Fort William

I spent last weekend at the Fort William Mountain Festival. Jane Magill and I were there with the Cosmic Way roadshow. The Cosmic Way aims to spread the word about the Scottish scientist CTR Wilson, the invention of the cloud chamber which earned him a share of the 1927 Physics Nobel Prize, and the study of radiation from space. Wilson always traced a very direct line to the cloud chamber from his stay on the summit of Ben Nevis in 1894. He also speculated that immensely penetrating radiation from space might arrive all the time at Earth and carried out a wee experiment to test this idea, in the Neidpath railway tunnel on the edge of Pebbles. In our minds we thought of a squiggly line on the map like a cloud chamber track, with Ben Nevis at one end and Peebles at the other. It could be a long distance journey, like the West Highland Way or the Southern Upland Way: the Cosmic Way!

By the way, I have ventured out into the world beyond the farm and I know there are Fort Williams and Peebles's in other parts of the world. In this Scottish story I'm talking about the Scottish versions.

Fort William is one of the obvious venues for the Cosmic Way. We meet people who know Ben Nevis and its summit very well (our stand was next to the John Muir Trust, who own Ben Nevis above 700m) and who love the outdoors and nature, just as CTR Wilson did himself. For some of them this esoteric science might become a bit less forbidding when they learn that it starts with a love of the natural world and its beauties.

On Sunday I took some time and walked up Glen Nevis a little bit. I hadn't really expected to have - or to take - any time during the weekend so I didn't have proper gear for long, rough walks or snow but I did start up the Ben Nevis path from Achintee, that thousands of people follow to the summit every year. I turned back when I came to a burn running down over the path. This is the same track that was constructed in 1883 so that the Ben Nevis Observatory could be built and operated. And in turn the Observatory gave Wilson a couple of weeks' work in September 1894, inadvertently starting him on the road towards the cloud chamber. So, in the absence of an ice axe or even decent boots, this wee toddle was exactly the right one for Cosmic Way reasons.