Scaling the heights: a woman’s experience of mountain climbing

In her memoir Time on Rock, Anna Fleming charts her progress from ‘terrified novice’ to ‘competent leader’ as she scales rocky vertical routes with names such as the ‘Inaccessible Pinnacle’ and the ‘Savage Slit’. There is poetry in the vocabulary of climbing, with its gritstone, gabbro and basalt and its slopers, arêtes, underclings, heel hooks and, my personal favourite, the thrutch — a kind of hip wiggle that can get a climber out of a tight squeeze. ‘There is nothing elegant in a thrutch,’ we are told.

One element of the book that distinguishes it from most climbing literature is its female perspective. Fleming initially compares herself unfavourably with her male counterparts: ‘I saw their height and armspan and told myself that climbing was easier for men, since they generally have a longer reach.’ She admired the ‘brawny masculine strength’ that could never be hers.

This changes when she observes two women climbers in Greece who seemed untroubled ‘by their female bodies: they blazed up routes’ and ‘moved fluently, using imaginative sequences to reach holds that lay beyond them. They had… exceptional technique’. ‘Watching them pull off move after move’, Fleming realises that ‘the female body is not a barrier to top-class climbing’. But the masculine bias of the sport rears up in unexpected places. In Moray, a chunk of rocky Scottish coast north of the Cairngorms, Fleming is faced with climbing Thatcher’s Crack, Special Brew, Horny Beast, Legover Wall or Primitive Thoughts About Modern Girls.

Her fascination with language infuses her descriptions of the textures of various stones and the mountains they form. In this regard, Time on Rock can take its place next to Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. Written in the 1940s, but only published in 1977, that book explores the author’s intimate, passionate relationship with the Cairngorms.