There are some mountains you climb for the views, and others you climb for reasons not many would understand. Deep in the Central Highlands, Ben Alder is remote, brooding, and steeped in ghost stories. So naturally, Jenny set off solo to explore it — with her bike, a tent, and a taste for the macabre.
It was a late autumn afternoon, and I was on a train thundering south from Aviemore to Dalwhinnie. The weather worsened the closer I got, and by the time I arrived and stood huddled on the platform with my little bike, it was absolutely torrential. All the mountains were shrouded in a thick, suffocating mist.
With few other options remaining, I hopped on my bike and pedalled out of the station, away from the small bleak village of Dalwhinnie and towards Loch Ericht – the long thin body of water that led deep into the steep-sided mountain valley of Ben Alder.
Cycling along Loch Ericht with the rain lashing my face felt relentless, but the loch looked typically Scottish – intriguingly moody and utterly mysterious. I fought my way along an undulating gravel track for 15 km before I started to feel the dark draw in.
The rain subsided as I set up camp by a stream. Whilst my spot was attractive, the glen was expansive, remote and hauntingly desolate. The mountains were still heavy with clag. At that moment, I felt very, very small in a landscape much bigger and more powerful than myself.
I was on a solo mission to explore Ben Alder in the depths of the Central Highlands in Scotland. At 1148m (3766ft), “Beinn Eallair” roughly translates to “hill of the rocky place” but the fog meant I couldn’t yet understand why.
What had brought me to this remote Munro in the first place was a morbid interest in the creepy history surrounding the hill. I had heard that Ben Alder was haunted.
As I stood there on my own in the glen at dusk, all the stories I was told came back to me as strong as the first time I heard them.
In 1996 a French hill walker was found dead on Ben Alder with a gunshot wound to his chest from – rather oddly – a Wild West-style Remington revolver.
Although it was officially deemed a suicide, the parents of the deceased believe he was murdered, claiming that the pencil-drawn map of the mountain found nearby had been planted and wasn’t created by him.
No forms of identification were found (it took 18 months to identify the decomposed body), and all clothes labels had been cut out, adding to the mystery of this disturbing death.
A century earlier, in 1746, after the Jacobite defeat at the Battle of Culloden, the chief of the ‘Clan McPherson’ called Ewen MacPherson, fled to the Ben Alder slopes where he lived in hiding in a cave for nine years. His extraordinary tale of evasion inspired a passage in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped, in which the protagonist David Balfour and the Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart take refuge in the very same damp and wind-lashed cave – known today as Cluny’s Cave – immortalising it in fiction as one of Scotland’s most haunting real-life hideouts.
Setting off the next morning into the rain and clag, thoughts of murderers and men in hiding chilled me. But I also felt exhilarated, and my love for Scotland burned stronger than ever.
It was a long slog with stone-cold hands that gripped my compass up to Carn Dearg, my first Munro of the day. Views came and went, each time leaving me in awe of the vastness of the glen. But I was too chilled to the bone to stop for long, so I just kept plodding on.
Just south of the summit of Ben Alder, I was aware of the Ben Alder Cottage Bothy sitting on the shore of Loch Ericht. Dating back to 1871, it is claimed that Ben Alder Cottage Bothy is Scotland’s most haunted bothy.
The first legend is that the old ghillie (the Gaelic term for a servant or fishing/hunting expedition attendant) who resided there named McCook, hanged himself on the back of the door.
Another gruesome tale speaks of a mother and child who took refuge at the bothy for a few days during a long storm. Eventually driven mad by hunger, the mother is said to have killed and eaten her child. She was later seen wandering the mountains lost in despair.
Although both these stories have since been debunked, the visitor book is filled with tales of mysterious and unnatural happenings in the bothy. I took some time to read them. There were reports of strange footsteps, old music playing, and objects randomly thrown across the room seemingly of their own accord.
Whilst it’s a deeply intriguing bothy, it was somewhere I had absolutely no intention of staying alone on that stormy evening!
I squelched my way across some more mountainous kilometres, still no other human to be seen. In fact, on the summit plateaus, there was no evidence of any human ever being there at all. I felt well and truly alone in the mountains. It was a little unnerving.
I descended off Beinn Bheòil, my final peak of the day, into the glen where I could finally see across to Rannoch Station and the mountains on the west coast of Scotland.
Back towards Dalwhinnie, there was a long gradually descending single track between the mountains which I ran down. I felt so light and fast after hours of trudging uphill!
On reaching my campsite once again, I threw my tent in my pack and pedalled towards civilisation, craving human company after the joy — and eerie unease — of so much time alone.
Unfortunately I missed my train, so I had to endure a few more sore hours of cycling with my pack weighing heavily on my shoulders. When I staggered through the front door at the end of the day, I was a bedraggled, exhausted but deeply satisfied mess.
That night I went out for a meal with friends. Showered and in clean clothes, no one could even tell I’d spent the last 24 hours in the mountains, battered by wild weather and absorbed in the supernatural stories of Ben Alder.
Back among the chatter and warm glow of civilisation, it felt strange how quickly the mountains receded into memory – like a vivid dream fading upon waking.
Yet, something lingered. Ben Alder had left its mark, a quiet sense of awe intertwined with unease that no brightly lit restaurant could entirely erase.