. I spent most of my time in and around the hostel at Alltbeithe. Just headed into Cannich for supplies, about once a week. Meant a lot of hitching and walking. No real time for side-track visits to Tomich, or dawdling. It's more than twenty years ago, too. Amazing area, though.
 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| Spookdaddy Cuckoo Joined: 24 May 2006 Total posts: 3923 Location: Midwich Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 07-10-2013 12:24 Post subject: |
|
|
|
I'm not a stalker, by the way - just got a kind of picture of it in my head when you mentioned the east/west path and the coffin road.
Never stayed there - but I've walked past it a couple of times. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 07-10-2013 15:02 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| Spookdaddy wrote: | ...
Never stayed there - but I've walked past it a couple of times. |
Considering how much it costs to stay there, these days. Walking past would probably be the sensible option. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| Cochise Great Old One Joined: 17 Jun 2011 Total posts: 1104 Location: Gwynedd, Wales Age: 58 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 08-10-2013 09:34 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| Pietro_Mercurios wrote: |
People heading off into the hills wearing trainers and not even carrying a coat. The weather would be nice down in the towns, but completely different up in the hills. Trapping the unwary tourist. Guys going mountaineering without checking the weather forecasts that had been warning of a major storm all the previous week. They nearly drowned when their campsite by a quiet mountain stream suddenly turned in to a raging torrent. They lost everything, but the clothes they stood up in. I'm surprised there aren't more disappearances. |
There is a track going past my house that leads up to a moor and some high ridges, plus a couple of relatively small mountains (compared to Snowdon next door). The track is fairly level as far as my house, then it gets increasingly rough. The moor up the top is not large by Scottish standards, but, although frequented by sheperds and other locals going about their business, it is relatively trackless and dotted with old quarry workings, the ridges abound in deceptive grassy slopes leading to drops of multiple hundreds of feet. It's lethal in fog and low cloud if you are unfamiliar and don't have a map and a compass. People have died up there, more frequently had to be rescued - at some risk to the rescuers , of course.
I've tried to advise people setting out that shorts and trainers are not a good idea, but they don't want to know. After all, "its a National Park, innit? I can go where I like, mister". I did manage to turn back one Jewish Orthodox family, complete with hats, who were heading up there with a baby in a pushchair. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| Mythopoeika Boring petty conservative
Joined: 18 Sep 2001 Total posts: 9109 Location: Not far from Bedford Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 08-10-2013 20:27 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| Cochise wrote: | | I've tried to advise people setting out that shorts and trainers are not a good idea, but they don't want to know. After all, "its a National Park, innit? I can go where I like, mister". I did manage to turn back one Jewish Orthodox family, complete with hats, who were heading up there with a baby in a pushchair. |
Put up an official-looking warning sign.
That's about as much as you can do, perhaps. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
