I Will Lift Up My Eyes to the Hills

There were places out in those hills which hadn’t felt a human foot for years. You could tell that because if you were so lost that you wandered by chance into those forgotten lands you plunged through a thin crust covering a riddled ground, too decayed underneath to bear weight, eaten out by decades of rain and snow but just held together on the surface by heather roots. If you tried to walk through that it sapped your strength so fast that you realised too late you didn’t have the energy to get back and it was always, always as cold night was coming on.

It was bound on one side by dark mountains containing wild moorland and on the other forested limestone valleys with crags and potholes beckoning invitingly, and in between remote upland tarns where you could sit for a whole day and have just the wind for company and the only sound the haunting cry of the curlew, forever looking for its lost love. And in that lovely and deceptive land people drowned trying to ford raging rivers, fell off the crags, sank into bogs, found themselves up to their armpits in snow, and generally killed or injured themselves in ways bizarre and creative. And guess who picked up the pieces afterwards? Yes, good old mountain rescue. But one rescue team also faced on their patch a mountain famous for murdering the unwary and this mass of malignancy, seeing so many of its intended victims snatched to safety, brooded over this injustice and determined to exact a price. All it had to do was wait and wait and wait…