From Glen Torridon, Liathach looks impregnable, with little sign of a way upwards; the path that worms up alongside the waterfalls of the Allt an Doire Ghairbh is invisible until we’re on it. The vast bulwarks and bastions of rock rise into a ceiling of white cloud, their full extent obscured.
We climb unhurriedly, content to wait for the forecasted “cloud free Munros” to materialise.
Like its enigmatic counterparts Suilven, Slioch or Stac Pollaidh, Liathach looks every bit its age, carrying the furrows of deep time in its vertiginously stepped Torridonian sandstone. To me, these hills of Wester Ross and Sutherland are not “ordinary” mountains but otherworldly artefacts from strange temporal dimensions.
The purple-pink-tinged Precambrian sandstone comprising the bulk of Liathach was laid down as long ago as 1,000m years, before multicellular organisms had evolved, and has preserved only plankton-like nannofossils. But the very top of Spidean a Choire Leith, one of Liathach’s two Munros, is crowned by Cambrian pipe rock, its name referring to the fossilised worm burrows found within it. You can run your fingers over these dimples and streaks like a biological braille, and interact with an epoch 500m years gone by, a world without fish or land flora, but where the teeming seabeds hosted an exponential explosion of animal life. If these hills are arcane monuments, these are their inscrutable hieroglyphics.
The fabled ridge along Liathach’s precipitous spine does not disappoint. I get giddy around heights, and have to suppress existential panic on sighting the pinnacles of Am Fasarinen – a line of mouldy molars with plunging abysses on either side – but a calm head prevails.
A rift does eventually appear in the cloud; it remains dammed against the ridge on one side but peels away entirely from the other to reveal the geological jumble of the Coulin Forest, a distant Ben Nevis and the soft blue arc of Skye. But as we walk back along the Glen Torridon road, it wells up and tumbles back over the ridge in foaming crests; the mountain assumes the shape and terror of a mega-tsunami as the top overspills and the giant wave begins to break.
