On a few occasions we used to go to Scotland for a bit of hill walking about 15 years ago. On one weekend we flew to Inverness and drove to the Isle of Skye and parked the hire car at a place called Sligachan. We then headed south with the intention of sleeping rough in bivvy bags before attempting a walk called the Cuillin Ridge. After about 2.5 hrs of walking it started chucking it down and we put our coats on except for Rich who had left his in the car. It then got dark and we were walking around in the rain with one torch in the middle of nowhere. Rich just had a tee shirt on but he didn’t complain. We headed for a mountaineering hut at the south end of a lake called Loch Coruisk. We knocked on the door and the people in side fortunately let us in to sleep on the floor in the dry. We were lucky. Then Rich pulled a bottle of whiskey out of his bag (obviously you don’t need a coat if you have a bottle of whiskey in your bag) and we sat up chatting with our hosts before making a sharp exit the following morning. As you would expect Rich was very much leading the conversation. We did about a third of the ridge walk before it got too much for us, hitched back to the car and then booked into the Sligachan Hotel for a shower, food and more refreshment.
The two things about this for me were Rich’s toughness – it was torrential rain, he was in a tee shirt and he kept going – and also the way he engaged with our hosts that night which helped massively to us avoiding what would have been an extremely uncomfortable night in the open.
RIP Richard,
Steve Dalton