It wasn’t the best morning I’d ever had. I was bivvying under a boulder in the Fisherfield backlands and had been woken around 5am by the unmistakeable buzz of a midge in my ear. Even up at 800 metres there were enough of the horrible little beasties for some to inveigle their way into my sleeping bag and they were poised to make my life hell. There was no way things were going to improve if I stayed where I was so I quickly packed up (without even a cup of tea☹️) and headed off into the thick mist. When you’re walking it’s easy to outpace the winged horrors but I was scrambling pretty much right from the start so inevitably moved more slowly. As a result I was soon clambering sweatily up damp rock in dense clag surrounded by a cloud of midges. Plod, pull, scrabble, “this is awful, what the hell am I doing here?”
Then in the space of a few seconds my whole outlook on life changed. I emerged out of the top of the cloud into blazing sunshine, with only the highest peaks around showing above the frothy sea. There was a herd of deer grazing a few yards away and wild goats just beyond them, and best of all there was a Brocken Spectre floating above the corrie to my right. For anyone who hasn’t come across these, they’re a striking atmospheric effect where a giant version of your shadow is cast on the clouds, with elongated arms and legs and a rainbow halo (often called a Glory) around you, occasionally a double or even triple one. The Brocken is a hill in the Harz Mountains in Germany where they often occur.
Brocken from Bivouac Buttress, A' Mhaighdean
They are commoner than people often realise, you just have to get into the habit of going to look over edges when the conditions are right. It’s always a thrill to see them, and usually provokes lots of arm waving (it waves back, of course), plus standing on one leg and waving the other about and similar juvenile behaviour. For some reason (perspective?) your legs and arms are inordinately long, and it works better if you are either on something pointy or have another drop parallel to the one you are looking over. I was once waving arms and legs at a Brocken with my then 12 year old stepson and one of his friends and wondering why nobody came across from the very busy Snowdon path a dozen or so metres away to see what all the fuss was about. Presumably they were giving the three dangerous lunatics a wide berth!
Brocken spectre on Rushup Edge
It’s sometimes said that you can only see your own shadow in the centre of the halo but that isn’t actually true. If someone is standing reasonably close to you then both of your shadows will be in the centre of the ring. You need to be within about a metre, so presumably social distancing meant that joint Brockens went into temporary hibernation. Occasionally you can get another person to pose with your spectre. That’s assuming the ground angle allows it, of course, as in most cases it would involve your friend walking over a cliff. It makes for a very odd photograph (I’ve got one but Paul wouldn’t speak to me again if I shared it as it’s rather unflattering).
One of the best Brocken days I ever had was on Muckish in Donegal. We were scrambling up the north side from the old Miner’s Track when we arrived on top of a small pinnacle that just peeked out of the clouds. Again, the boundary between murk and light was surprisingly sharp and our summitlet was a tiny island just off the ‘coast’ of Muckish, with a perfect Brocken when I stood on the top.
On the first pinnacle, Muckish (pic taken by Joanne Schwartz)
As things warmed up the cloud sea rose and soon our perch was submerged. No problem, we clambered a little higher and found another sunny pinnacle to laze on while watching history repeat itself and waving at the spectre. Some considerable time later we ran out of pinnacles and found ourselves on the grassy summit plateau. The mist was still rising and flowing over the top of the cliffs in a slow motion tsunami so we scurried off to the summit to find ourselves in the centre of a sunny bowl completely surrounded by a hundred foot wall of cloud. It felt somehow disturbing, partly because it was slowly advancing but mainly because of a vague irrational fear that who-knows-what could emerge out of it without us getting advance warning. We both felt spooked and hurried off into the anonymity of the mist.
Waving at the Brocken, Muckish
Brockens can even be helpful sometimes. A group of us were sitting on Cul Mor in Coigach enjoying the sight of the Brocken below us when it suddenly occurred to me that if the spectre was there at this time of day then we must be looking down a north-facing slope rather than the south-facing one I was expecting to encounter. Oops! At least I knew where I was now and the problem was easy to remedy. What made it funny was that a few minutes earlier a leader from a rival guiding company had overtaken us and asked me whether this was the way to Sron Gharbh. Not having received the Brocken’s revelation yet I had blithely said yes and waved him off down the ridge in the wrong direction. I imagine he thought I’d done it on purpose, but actually it was a genuine mistake. My apologies to him if he ever reads this.
Occasionally you can see traces of a more distant outer ring of bright white light around the spectre. It’s unusual to see the whole ring as the cloud height has to be well above you but you still have to be in the sun. If you get that same situation when you are on flatter ground (or the sea) then the Spectre and the lower part of the ring are cut off and you’re left with a bright white ‘rainbow’ known as a Fog Bow. These are much rarer than Brockens and feel even more otherwordly. I’ve only seen them on a few dozen days. The first one I ever saw was in thick mist on Stonesty Pike near Crinkle Crags, and I didn’t know what it was at first, which gave it quite an impact. It felt like a glowing doorway to some other dimension. The best ones I ever had though were on the approach to St Kilda off the Hebrides. The arc just shone in the air with the cliffs of Oiseabhal faintly visible though it. It was stunning and my pictures come nowhere near doing it justice.
Fog bow, St Kilda, with Oiseabhal behind
That one was over the sea, but because they generally occur on flatter ground than Brockens it’s much easier to put a person into the middle of one for a photograph, although you do need a wide angle lens as the arc is usually too wide to get it all in.
Fog bow below Clisham. Photo Paul Buchanan
Brockens came to wave me off on my last ever day’s guiding. We started with cloud down to 500 feet, but 2000 feet higher came out of the top of it into a magical landscape. There were Spectres from every pinnacle as we scrambled over sandstone towers looking out over an ocean of cloud. Most of the day we had only the wild goats for company and it was a wonderful way to finish. The lesson to draw is that just because there’s a thick blanket of cloud low down it doesn’t mean that it’s like that on the summits too. Go and see, sometimes you can get the most amazing rewards. And if you don’t, well just chalk it up to experience and enjoy being out anyway.
The 'coast of Muckish'
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