Ups and Downs (The Story of Handbook of the Scottish Hills)

By Dr E J Yeaman

My Handbook of the Scottish Hills justly claims to include ‘the first list of hills in all Scotland’. This is the story of how I conceived, developed and self-published it, with the consequent marketing, reviews and correspondence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dr E J Yeaman
• Release date: Jun 19, 2020

Dr E J Yeaman

I retired (early) and started a new career as a writer. I wrote short stories and articles. Some were published; some won prizes; some sank without trace.Having heard my stories, two friends suggested I should write for children. I’d never thought of that, although I’d spent my first career communicating with young people – as a Chemistry teacher, and running clubs for badminton, chess, table tennis and hillwalking.I tried writing for young people – and I loved it. It became my main occupation. I sent samples to publishers. One asked to see a complete story. In excitement, I sent it off. Then nothing. After four months, I rang, and was told the manuscript was being considered: I would be notified. Then more nothing. Now, after eight years, I no longer rush to the door when the letter box rattles.But I kept writing the stories because I enjoyed it so much. Until, in late 2013, I learned I could publish my stories and games as e-books. Since then, I’ve been polishing and issuing some of them. I hope everyone enjoys reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.Check out the series:C: Charades – party game – a new twist to the traditional game.D: Diagags – party game – gags written as plays for two people.M: My Story – novels – classical stories, told by the heroes.O: One-Offs – party game – guess the titles, not quite the classical ones.P: Pop Tales – short stories – inspired by 60s and 70s hit songs.Q: Quote-Outs – word games – can you deduce the missing words?S: Inside Story – novels – a boy’s adventures inside classical stories.T: Troubleshooters – novels – space adventures for young people.

Book preview

UPS AND DOWNS – THE STORY OF

HANDBOOK OF THE SCOTTISH HILLS

by

Dr E J Yeaman

THANKS to Ann Bowker, Peter Drummond, Pat Ewin (for Clem Clements), Ken Falconer and Ken Whyte for their kind permission to include their names and correspondence.

Published by EJY at Smashwords

Copyright 2020 Dr E J Yeaman

CONTENTS

1. ORIGINS

2. EARLY USES

3. APPROACHING COMMERCIAL PUBLISHERS

4. SELF-PUBLISHING – PRINTING

5. MARKETING TO SHOPS

6. REVIEWS

7. LATER MENTIONS

8. RADIO

9. LATER MARKETING

10. DEALING WITH BOOKSHOPS

11. CORRESPONDENCE – CLEM

12. OTHER NOTABLE CORRESPONDENCE

13. EPILOGUE

UPS AND DOWNS

1

ORIGINS

In the beginning were the Scottish hills. Then Sir Hugh Munro published his Tables giving all the Scottish Mountains exceeding 3000 feet in Height in the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal in 1891. After that, there were two kinds of Scottish hills – Munros (worth climbing) and others. I didn’t know of any discrimination among the others until the early 70s, when the warden of the old SYHA hostel in Crianlarich told me of another elite species – a Corbett.

At that time, I was running hillwalking clubs for young people from my school and church. Like everyone else, we ultimately aimed to conquer Munros, but twelve-year-olds need some outdoors experience first, so we started on the lower local hills. From our bases in Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, my favourite hills were Deuchary Hill (behind Dunkeld) and Clachnaben (above the Cairn o’ Mount) – testing enough for the young people, but with variety all the way, and well-defined summits. I was disappointed that no list existed of lower hills, and speculated on compiling one.

In spring 1972, I was notified of a meeting in Broughty Ferry YMCA of leaders who took young people to the hills. I assume it was a consequence of the enquiry into the Cairngorm Disaster of November 1971, when five young people and one of their leaders lost their lives in a blizzard on the Cairngorm plateau.

I went to the meeting, to an attendance of three – two from the YMCA and me. I was given a copy of the jury’s recommendations, and no doubt we discussed them, but the talk broadened, and I was given a formula for calculating the energy required for a hillwalk:

E = 100(R + 2C + 4H)

where E is the energy in kilocalories, R is the road mileage, C is the cross-country mileage, and H is the height climbed in thousands of feet.

At the time, I had no idea of the origin of that formula, but I later found a similar one in early editions of Eric Langmuir’s Mountain Leadership:

E = 100 (10 + R + 2C + 4H)

This formula is credited to Waddell (1965). In it, E is the energy expenditure over a 24-hour period, and I assume the 100 x 10 is the basic energy your body would use to maintain life, even if you never got out of bed. The energy must depend on the size of the walker. This is not specified, but the context suggests an adult male mountain-goer.

Since, as may be obvious, I like tinkering with numbers, I pounced on the formula. For several years, I used it to assess walks I had done, and walks I proposed doing. I found it consistent and useful. For several years, my hillwalking club programme included the energy estimate for each walk.

I’d like to quote a date, and say, "On that day, I started writing the Handbook." But I have no record of that. In the late 70s, however, I was keeping quite a full diary. It was mainly intended as the Troubles of a Chess Teacher, but I made passing comments on my other activities.

At that time, the Ordnance Survey were replacing their one-inch-to-the-mile maps with the metric, 1:50 000 Landranger series, and my diary records buying these as I found them, e.g. 9 (Cape Wrath) on Saturday 9th December 1978, and 12 (Thurso and Wick) on Saturday 6th January 1979. On that day, I also note: "During the week, I had the idea of writing an article for The Great Outdoors on calculations about hillwalks. What I had in mind was metric versions of Naismith and Waddell’s formulae. I would then go on to my application of the latter to grade walks according to difficulty."

The following Wednesday, I give an attempt at a metric version of Waddell – inaccurate. But, after a lot of wrestling, I finally converted the simpler formula to:

E = ¼R + ½C + 0.55H

Now E is in megajoules, R and C are in kilometres, and H is in hundreds of metres.

With a little practice, the mental arithmetic is not too hard. Add H and H/10. Halve the result. Add ½C and ¼R, rounding nonchalantly.

The diary is silent on the subject for more than three months, but I assume I was gathering data for the article by calculating the energy required for various walks, including those to the tops of hills.

That would cause me to ponder – what is a hill? It should be sufficiently separate from neighbouring hills. Then: (a) it would have a view, and (b) you would feel you were on a distinct summit, not just a shoulder of something bigger. What size of dip would give an adequate separation?

The new metric maps suggested a possible criterion – a drop of 100 m all round. After a bit of work on the maps, I reckoned that might be a suitable basic condition.

But a hill with a lesser drop could be on the end of a ridge, far from anything higher. So I added an auxiliary criterion – a summit would also qualify as a hill if it was at least 5 km (walking distance) from any higher point.

That ‘walking distance’ was an attempt to clarify what I meant. Clarify? It certainly didn’t do that. By ‘walking distance’, I meant along the watershed. That’s obvious on a ridge but, if a hill has two parallel ridges, I would usually walk round, rather than down into the dip, then up the other side. After thirty-one years, I’m glad to clear that up.

Using various Landranger maps, I tested the criteria to make sure they identified hills which seemed distinct. I visited some borderline local ones.

On Tuesday 24th April 1979, the diary records: I looked for hills on the Glen Carron map. I hope they’re not all as messy as this one!

The ‘Glen Carron map’ is Landranger 25. And a comment the following Tuesday is enlightening: I also did a bit more hill-spotting on the interminable Map 25 for my book.

That’s the first reference to my intention to produce the book. One more trial is recorded. On Wednesday 2nd May: I spent much of the evening cataloguing hills. Today was a successful session during which I polished off all of Skye except the main Cuillin Ridge, where contours are indistinguishable under the black mass of rock symbols.

One more reference, mentioned later, indicates that I was still working intermittently on the project, but I didn’t buckle down to it for another sixteen months. On Tuesday 30th September 1980, the diary includes. "I spent the bulk of the day in Caithness, on the Catalogue of the Scottish Hills."

Throughout October, comments take me down through Sutherland to Torridon. By the middle of November, I reached an obvious boundary, the Caledonian Canal. On Wednesday 26th November, I noted Ben Nevis.

Two days later: Home from school to the maps, trying to decipher the wandering contours over the hills of Moray and Banff.

I hit my local Perthshire hills in early December, then, on Sunday 28th: broke all records with 118! No location is given, but Tuesday 30th says, A day on the hills – a dreary bunch of Borders ones – probably nice if you got there, but difficult to sort out.

Much of that difficulty was due to the new maps. I had great trouble in determining the heights of the cols. Many of the First Series of Landranger maps were more metric in spirit than in fact. They were photo-enlargements of the most recent one-inch-to-the-mile maps, with imperial heights converted to metric.

That included the contours. The 50-foot contour remained – now (sometimes) relabelled 15. The 100, 150, 200, 250 and 300 contours became respectively 31, 46, 61, 76 and 91.

That didn’t matter to me if a quick inspection showed a mass of contour lines around a summit, but it was a nightmare on bumpy ridges, especially when the contour lines were sparsely numbered. I soon learned the values for the heavier contours (every 250 ft) – 76, 152, 229, 305, 381, 457, 533 etc. Not very memorable.

This wasn’t a minor problem. It applied to the first Landranger maps of Orkney, the Moray coast, and all from 45 (Stonehaven) south. A total of 50 out of the 85 maps that covered Scotland.