Time on Rock by Anna Fleming, reviewed by Cameron McNeish

Canongate, £16.99

Review by Cameron McNeish

Lay aside any misconceptions you may have about rock-climbing, those images of bearded, brawny individuals heaving and thrusting their way up rocky crags on remote, damp mountainsides. Consider instead a multi-faceted activity ranging from indoor climbing in a centrally-heated gymnasium to drifting upwards on sun-warmed granite on a Greek island or, as author Anna Fleming poetically describes it, as a form of vertical dance: “Climbing can be frightening and demanding, but there is also a beauty within the movement. It is a question of timing, precision and agility. A form of dance. And within that absorbing outdoor ballet – when stretching and balancing, reaching and releasing – you come to see things differently.”

In her book, Time On Rock, Edinburgh-based Anna Fleming shares a woman’s perspective on rock-climbing, and that is certainly different. I can’t ever recall a male rock-climber writing about the “intricacies of dance and flow”.

“Through intensive physical, emotional and creative work on the rock face, a climber can begin to sense the choreography and movements of land. We see in shapes, patterns and sequences; we place ourselves within rhythms of time, weather and geology. To spend time on rock is to be immersed, orientated and transported.”

It’s not often I find myself quite so beguiled by a book about rock-climbing. In my experience, book and magazine accounts are dominated by grades and personal achievement and are often bereft of any real appreciation of the fundamental element of the activity – the rock itself, or the mountain to which that rock belongs, or the greater landscapes that contain the mountain. Rock-climbing, or a bastardised form of it, is now an Olympic sport, but Anna Fleming’s wonderfully refreshing examination of the pursuit takes it back to its roots - traditional climbing on crags and mountain cliffs where the natural world holds sway - and encourages us to fully embrace it.

My own tyro climbing exploits, many years ago now, not only taught me the rudiments of climbing, but also how to distinguish between a golden eagle and a buzzard, or between a ring ouzel and a blackbird, a meadow pipit and a skylark. I learned about weather systems, plants, wild flowers – the ecology of the mountains, and during those early climbs I learned the difference between schist and quartzite, andesite and granite. In one impromptu geology lesson from an old climbing gangrel, I sat flabbergasted as he explained how the rock I was climbing on was part of an ancient volcano that erupted through and onto a land surface of Dalradian metamorphic rocks about 420 million years before. It was my very first geology lesson, and the subject has fascinated me ever since.

Those early years taught me the natural world is infinitely more than a playground, or a place where I could test myself – it’s an incredibly ancient, evolving home for countless other creatures and plants with which we share this planet. It’s difficult to learn these things if you are taught to climb on an indoor climbing wall.

Having said that, indoor walls have a place in the climbing firmament and Anna Fleming certainly recognises that as she praises the opportunities indoor climbing offers to hone techniques in relative safety, to build strength and perhaps most importantly for many, to socialise, for the wide realm of mountaineering contains no more sociable sub-culture than rock climbing. We discover that as Anna takes us on a tour of the some of the UK’s most popular climbing haunts: the Derbyshire gritstone crags of Stanage or Froggat Edge or Shepherd’s Crag in Borrowdale in the Lake District, or Malham Cove in Yorkshire where we wonder at the sheer number of Lycra-clad climbers, chatting, comparing notes, drinking tea and generally supporting each other. Aye, and some of them actually climb too.

It’s not quite like that in Scotland, where such roadside crags are fewer in number, but it’s here Anna Fleming comes into her own, despite moving out of her climbing comfort zone. As she takes on the challenges of the big mountain crags, particularly in the Cuillin and the Cairngorms, the comfort and familiarity of the popular roadside crags are exchanged for a more intense experience, as Anna Fleming suggests: “To climb in the Cuillin is to throw yourself into a rocky realm of epic resonance.” In such grand, natural arenas, the scales are so much bigger, the risks are greater and the skills are more complex and profound.

Through all of these experiences, the author weaves an intricate and beguiling description of British rock-climbing in all its multi-faceted shades and in doing so emphasises the woman’s perspective. As such, the book’s promotional material inevitably draws comparison with the writing of Nan Shepherd, the Cairngorm poet, and while Anna Fleming’s writings do share an existentialist style it’s important to remember Nan Shepherd was no climber.

Shepherd’s writings were confined to the Cairngorms, and her whole contribution to mountain literature was one extremely slim volume. If anything Anna Fleming’s ethos more closely parallels those of the 1950s Welsh rock climber and author, Gwen Moffat, now 93 years old, who, in a recent interview with Natalie Berry on UKClimbing, said: “When I wrote up my journal shortly after the climbs I was noting the salient points: the interesting moves, weather, exposure, wildlife – my reactions to those and to the behaviour of the company (when climbing) and their obvious reaction to me.”

Serendipitously, that quote of Gwen Moffat succinctly describes Time On Rock, an illuminating and poetic appraisal of what it’s like to be a woman in a male-dominated world but more importantly, the subtlety and the rich textures a woman writer can bring to such a male-dominated genre.