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But this was only the first. As it would go, fifteen more mountains lay ahead – each with its own challenge, its own particular conditions, feel and story to tell. Beinn Dearg wasn’t the hardest. It also wasn’t the highest. But for me this was the mountain I’d always associate with this feeling of height; of that elevated perspective you can only get from a mountain, and of the exhilaration and the fear that grips you by the stomach – the basic elements that make these places so special. In 1911 the Scottish-American naturalist John Muir wrote that ‘Nature, as a poet … becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains: beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.’

I rose, and as I did so I pushed my wet hair out of my face and felt a substantial deposit of sharp sandstone grit upon my forehead. Confused for a moment, I realised my hands had picked it up off the rock and I’d wiped it onto my brow every time I’d mopped it. I was literally sweating grit.

My eyes followed the rock at my feet up towards the ridge I’d just climbed. The stuff I was carrying down the mountain on my forehead, these mountains are made of it. That brown, course-grained sandstone is even named after the area best exhibiting it: Torridonian sandstone, they call it. The whole range has rocks made of this grit as their bedrock. It’s why Beinn Dearg is called Beinn Dearg: for the way the sun lights the brown sandstone and deepens it to red in the westerly glow of sunset. It’s famous for this.

But nobody ever tells you about the lichen. Brilliant white whorls of it, augmenting almost every rock. Unless you were on the hill you wouldn’t see it or know it was here. But up on the ridge it’s everywhere. It looks as if the mountain is pinned with white rosettes; silly little patches of prettiness adorning its hard skin.

* Which was of course said by ill-fated climber George Mallory at a lecture in 1923 when asked, ‘Why climb Everest?’ Nobody really knows what he meant, or even if he said exactly this; it could have been something profound, or it might simply have been irritation at the question. Either way, it has passed into history as the most famous three-word justification of the ostensibly pointless.

* Most famously, Sgùrr Dearg’s notorious ‘Inaccessible Pinnacle’ on the Isle of Skye. There are other summits in Britain – indeed, more on Skye – that require the use of a rope, and ability is of course subjective, but there are ways up most of our principal mountains without additional aid, certainly in summer.

PART I

SPRING

2 SPACE

It was May, and southern Britain was drowning. Winter had been hard, and spring hesitant to commit in its wake. The last six weeks had seen new lambs arrive along with the first, anaemic, blush of colour to the landscape; both were soon buried in snowdrifts. For mountain climbing, this didn’t bode well. Whilst such seasonal false starts were happening so dramatically in the valleys, the weather on the tops would be even more alarmingly fickle.

Six months after I returned from Torridon the thaw finally came – and with it rain, on a seemingly biblical scale. It was in between two of these May downpours that I went out to the garage to resume packing the bag I intended to take on the journey of sorts that, with the albeit damp foundations of spring firmly bedded, could now begin.

One of the most important aspects of this journey was my desire to see the mountains at their most wild, and experience their most extreme and dynamic moods. Happily, these conditions occurred every 24 hours without fail, and twice: sunrise and sunset. To really know a mountain you need to see it in all shades of the day and, preferably, at night – and in the high places of Britain contrasts are magnified far more than at sea level. A mountain feels intense and quite different in the dark. My plan, therefore, was to climb as many as I could at the frayed ends of the day, the time when the mountains lose the little civility they tolerate during the daylight and return to the wild. Where I could I’d sleep on them, drink from their streams, seek shelter amongst them and walk in all weathers. And whilst I’m not saying that I didn’t want to do the living-off-the-land thing and wander in with a stick, a cloak and a big knife (well, maybe I am), I was going in to enjoy the mountains, not survive them. But that still meant that a certain amount of kit was necessary.

It started out as a small bag; just the ascetic essentials for safety and warmth, crammed into a small rucksack that was light enough not to be an onerous burden, but fortified with enough to see me through any blip in the notoriously shifty mountain weather. I wanted it to be there, ready and packed – something I could stash in the car boot for deployment at any opportunity. As time passed, however, and I watched all manner of winter weather scrape by the window, additions inevitably began to creep in: another jacket, an extra pair of gloves, a second hat, my spare compass, the emergency map. There was, when walking at the extreme ends of the day, always the possibility of becoming cold or lost: and, as wild camping was on the cards, a tent – or bivvy bag, if I was feeling intrepid – a sleeping bag and a roll-mat needed to go in there, too. Now there was far too much for a little rucksack and so a larger rucksack was needed. And so on.

It’s easy to get excited about outdoor kit. The shops that sell it are little pieces of the mountains dropped into urbania; boutiques filled with shiny, purposefully robust equipment destined to become muddy and tarnished. It’s no problem at all to disappear into these places for ages. Inside, you can appraisingly touch the latest waterproof fabrics, assess the tents packed into tight nylon sausages for weight, gaze at the newest boots, and wonder what it might be like to have it all at your disposal. You’ll recoil at the price tag, but over the coming weeks you’ll come to realise that you not only want this piece of equipment but categorically need it. Every hobby has its own infectiously fetishistic side, and climbing mountains is no different. There’s something slightly gladiatorial about it; layering up with stiff, rugged fabrics and packing everything on your back that you need to self-sustain in a wild environment is a pleasing feeling. But aside from the pomp, drastic financial outlays and painful colour clashes, dressing properly is also absolutely necessary. You need to not only be warm and dry, but comfortable under considerable physical strain. It gets pretty tough out there.

I was fairly sure I was in possession of everything I needed for whatever I was about to face; the problem with our seesawing climate was knowing exactly what that was likely to be. Eventually I gave up on trying to pack the perfect bag and instead lugged the now considerable pile of clothing and kit in various states of garage-induced mustiness to the car boot. Most of it would remain there for almost a year and less than half of it would get used. But as I packed the last pieces in, it was empowering to think that I’d be comprehensively covered should I be seized at any moment by the notion to turn north in search of mountains. You can choose your cliché. To get away from it all. Escape the rat race. To get some headspace. For many who habitually head for the high, wild places, this idea of space, of solitude, is a key part of the appeal. For many, it’s the whole point.

Of the many things you get used to hearing when you live in Britain – the moans about the weather, the speed at which the government of the day is sending the country to hell on a skillet and the fact that petrol isn’t as cheap as it used to be – one gripe that’s particularly difficult to escape is how hopelessly, intolerably crowded the country is. It would be easy for an outsider to visualise Britain as a kind of unstable skiff of disgruntled, over-jostled passengers that at any moment will crack loudly and spectacularly discharge its contents into the North Atlantic. But in practice this preconception is really complete nonsense.

The next time you find yourself travelling long distance across the country, allow yourself for a moment to be struck by just how physically empty much of Britain is. We’re not talking boundless, unmolested wilderness exactly; just space. Leave London by car in most directions and minutes after you’re outside the M25, the number of buildings falls away and you’re amidst the most bewitching countryside. Even in the industrial north – where, if maps were to be believed, cities seem to spill into each other in an arc that starts at Liverpool and doesn’t really stop until Leeds – there are huge expanses of not an awful lot. There doesn’t seem to be anything sizeable at all between Lancaster and Whitby (the span of the entire country) except high, savage moorland; ditto between Carlisle and Berwick, and Newcastle and Penrith. Of course this is difficult to appreciate from King’s Cross or central Birmingham. And on the face of it, the numbers do disagree.

According to the 2011 census, 56,075,912 people live in England and Wales. This equates to just under 371 souls packed into every one of a combined 151,174 square kilometres. That’s a lot. But that’s also presuming they’re spread uniformly, which of course they’re not. The 70 most populous towns and cities in England and Wales cover a total of 7,781 square kilometres – around 5 per cent of the two countries’ total area. Into that a staggering 60 per cent of the population is shoehorned. A total of 33,899,733 people live in one of these built-up areas, which means the average population density of the remaining 95 per cent of the country exhales to a rather more spacious 154 people per square kilometre. This is a third of England and Wales’ ‘official’ population-density figure, but again in practice this is a rather misleading measure as the remaining population is also by no means evenly spread, being instead compartmentalised even more by the many thousand smaller clumps of population: big towns, small towns, villages and so on.

Scotland belongs in a different class altogether. Covering 78,387 square kilometres and home to 5,313,600 people, its average population density of 67 people per square kilometre drops to a decidedly thin 37 when the ten largest settlements – which cover just 769 square kilometres, or a fraction under 0.9 per cent of Scotland’s total area – are disregarded. So really, when you think about it, Britain consists of a small amount of space in which a huge amount of people live, and quite a lot of space where relatively few people live.

Mountains are the unconquerables. They are, in every sense, the last frontier of Britain – and its emptiest places. By their very nature, they will be the last bulwarks to be overcome by the rising flood of population and development that the gloom-mongers tell us is relentlessly on its way. Inhospitable and extreme, they’ll become refuges for those seeking escape; pointy little islands of silence and space, too awkward to be developed, too inconvenient to be home.

Of course, for those who crave calm, said solitude and escape from the very real crowding of cities, the mountains are refuges already. They’re the greatest empty spaces in a country of otherwise relatively lean dimensions. Consequently, I was keen to find a mountain that might demonstrate exactly this, a wilderness close to something, but bare of anything; a kind of accessible antithesis to claustrophobia.

I spent some time trying to find it. It needed to be a place where you could feel like the only person in existence, where the landscape around you is so limitless and free of human meddling it has the potential to redefine perspective and blow any sense of claustrophobia or overcrowding out of the system. The trouble was – and this was a happy dilemma – there seemed to be too many places to choose from.

Arthur’s Seat, standing above the spired city of Edinburgh like a spook over a child’s bed, stood at one extreme, given its striking juxtaposition of the brimming and the barren. Such is the intimacy with which the city and the peak nuzzle up against each other you could honk a horn or even open a tub of particularly delicious soup in the city and someone up on Arthur’s Seat would notice. Not just that, the visual contrast was particularly unsubtle. The roots of a long-dead volcano hewn and squashed into its present form by glaciation during the Carboniferous period some 300 million years ago, its bold profile grinning with crags made for a strikingly bare companion to the twinkly steeples and townhouses of Edinburgh. But at 251 metres it’s tiny even by British standards, and didn’t so much offer an escape from civilisation as stand proud as a podium amidst it – somewhere to gaze from a pleasing point of observation down upon the city, but never to feel truly removed from it.

Dartmoor, in the south-west of England, seemed to offer almost limitless desolation with a pleasingly eerie footnote, thick as it is with folk legend and weird, gaunt tors. Much of it sits at around 500 metres above sea level, making it surprisingly elevated for a moor; look north from its highest point at 621 metres and the next comparably lofty ground in England doesn’t crop up until Derbyshire. But a quarter of the national park – and around half of the area you would call the ‘high’ moor – is used by the Ministry of Defence, who, for a few hours most days bounce around on it in jeeps and shoot at each other with rocket launchers and other noisy things entirely unfavourable to tranquillity. To give them their due, the military look after the moor rather well in the moments they aren’t using it as a kind of Devonshire Ypres. But to me, the process of having to check access times on a website to avoid the slim possibility of being shot – or inadvertently stepping on something that might cause me to be returned home in a carrier bag – sort of defeated the object.

My search area was beginning to spiral northwards again when a news story caught my eye. Suddenly the answer was obvious, and a decision was quickly made. And fortuitously enough, the solution to this quest for space came in the form of space – albeit space of a quite different kind.

Whilst the most obvious menace with the potential to collectively rob us of quality elbow room and the balm of tranquillity is hustle and bustle, cars, noise and overcrowding, it appears there’s another, more insidious, space thief at work in Britain. Disruptions of migrating birds, erratic breeding patterns of animals, falling populations of insects and even serious health conditions in humans are being blamed on it. I learned all of this one morning in February during a discussion on the news centred on an area of South Wales that had just become the fifth area in the world to be selected as an International Dark Sky Reserve. What this meant was that the quality of the night sky above this particular area was of such superior clarity, free of the sickly orange bleed of large population centres and their streetlights, that it not only warranted recognition, but also protection. The area was the National Park of the Brecon Beacons. The Brecon Beacons are mountains.

It made perfect sense. Where there are people there’s light, and therefore where there’s light, you can never truly be away from people or their influences. But there’s also light where there are only people some of the time: roads, warehouses, industry, infrastructure. Subtle though it is, understanding this relationship between human-manufactured light and the night sky will lead you to the emptiest parts of Britain.

During idle moments over the next few weeks I learned some interesting things about light pollution. I learned that light that falls away from the area where it’s needed or wanted is called ‘stray light’ and an unwanted invasion of this – be it a washed-out night sky with stars lost to the amber haze of a nearby town or the clumsily angled floodlight on your neighbours’ wall that lights up your bedroom like an atomic flash every time a cat walks under it – is given the apt term ‘light trespass’. Lighting used to throw dramatic illumination on a building or object is called ‘accent lighting’, and I also learned that all of these are in general bad news to lovers of dark skies and given the neat collective term ‘night blight’. One of the worst-afflicted places on the planet is Tsim Sha Tsui in Hong Kong, where the level of light has over 1,200 times the value defined as the international standard for a dark sky.* The facility where this is measured is, with unfortunate irony, the Space Museum. I also learned – thanks to a charming organisation called the International Dark Sky Association – that an unspoiled sky is visually packed with stars right down to the horizon and the starlight is strong enough to cast noticeable shadows on land. In such conditions, picking out individual constellations is almost impossible to the untrained eye given their sheer abundance above.

I also learned that, perhaps surprisingly, Britain has some of the largest areas of dark sky in Europe. This was illustrated by a natty map of the United Kingdom as if seen from space, with clumps of heat-signature colour spread over the country like an outbreak of digital pox. The largest population centres – London, Liverpool and Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow – were coloured an angry red, surrounded by a scab of yellow, gradually fading into pale blue. The areas of least pollution were deep navy, tonally seamless with the sea. On land, the places where these were darkest and most extensive were the mountains. Scotland blended with the sea just north of Stirling. The Pennines, the Southern Uplands of Scotland, the moors of the south-west, and the Lake District were all dark – as were blanket swathes of Wales.

The population-density maps had been one thing, but I hadn’t seen anything quite so starkly illustrative of this idea of mountain ranges as islands – or voids – amidst British civilisation. This map cut through the intricate camouflage of daylight, highlighting human intrusion like phosphorescence in a murky lake: a true map of British space. And a week into May, with my eye on the weather I picked the best of a bad bunch of moonless days and headed for South Wales, to spend the night on top of the mountain – all being well – that lay beneath some of the darkest, most spacious skies on the continent.

The mountains of the Brecon Beacons – like most British mountains – are totally unique. The name rather evocatively comes from the signal fires once lit on their summits to warn of approaching English raiders. But whilst many other mountains wear the suffix of ‘Beacon’ across the land, none is quite like the Beacons of Brecon. None is even a bit like them.

Such is the ancient, much-brutalised geology of the British Isles, that every bit of land sticking its neck up has been battered by a particular something, in a particular manner, at a particular point on its long journey, marking it as different to mountains not that distant from it. That’s why British mountains have long been of interest to geologists: they are some of the most scrawled-on and kicked-about creations nature has ever sculpted, and they wear these signatures like scars.

The Beacons are a perfect case in point. From a distance, as you approach from the direction of south-west England, their character is clearly seen. They look like they’ve been finely carved from wood by a carpenter with an eye for nautical lines; all elegant scoops, gorgeously concave faces and wedged prows, a natural symmetry that seems somehow too symmetrical to be natural. These ingredients rise, gently but inexorably steepening towards the 900-metre contour line, whereupon they are abruptly sliced flat, as if by plane and spirit level. Their characteristic form is best demonstrated by the highest massif – the ‘Brecon Beacons’ themselves, the central trio of Pen y Fan, Cribyn and Corn Du – but all of these startling mountains display the same touch. The other visible hallmark is their cladding: these are not cragged and hard-skinned like the mountains of Glen Coe or Torridon, or even Snowdonia. All have coats of horizontally ridged green corduroy, the edges of which catch the first winter snows and hold the last, striping the mountains white. Where paths have worn through, the mountains beneath bleed sandstone a vivid, Martian red. The flat ‘billiard’ tops exhibited by the most distinctive of these mountains are the remnants of ‘plateau beds’ – a much grittier, harder sedimentary layer that has been chewed into the air by weathering, then resisted further attack. If the mountains look as if they’ve been cut flat it’s because, in a manner of speaking, they have.

These central mountains are the most frequently climbed of the Brecon Beacons, and are rewarding and accessible to all. The drops are huge, the views immense, the sense of achievement fulfilling and the aesthetic tremendous. But it wasn’t Pen y Fan I was here to climb. At each of the park’s extremes lie two ranges that confusingly share the promising (promising if you’re in search of a lovely dark night sky, anyway) name of Black Mountain. Well, they almost share it: the Welsh names for each reveal the subtlety lost in their English translation. One lies close to the English border in the east, and is a high but inauspicious collection of moorland summits bearing the collective name the Black Mountains (Y Mynyddoedd Duon). The other, on the park’s spacious western fringes, bears the singular denotation the Black Mountain (Mynydd Du), and this one most definitely earns its chops in the spectacle stakes. Burly and remote, its summits are in fact the hoisted edges of an enormous, wedge-shaped escarpment, tilted into the ocean of moorland like a sinking liner.

The more specific names associated with this mountain and its features are rather bewildering, and you may have to bear with me here. Mountain toponymy – as we will continue to see anon – is not an exact science, and is often inconsistent across a relatively short distance. A summit in South Wales (Fan, Ban, Bannau, Pen) isn’t necessarily a summit in North Wales (Carnedd, Moel), although in both places a llyn does tend to be a lake, cwm a valley, craig a crag, bwlch a pass, and fach and fawr little and large, respectively. The Black Mountain as a massif is Mynydd Du; the long escarpment of the eastern flank is given the name Fan Hir, fan meaning crest. But fan can also mean peak – and there are two of these on the Black Mountain, three if you count Bannau Sir Gaer, which uses the term bannau, which is probably derived from ban, which is in turn the plural of fan. Bannau Sir Gaer means the ‘Carmarthenshire Beacon’, and this is often still known by its mixed translation Carmarthen Van, van being yet another variant of fan. Fan Foel is one summit, probably meaning ‘bald peak’; Fan Brycheiniog is the other, named after the small kingdom to which the mountain belonged in the Middle Ages. Like I said, bewildering. But if you take anything from this, make it simply the following: mountain names can be complicated. And it was remote Fan Brycheiniog – at 802 metres the highest point of the Black Mountain – that was to be my mountain of space.

The weather was, it has to be said, not good at all. The rain held off long enough for me to enjoy the sinuous roads over the border and the tentatively awakening villages and pubs as I approached Brecon. It even stayed clear enough to appreciate the tall, distinctively clipped top of Pen y Fan as I passed Brecon and headed for the empty western part of the national park. A few miles outside a little place called Trecastle, a left turn led into a long valley of arched hillsides and naked, wintered trees. The road dwindled to such a degree that I began to suspect it led nowhere, and indeed it proved more or less to do just this. It first climbed, then dropped into a scraped landscape of wide-open moorland. This was one of the barest landscapes south of Scotland. And to the west, far away across it, there it was.

The Black Mountain filled the horizon like a wall. Though it was smudged by cloud, I could just about see the top reaches, for the moment at least. I certainly wasn’t going to be reclining under an umbrella of stars tonight, that was for sure; although I’d brought a tent, my optimism of a clear night out atop the mountain had faded with every squeak of the windscreen wiper. More concerning was the wind; I could feel it whumping into the car as I sat gazing out at the grey landscape, and by the rate the weather was moving across it, things would only get rougher higher up. Trouble was, whilst camping probably wasn’t an option, it would inevitably be night in a few hours. Whether I liked it or not – and regardless of whether the weather improved – I’d definitely be coming down in the dark.

The eastern approach to the Black Mountain involves crossing over a mile of rough, stream-ridden heathland, more moor than mountain. The map says there’s a path here, and there might well be, somewhere – but it’s so indistinct amongst the soggy brown, lumpy grassland that following it would require constant concentration. It certainly didn’t register beneath my boots as I set off into the wind towards the dark cliff ahead.

The place to ascend from this direction is a gentle chink – the Bwlch Giedd – which from this direction dips the escarpment into a shallow ‘M’ shape. This passage is not easy to miss: at its bottom lies the large lake of Llyn y Fan Fawr – ‘Lake of the Big Peak’ – so named for its position directly beneath the highest point of the massif.

Walking into a strong wind filled with rain has little to recommend it other than giving a renewed appreciation for how desperately insignificant and fragile you are versus the elements. Within half an hour of staggering into the south-westerly, the left side of my body was beginning to feel the tendrils of cold moisture pushing through my clothing. The volatile time of year meant the usually insubstantial streams that required crossing on the journey west towards the mountain were thick and fast. The only ways across were by balancing on moss-slicked rocks over which water raced with unbalancing strength. One mis-step, and a lively second or so of spasmic body penduluming almost resulted in a dunking – after which I made a mental note to ensure to pack both a pole and a dry set of clothes were I to do anything this foolish again.

After an hour I very nearly gave up. The wind had grown stronger as I climbed above the sheltering hummocks, and it wasn’t long before it was pretty intolerable. Just walking was becoming hard, and more and more I took to stopping, mouth gaping, with my back against the wind for respite. Cloud was tearing across the vanishing mountainside ahead like billowing smoke, and with the gloom, thickening cloud and my rapidly chilling legs – plus the fact I hadn’t actually set foot on the mountain yet – the outing this was unfolding into bore little resemblance to the evocative plan I’d left home with. Just as I was considering abandoning it for another day and squelching back to the car the mist briefly moved, and I saw the shore and grey water of Llyn y Fan Fawr close by. I was practically at the base of the escarpment; it would be rude not to go and have a look at it. As I climbed towards the grey bulk of the mountain, a frayed path joined from the left. This was the Beacons Way, which climbed the escarpment of Fan Hir at precisely the point I was aiming for. Soon the red soil of the path was joined by a more established, slabby path, and as I followed it into the curl of the cliff, the wind – blocked by the fold into which the path was beginning to climb – fell away.

Suddenly it was quiet. I could hear my own whistly breathing, and my clothing – having spent the last hour energetically flapping – settled heavily against my skin. I was soaked.

The escarpment of Fan Hir isn’t a huge climb. In fact, given the relative tallness of the Black Mountain’s highest point, Fan Brycheiniog – at 802 metres the fourth-highest point in Britain south of Snowdonia – it isn’t much of a climb at all; from the shore of the lake to the top of Bwlch Giedd requires less than 150 metres of vertical ascent – vertical ascent being the typical measure hillwalkers use to anticipate the likely exhaustion of an objective. I’d parked the car at close to 400 metres above sea level; most of the rest had been gathered gently on the blustery walk in.

I stopped for a few minutes in the lee of the cliff, enjoying the calm and considering my options. Cloud was coming down and the darkness was deepening, robbing the distance of detail. From the top of the escarpment, the route to the highest point of the Black Mountain – the trig point of Fan Brycheiniog – was less than 500 metres away. I was wet as hell. Stupidly I’d neglected to pack waterproof trousers; although the ones I wore were supposedly robustly resistant, seven years of more or less constant use had evidently depleted their ability to withstand torrential rain and wind, and everything from my hips to my ankles on my left side was numb. I’d spare warm layers in my rucksack, but they were for emergencies. What’s more, I knew that once out of this sheltered fold in the escarpment, I’d be exposed to the full temper of the bludgeoning wind – wind that, quite possibly, would have the muscle to blow me clean off the top of the mountain.

I should really have called it quits, but I decided to push on to the top of the escarpment – or until my natural shelter ran out, whichever came first. If I stuck my head above the top and it was too blustery, I could turn round and climb back down without being mugged of dignity. Whether it’s Mount Everest or a Brecon Beacon, the basic physiology of a mountain can’t be argued with: the summit is only halfway home, and overstretching yourself before you’ve even made it there is usually a bad idea.