David Craig

The most baffling part of the climb was getting to the base of the Rock. Or so we thought until we embarked on the Face itself. On a Saturday we started to ask our way along the limpet-horde of wrecked garages and scrapyards that encrust the base of the reef. Nowhere does the 500-metre soaring triangle of raw limestone actually sprout from common ground. These rusting corrugated-iron shanties shut us out. At Rock Haulage Ltd, 26 Devil’s Tower Road, a tanned and stubbled man is standing in the doorway of a den stacked up with cannibalised cars. When I say, ‘We want to climb the cliff here,’ he says instantly, ‘Are you sure?’, looking me full in the eye. He is friendly about access but must clear it with his boss, who ‘should be back by 6’. As we talk, the crag leans over us hugely.

A Highland Terrier – which is a mini-bus, you understand – whizzes past the Culloden Chinese Take-Away and I realise that my Scotland has changed again – has gone from me still further through yet another of the time-warps which have shaken me ever since I left in 1959. It isn’t comfortable, or reassuring, this blinking through the decades in a slide-show of small, brilliantly-coloured transparencies. But the detail is enthralling.’