I’ve had a great deal of pleasure reading the Wholehope Diaries of Ray Rees and of course seeing the photographs of so many old friends, especially my very good pal Charlie McGonnigal.
We were together from the start of the conversion of a tumbledown old cottage into my favourite Youth Hostel, where we subsequently spent most of our weekends, especially in the wintertime. We always seemed to have lots of snow in those days and I remember one glorious weekend when Charlie and myself had been the only two people to get up to Wholehope in deep snow and on the Saturday we skied over to Uswayford to see the Telfer family.
They had been snowed in for two weeks and we had heard on the radio that the RAF were going to drop provisions and tons of hay that very morning. We arrived just in time to se the last load of hay come down and we spent the day helping to get it all in as quite a lot had been dropped some distance up the fell side. We were well fed for our help and spent the night in their old caravan before a lovely days skiing back to Wholehope, then later down to Alwinton on the Sunday.
I've enjoyed looking at the Wholehope photos too, the one showing Charlie McGonnigal and Jackie Addison includes me and not my good friend John Bowman.
We enjoyed meeting John and Anne during the recent Ski Club reunion since we were founder members of the Northumbrian Ski Club and had many memorable trips up to Scotland, to Aviemore before the lifts were installed, to Glencoe where we usually had terrible weather at Christmas, and to Glendoll at Easter time.
Map images on this page are courtesy of the Ordnance Survey Get-a-Map scheme
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