` In Britain, mountains tend to be seen as part of the public domain, along with folk-music, beaches, weather and Shakespearean plays. Ben Nevis, the highest mountain on these islands, was sold this year for less than £500,000. The bargain price secured the entire roof of Scotland, including two adjoining summits, Carn Mor Dearg and Aonach Beag. The only elevated ground that might outrank Ben Nevis in the British popular imagination is the Cuillin Ridge on the Isle of Skye.
The sale astounded those who keep bits of Ben Nevis permanently under their fingernails, but it was hardly a contentious deal. The 4,185-acre estate, held by a single family for generations, was sold to the John Muir Trust (a conservation charity) at a cost said to be significantly less than its market value. The owners felt the trust would best safeguard the future of the enormously popular mountain. The John Muir Trust launched a £1 million funddrive to cover purchase and management. It would be no surprise to find they've raised it already. When it comes to the sale of mountains, the price of Ben Nevis is well down the scale. Only a year ago, in Wales, the Williams family sold the best part of Snowdon for £4 million. They had farmed the mountain for 14 generations and recognised, no doubt, that the game was up. The National Trust - an older conservation charity - raised the money by public subscription in less than 100 days, with the snappy slogan "Save Snowdon". Anthony Hopkins, the actor, chipped in £1 million.
Maybe he should have saved his money, because Snowdon didn't need saving at all. Who'd have bought it? Who'd have bought Ben Nevis? Not the Japanese, anyway - they're going for Everest and the Eiger. They've been establishing title by sheer weight of numbers for years.
Are conservation bodies, despite the best of motives, stirring up public panic in order to increase their holdings, to acquire estates? Save Snowdon? From whom?
Hardly a commercial interest with a view to development. Toadying as British land law is, major landscapes are legally protected against exploitation and development. With established exceptions. . .
No matter how many millions the conservation lobby raises, it won't rid the mountain of the historic Snowdon Railway, which brings hordes of tourists - many able but unwilling to walk - to the Snowdon cafe on the summit. This fog-bound venue, built in 1936, was once described by the heir to the British throne as "the highest rubbish-dump in England and Wales". But the Snowdon Railway has long been at the heart of local tourism, a thriving industry on which jobs depend, and it has earned its keep. The Snowdon cafe is soon to be demolished and replaced by a new one at a cost of £10 million. This airy figure puts the purchase of the landscape itself in an ironic perspective.
While the National Trust and the John Muir Trust are dedicated to community partnership, liaison committees and a host of hand-knit phrases, the hill-farming lobby is covertly resentful. Its members see themselves as a dying breed and deeply resent the "English conservation colonialism" which they sense behind the trusts.
I have to confess to a sense of fellow-feeling with the farmers (which they would no doubt repudiate). "Management", "guardianship", "public access", "balance of recreation and conservation", may be wise and worthy words and phrases but they carry a charge of piety that arouses an aggressive instinct in the rural gut. Maybe it's a parasite in the bowel rather than good judgment, but some observers feel that the earnest stewardship of the earth, so prevalent in Britain, is the new Christianity. It grates on the instinctive pagan, to whom the wildness of the landscape is fundamental. Time and again, charismatics of all creeds prove that all they care about is their own orthodoxy. The movement to salvage the remnants of wild landscape is absolutely essential, yet we must watch those who direct it in case they become too smug. Here in Ireland, we've seen what can happen when the ultimate orthodoxy - the State - gets hold of wild landscape in one hand and a syringe in the other. When the Burren and the Wicklow Mountains became national parks, the Government of the day came on like junkies shooting up on cheap tourism. There was a mad rush to inject cars and concrete and EU funds into the national bloodstream, to pump the visitors in, to jack the numbers up. The "quality visitor", the one who will pay for the privilege of not spoiling the landscape, is repelled, and the coach-tours are hoovered in. We may have survived the worst of this "interpretation" phase, but the car-park in the Burren - rejected at last by An Bord Pleanala - is still festering on the skin of the Burren, like a weird withdrawal symptom, the congealed seepage of a deep malaise. Heritage trusts, on the other hand, have noble aspirations. At the heart of their vision lies the desire to cherish and to show off beauty; to educate; to uplift; to use the landscape in a moral, edifying way.
But in the very process of being realised, their vision is blurred and its impact blunted. The essence of wild landscape is not any kind of order; it is the very wildness itself, unpossessed and unpossessable. You can't put it on a curriculum. Paradoxically, wildness will often flare in the wrong hands, in sheer defiance, while in the hands of its protectors it can turn limp and slack. This limpness is called management. Those who have walked National Trust domains in Britain may recognise the signs. It's a kind of pleasant, middle-class blandness, all gates and paths and discreet maintenance - the land of the waxed jacket. Actually, there's nothing like a threat to its fabric to make a landscape truly precious; to bring out the intensity of its fugitive hues; to radicalise the visitor and imbue them with the ancestral thrill of the trespasser, when the walker bore a stout stick not just for support but for altercations with gamekeepers. I have little taste myself for landscapes owned by national parks and charitable trusts. They have a whiff of the admirable school project, discreetly supervised by adults, about them - all that smug signage showing pictures of the wildlife you're too stupid to see for yourself. Listen: if its picture is on a notice-board outside its lair, then it's no longer wild life. But the market for landscape is there. Today's swollen armies of recreationalists - walkers, climbers, mountaineers - clad in stellar fabrics and cushioned boots, are a mass of affluent contradictions. Certainly in Britain - Snowdonia, Glencoe, the Lake District - visitors are as destructive, simply because of their numbers, as any of the hill-farming excesses were. The Ogwen Valley, for example, is as trampled as a sheep ranch, as hackneyed as a showground after the circus moves on. The Lake District on a holiday weekend is where the circus is. Walkers insist on bringing cars to the very start of the wild. In the Peak District, the authorities threatened to charge for car-parking in order to curtail congestion. There was a folk revolution, a new declaration of The Rights of Man: The Right to Park in Paradise! Likewise, in Glencoe, when the parking lay-bys, stuffed with college minibuses and leisure-centre vans, were threatened with closure, there was an outraged sense that the Campbells were coming. Again.
Outdoor people today are consumers. We are a little too conscious of personal rights and freedoms, not quite conscious enough of the landscape and the people who live in it. For a growing number, the outdoors is simply another personal space to which we are entitled - an extension of the home, the office, the car. There are groups who bring their suburban context with them - the culture of the crowd. They are a minority among sensitive outdoor people, but as the uplands become increasingly fashionable and walking more festooned with gadgets, they are increasing. Given a choice between a scrum of urban walkers on the hills, and a bunch of sheep-farmers at a hurling-match, I know which I'd prefer.
The question as to who might have bought Snowdon and Nevis if the good guys hadn't, may soon be answered. The Cuillin Ridge on Skye is up for sale - for £10 million. MacLeod, the owner, appears to have proved that his ancestors were given title in 1611. Recently, he has offered to withdraw the estate from sale if the government consents to repair the roof of Dunvegan Castle, the clan seat. Astute observers take this as a sign that he hasn't received any decent offers. Ten million pounds for the finest ridge this side of the Alps. What a vanity purchase! Better value than a pair of terraced houses in Killiney.
It has been confirmed that An Teallach, a magnificent Highland mountain, has been bought by Gordon Crawford, a British billionaire, for £1.7 million. He owns a company called London Bridge Software. Don't forget that the original London Bridge was sold, shipped to Arizona and reconstructed. Buying and selling mountains is one thing: let's hope they don't start moving them around.
Dermot Somers is a writer, broadcaster and mountaineer
