At a glance, it would be easy to think that the main driver or benefit of participation in outdoor activities is in doing the activity itself. We talk about going biking, climbing or Munro bagging. We share success in terms of completion of a route, a trail or a climb; its grade or length, the speed or time you did it in. It can be like a tick list of accomplishments or peaks conquered.

It is of course very useful to talk about routes and objectives. We all need inspiration and a list of things to go for. The Munros offer a fantastic list of brilliant days out right across north Scotland which will get you out doing something on a weekend of poor weather when it would be all too easy to sit at home staying cozy. Guidebooks are full of routes to tick off and the star rating system accentuates the value of some of them in particular. I remember a description that said this is "a route for all aspiring Alpine ice climbers"; I was, of course, totally hooked until I had completed the climb. I still have my own personal list of objectives behind a magnetic badge on the fridge.

There's no doubt that reaching a state of flow in whatever activity we engage with is a powerfully beneficial thing. When our full cognitive bandwidth is taken up by the activity there is no space for anything else; our usual worries, day-to-day concerns and long term anxieties can disappear from our minds and we get some welcome relief. Just about any activity can do this, but an activity with a real risk of injury as a result of a minor lapse in concentration will focus the mind more easily and more completely.

Skiing and mountain biking can offer such experiences while at the same time we can be insulated from our surroundings. The infrastructure of a ski area tries to bring the comforts of modern living to the mountain landscape with restaurants and bars, uplift in sheltered bubbles and marked out and manicured pistes that we are to follow. All of this is good and it gets people outdoors exercising in a fairly wild landscape which sometimes has amazing views if we stop to look at them.

However, it seems to me that there is a greater depth of experience that might be missing from your average day of piste skiing or lift assisted mountain biking.

Instead of always doing things in these wild landscapes, perhaps we should take time simply to be in them. I think we should build time into our journeys to stop and connect with the place in which we find ourselves with the final goal of becoming a part of the landscape.

This might be a spiritual process in which we connect ourselves physically to the ground and meditate on our position in the world, in our lives and our existence. Or it might be a process of learning more about the landscape, how it came to be as it is now and of all the ecosystems and human influences that keep it this way.

Up to a couple hundred years ago people lived in these landscapes, subsisting on what they could grow and catch to eat. Clearly there was a deep connection with the landscape then, an interdependence that offered the possibility of life in what can be an incredibly harsh environment. Evidence of those lives is easily seen now; the footprint of black-houses and shielings, peat cuttings, lazy-beds and signs of ancient agriculture. 

Things have changed beyond recognition since then. We no longer depend on our landscape for sustenance and we can no longer say that the landscape is wild in terms of being untouched or unmanaged by human hands. It strikes me how the same landscape that used to be essential for survival 300 years ago is now sought after as a respite from modern day life and seen as essential to many people for very different reasons.

When thinking about experience instead of landscape, the term "wild" is subjective. To many people, experienced walkers and climbers, walking up a big path to the top of Ben Nevis alongside a few hundred other people is not a wild experience. However, to someone who has barely left an urban environment, being a few hours walk away from shelter, rescue, a coffee and a toilet, being unable to stop or change the weather and being totally reliant on nobody but yourself represents a very wild experience.  

At whatever stage you are at, I think the most fundamental value of exploring our beautiful landscape is in creating and fostering a connection with it. The initiator of this might be an activity or a list to tick off as a challenge, but the end result should be in becoming a part of the landscape, one that is in tune with it and understands its rhythm. Take time on your next expedition through our landscape to allow this internal expedition to start out.

I’ve often said to people, hillwalking and mountaineering are like meditation. We are removed physically and mentally from our every day lives. We get so involved in the moment, in the activity and its demands on us, that we very often forget all about our normal worries and anxieties. The more we are challenged by the activity, the less cognitive bandwidth we have for anything else. It’s only when we get back home that we remember about the outstanding bills, the anxiety caused by our work or any number of things that cause our mental fatigue.

Modern day life in our urban, man-made environments, increases mental fatigue, stress and anxiety. Restoration of feelings of calm, relaxation, revitalisation and refreshment can be achieved by spending time in a natural environment. For it to be most effective, a natural environment should have three critical elements; it should give you the sense of being removed from your normal life and surroundings; it should contain visual elements and sensory elements that are fascinating in some way; and it should be expansive – it should have some degree of extension. For me, exploring our beautiful mountains is perfect!


This is what “Attention Restoration Theory” tells us, that the human experience of the natural world markedly assists in maintaining and fostering a strong sense of subjective wellbeing. It's the idea that the natural environment has profound restorative effects on our wellbeing. ​

​It’s really obvious that our mountains are full of astounding visual and sensory elements that are fascinating, beautiful, full of wonder and surprising. Over the last few years I have increased my knowledge of the natural environment massively, especially through projects such as The North Face Survey on Ben Nevis. It’s also clear to me that there is a never-ending supply of new knowledge to gain, new insights to understand and new things to see. This understanding of the very small things in our landscape makes my enjoyment of the vast scale of the landscape even more rewarding.

​By exploring the mountains that surround us in Scotland we get to feel the immense scale of the landscape, the power of the weather, and the never-ending nature of wildness, that can give us a proper sense of scale. In a blizzard on a summit with numb fingers and an unrelenting wind, when we have to take a bearing on our compass to walk off safely there is nobody else we can turn to, nobody else we can blame if we get it wrong, and no sympathy in the weather or the landscape. It is a good reminder that each of us is not at the centre of things with the world revolving around us. We need to learn some humility and to take responsibility for ourselves. This is surely the expansive nature of the experience that is required to make its restorative effects most profound.

This is why I am passionate about spending time on our mountains. It maintains our physical health, it restores our mental health and it can have a profound influence on our spiritual well-being. It can counter the self-centred focus that modern day life has on us all. In these days of global climate change, an obesity epidemic, mental ill health and disconnectedness from nature, one solution is simple.
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Go for a walk, preferably a long one and immerse yourself in nature!