Performing Facts: Finding a Way over Scotland's Mountains

Introduction: the practice of abstraction

This century-old commentary marks the departure point for a chapter in which we consider various means by which ‘hill-walking’ is encoded, and enacted, as a popular leisure pursuit in the Scottish mountains. Drawing on findings from an ethnographic study we narrate, and critically analyse, a succession of meaningful phases from the prescription and performance of walking. Our ethnography was variously orientated: active and participative research in learning settings extended from hill-walking under both summer and winter conditions to the attendance of evening classes on mountain navigation skills and the prescribed study of technical instruction manuals detailing the lore of ‘mountain-craft’. Evidence emerging from these activities is supported by material from interviews with members of hill-walking clubs and individual walkers.

The same archival commentary is a counterpoint to our arguments too. Unlike Gibson Stott, we do not want to isolate realms of objective and subjective expression, and thereby attribute to them a separate epistemological status. Instead, we want to draw attention to the complex nature, and function, of the ‘objectifications’ embedded within, and integral to, sensuous performances of nature. By doing so we caution against a disregard of quantitative measures as disembodied, and therefore unhelpful. By looking closely at the ‘practical activity of objectification and abstraction itself’ (Harvey, 1997: 10) we show how numbers, facts, rules and bearings are not mere abstractions but are themselves generated through certain kinds of embodied, emplaced and socially situated performance. Consequently, our comments explore the establishment, rehearsal and practice of systems of calculation and classification as negotiated acts, and as sensuous performances of nature. In sum, what we propose is an analysis of the relational interactions that create embodied subjectivities and standardized facts.

Given the suite of spatialized practices that concern us here—mapping, surveying, counting, navigating—and the instruments employed in them—compass, maps, lists, Global Positioning Satellites—we have found it helpful to extend our observations into cross-disciplinary debates on technology, materiality and skilled practice (Harvey, 1997; Graves-Brown, 2000). This field, fusing ideas from science studies and anthropology, suggests that transformations and continuities in technical capacity can be usefully confronted through an awareness of the social nature of material ‘things’ and practical tasks. Rather than being rendered inert, objects are then animated by intentions issued from the user in the context of a bodily engagement within an environment. What Ingold (1997: 112) says of the generation of artefacts is also, we argue, true of the generation of facts and numbers: they ‘are not inscribed by the rational intellect upon the concrete surface of nature, but are rather generated in the course of the gradual unfolding of that field of forces and relations set up through the active and sensuous engagement of the practitioner and the material with which he or she works’. To draw these theoretical ideas into the grounded conditions of our own ethnographic research, is therefore to understand different embodied dispositions, technologies of walking and repeatable habits of use as co-constitutive and produced within generative fields of doing. If the self-conscious mobilization of ethnography—a mode of research that ordinarily involves site-based immersion—was partly intended as a practical means to cope with the continuous movement of our practising subjects, this methodological decision also provided the opportunity for an unhurried observation of the interplay between sensual and objectifying modes of performance as actual happenings on the mountainside. Ultimately, by moving and interacting with hill-walkers we ensured that our ideas emerged out of, and were re-worked and enriched through, direct embodied experience.

While these themes extend the reach of our notes on walking, we should also acknowledge that our observations are characterized simultaneously by certain particularities of place, and of performance. While cultures of walking in England have been subject to recent investigation (see Macnaghten and Urry, 1998; Matless, 1999; Edensor, 2000; Darby, 2000), we consider Scotland's mountains a distinctive (and under-researched) ‘stage for action’ (Edensor, 2002) that must be grounded in specific social and historical contexts. In this regard, we fall back on the notable contributions of pioneers from the modern history of hill-walking in Scotland to anchor the narrative and to allow us to track thematic trajectories of practice between past and present. Our ethnography of walking performances must then be understood according to localized formations, and customizations, of scientific knowledge, outdoor conduct and cartographic method. The identities of those contemporary hill-walkers encountered during the chapter in some measure reflect, but also creatively rework, a unique history of leisure practice in the Scottish mountains. We are careful to note how codifications of achievement, ability, risk and trust in hill-walking can be understood through a regulatory discourse promoted in guidebooks. However, when manifested as embodied practice they are, we argue, subject to improvisation and strategies of resistance.

The chapter sections that follow are structured around three pedestrian ‘events’, in each case founded on a mobile abstraction: first, tracing the trajectory, and performance, of the mountain as identifiable ‘fact’; second, refining an equation for calculating speed of movement through a landscape; and third, mobilizing a geo-spatial abstraction with a pair of pacing legs and different navigational technologies. Taken in turn, each event oscillates between the geometrical spatialities of the mapped mountain and the sensed spatialities of the body. While by necessity our description and treatment of these events is separate, they should not be considered as discrete but, instead, understood as the connected elements of a process.

Creating the mountain as fact

Published in September 1891, the sixth issue of the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, included an inventory of all Scotland's mountains rising above a height of 3000ft. Divided into seventeen separate geographical sections, the 283 mountains were numbered, recorded by name, height, and grid reference number from available Ordnance Survey maps. Meticulously detailed, these classificatory ‘Tables’ were the end product of several years of surveying, measuring and mapping undertaken by Sir Hugh Thomas Munro, prodigious walker, cartographic critic, sportsman and Scottish landowner.

Munro's labouring individualism is notable for having produced a localized enumerative solution to the ancient philosophical conundrum, ‘What is a mountain?’. By treating mountains as identifiable things and establishing their status as recognized facts, his classification created an orderly idea of Scotland's highest topographical points. A great deal has since been written about this enigmatic project (Campbell, 1999; Dempster, 1995), but in the context of this chapter how might ‘Munro's Tables' be understood? Mary Poovey's (1998) inquiry into the epistemological condition of the ‘modern fact’ offers some guidance. Tracing uncertain shifts in learned, and popular, opinion over what exactly should be counted, how material reality should be understood and how quantification might contribute to a systematic knowledge of the world, she outlines the status of the ‘fact’ as both ambiguous category and powerful epistemological unit. Poovey's choice of empirical study—the sciences of political economy and statistics—underscores a contention that for numbers to accumulate the social power necessary to secure the transformation into modern facts, their representation must suggest immunity to interpretation or theoretical analysis.

The numbers in ‘Munro's Tables' certainly held an authoritative appeal for the élite, gentlemanly club of Victorian mountaineers among whom he was already a prominent and respected figure. Although arguably sanctioned as much by social status as by the probity of scientific method, his work was undoubtedly a key contribution to the geographical knowledge of Scotland. And yet, his numerical system transformed many ‘mountains’ into problematic abstractions. The criteria used for the award of ‘mountain’ status were far from transparent: while some peaks over 3000ft were indisputably ‘mountains’, other ‘less shapely’ summits were deemed otherwise. If the aneroid barometer and map were Munro's trusted companions, his judgements were also swayed by a visual and sensuous aesthetic. His original bundles of blue and white index cards confirm as much, recording an enthusiasm for numerical correction on the grounds of accuracy, but also hinting at decisions based on situated circumstance.

The legacy of these endeavours might best be understood as the topographical version of an unfinished symphony. During the past three decades his work, now recognized as ‘The Munros’, has been subject to ever more complex and arcane inspection and re-interpretation among mountaineering circles; on occasion culminating in organized programmes of revision, alteration and reformulation. As evidenced here, the trajectory of the classification can be traced through a conventional documentary archive. However, it is also possible to understand it as a schema that is choreographed through contemporary, and continuous, performance.

Performing mountain classification

The vocabulary of ‘performance’ can mask (sometimes sharply) contrasting interpretations of recent theories of performativity, which are themselves very different in orientation and agenda (Butler, 1990; Thrift, 1996). Our ambition here, informed by Nash (2000), is that the concept of performance be put to work in two ways: as a means better to understand material interactions at the level of body practice; and to consider the social conditions of identity formation that emerge through particular sets of relations with landscape. Performance as an intersection of the material and social prompts novel forms of analysis that can help to mobilize the otherwise static and inactive analysis of Scotland's mountains as a leisure resource among a practising outdoor community (see for example, Prentice and Guerin, 1998). By thinking ‘performatively’ we divert our course away from a conventional treatment of hill-walking as a behavioural procedure determined by crude cognitive choices. Instead we seek out the tensions and correspondences that exist—at different scales, and for individuals or collective groups—between formalized configurations of coded acts and an improvised realm of creative acts. These performative concerns extend directly into the various ways that people maintain and re-create the classification of ‘mountain’ as a matter of fact.

For many thousands of hill-walkers, the Munros provide a classificatory system around which everyday leisure practice can be organized. Collecting and ultimately completing an entire round of the mountain summits by independent ascent is a long-term objective recognized by many in this loose outdoor community. Such is the popularity of the pastime that a specialist terminology has entered the popular lexicon. Moreover as proof-positive of a significant social trend, associated stereotypes are widely referenced in the national media. Thus, ‘Munro-bagging’ is recognized as an activity indulged in by the ‘Munro-bagger’ who finds the habit of collection to have become an all-consuming one.

Greater sensitivity to the impulses that energize hill-walkers reveal very different, sometimes overlapping, leisure identities in which the underlying, or explicit, presence of this numerical classification unfolds into each personal account of performed practice. A commonly expressed theme, and one that holds potent appeal, is the sense of presence within a national space that hill-walking can engender (Withers, 2001: 236). To plot your own personal progress (Parks, 2001) through the Munros is a popular means to claim knowledge of Scotland's geography, while affording a grounded point of connection to historical events: ‘I feel like this is a part of a tradition’. Patriotism and an awareness of the body politic can however, be surpassed by more visceral bodily expectations. Walkers clearly enjoy the motivation provided by a target that will spur them on to greater, possibly unexpected, physical efforts: ‘I push myself to do it, I mean sometimes I don't find it easy’. However, recent converts can disturb romantic convention by choosing to understand, and articulate, acts of collection through a more modish body culture of ‘empowerment’ and ‘goalorientation’. To internalize the list, and sense it through a kinaesthetic ‘burn’, is a markedly different enterprise from one rooted in a national narrative.

Within each climb undertaken the existence of objective(s) can bring immediate physical satisfaction while also contributing to a longer trajectory of factual reward: ‘Well firstly, I am touching the top to say I have got there and maybe that's another one ticked you know … the famous tick, you know’. With continued walking experience, and the steady accumulation of ‘ticked-off’ summits, the appeals of a quantitative understanding of walking experience become more evident. For many individuals, the collection of facts is a healthy distraction within the greater physical challenge of what many acknowledge as ‘a game’. For some, the importance of an exhaustive, internal order to things emerges as a more illicit pleasure: ‘I think I must be in danger of Munrosis hyperdocumentalis. In addition to full records of the climbs, I have elaborate data sheets giving distances and heights, time taken, times between peaks and so on …’. This confessional mode, allied to a knowing reflexivity in self-description, is crucial to many walkers as a means to avoid the barbs and jibes attached to the label, ‘Munro-bagger’. However avid their ‘summiteering’ might become, the function of any outing can still be reduced to that of a harmless diversion: ‘I think one of the things that appeals to me the most about this is … that it is just ridiculous.’ Those who contend that the essence of walking should be strictly processual and phenomenal, however, look disapprovingly on any element of competition and the urgent desire to secure just one more fact, en route to the ultimate conclusion: ‘quite a lot of my friends have finished and they became sort of obsessive about you know—‘must do this hill, must tick it off’—even if they saw nothing. I don't enjoy that at all, so I have kind of fallen behind’.

De Certeau (1984) alerts us to the mobile strategies of resistance that pedestrians deploy to (re)create the city streets. In similar measure, it is possible to unpack complex tactics for movement within the staged setting that Scottish hill-walking and the Munro classification offers. Gently subversive and playful types of performance act as important statements of intent, and as markers for an alternative sensibility, within the wider community of collectors. ‘Anti-munroists’ steadfastly refuse to count summits, or keep a list, and in the most extreme cases, even to climb mountains with Munro status. Walkers on the verge of completion elect not to complete the round, while some of those who do, decide not to have their name entered on the official, all-time list of ‘Munroists’. For some, the visual imperative in hill-walking is taken to its logical extent by only counting those summits from which a clear view was visible. Others observe a puritanical adherence to the original classification by ignoring all subsequent changes, or customize the accepted standard: ‘My own “rules” differ from the lists in the current Tables, but as the Tables in their entirety fall within my own tables, officialdom should be satisfied’.

Evidently, the classification of Scotland's ‘mountains’ as identifiable facts is manifested in a wide variety of performances of both personal and collective identities. Different enactments mobilize conflicting ideas over the authenticity of natural experience, create deliberate displays of national identity, reflect urges for bodily improvement, and more fully socialize the systematic abstractions of collection. When refracted through Poovey's aforementioned thesis for the modern fact—that power and status is founded on an apparent imperviousness to change—Munro's Tables do not seem to fit the mould. Arguably it is their inherently contestable and malleable nature, rather than any putative impunity, that has ensured an enduring appeal.

In the two sections that follow we focus our attention on different walking ‘events’ that spatialize the mobile sensing body, against the mountain as both mapped form and material terrain. By observing performed action at close quarters, we consider how different abstractions, quantitative measures and navigational technologies function within embodied movements as they are planned for in instruction classes, and as they then happen in the landscape.

Calculating a route on the map and visualizing an objective

The ‘Notes and Queries’ section of the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal for December 1889 included a brief account of a day's outing in the Central Highlands written by one William Naismith, then a mountaineer of growing repute. Factual in tone and practical in intent, his entry closed thus:

Reported with the minimum of fuss this was, ostensibly, a modest contribution to the journal's statistical marginalia. There was certainly little to hint at a longer trajectory that would transform his humble formula into ‘Naismith's Rule’, a time-honoured artefact for determining speed of movement through a landscape. Tailored to suit the topography of Scotland's mountains, it is still judged in standard mountaincraft handbooks to be ‘just as valid today as it ever was’ (Langmuir, 1984: 14). A simple formula on paper, in practice it requires a form of ‘cartographic literacy’ in which calculations switch between the flat representational plane of the map and the anticipation of embodied movement through a landscape. These successive shifts from abstraction to experience require fuller consideration.

During research, we found that instruction classes on mountain navigation reveal much about the application, and refinement, of this specific technique. On every possible occasion, the importance of miles and minutes as basic controls in a hill-walking outing are impressed on the learning student, often in the form of rudimentary questions: ‘where are you heading?’, ‘what is the objective of the walk?’ and ‘how long will it take to get there?’. Responses are steered by a mounting awareness of remoteness, long distances and the unpredictability of weather conditions. The precautionary register is captured in a recognized code for safe and responsible conduct founded on sound navigational training: it is incumbent on the walker to begin pedestrian practice prior to any actual movement on foot.

With a preparatory decision taken on a likely summit the walker's next move is to measure the length of the planned route, and estimate the time needed to meet the objective. The map surface is to be understood through contour markings, duly measured in accordance with Naismith's Rule. The instructions given by the mountaineering instructor are simple and concise: ‘Take out a map and visualize where you are going’. The implication is clear, that the map will provide a ‘visual reality to an invisible reality’ (Jacob, 1999: 29). Yet, we are still left pondering how this activity actually occurs. Of specific interest are the walker's attempts to see and feel the route as it emerges through the map before any embodied action occurs in the landscape.

In later lessons on the use of Naismith's rule, the class instructor supplements the measurement of distance, height, gradient of ascent and descent with additional considerations: ‘terrain, experience, fitness, rucksack weight, navigational confidence’. At the same time as attempting accurately to measure the proposed walk in terms of quantitative measurements on the map, the instructor readjusts these calculations by reading known bodily capacities onto the map. While the novice might look at the map from a position on high, and only see a confusion of lines, markings and numbers, the more experienced walker learns to use the map as a way of looking into the landscape, and seeing how the topography rises and falls. By steadily examining the route it is possible to visualize landscape and speculate about the types of terrain likely to be encountered. Thus the summit objective, when conceived of within an embodied context of ascending or descending, becomes ‘a key point only through its location within a broader narrative’ (Matless, 1999: 200). It is important to recognize this more complexly layered process of cartographic visualization, when the map becomes a medium between the anticipating body and the still distant landscape. In this mode, the act of measuring and judgement begins to exceed quantitative facts established from a simple currency of metres and contours. These preparatory abilities are succinctly described by one hill-walker: ‘The skills you have are what control you, and what you do. And the skills you have make the objective the skill of knowing what you can do and what you are ready to do’.

While navigational instructions presuppose a pure and objective realm of cognitive decision-making, the sentient aspects of these preparatory activities are less readily acknowledged. Arguably, it is the instructional imperative of possible risk and individual responsibility in hill-walking that renders the core message as one of rational, calculated action. Nevertheless, the importance of Naismith's rule is diluted by practice. It recedes into the background, overcome by the complexity and intensity of a dialogue between walker and map. If afforded its simplest definition, such a rule creates an identifiable relation between two objective facts. It then offers a resource for action. When placed under scrutiny in a field of practice, Naismith's version functions with lesser claims to accuracy and more of the characteristics that Lucy Suchman (1987: 55) identifies in a ‘rule-of-thumb’. Malleable and alterable, the numerical products are open to reconfiguration and do not comprehensively regulate action. This version of mountain performance is based around the variabilities that open up within the calculation. As a quantitative event, much rests on its adaptive character: a standardized formula that will have to bear the weight of a body moving along the course of the route. Here, the establishment of a code for safe conduct and mountain mobility draws on the geometric order of the map and the anticipated reactions of the body.

Moving, bearing, counting and pacing

For our third walking event, we want to consider relations between embodied performance and numerical abstraction, during phases of movement across the mountain landscape. Equipped with an objective and a planned route, for the hill-walker the inter-subjectivities of practice are no longer limited to sensed visualization and are further complicated by relations with underfoot conditions, the surrounding landscape and navigational technologies. Differently practised techniques are required—these prioritize an understanding of the body felt through the physical terrain. On this particular occasion, it is helpful to consider a narrated sequence of embodied actions in place.

Immediately on setting out, for the walker there is a marked shift in attention from the terrain of the map to the ground that is being passed over. During the earliest stages of the route, a path is often followed which clearly guides the way ahead. The walker takes care to step over stones and boggy areas, but can take advantage of the relatively accommodating terrain to enjoy the landscape, viewed in ‘wide-screen’. While the map is occasionally consulted, for the moment this is simply for verification of route judgement, or path selection. As the maintained or marked route gradually peters out, the experience of more immediate surroundings becomes acute and the practice of walking alters. On encountering more challenging terrain movement inevitably slows, sometimes until ‘every step … become[s] a separate decision about direction and safety, and the simplest act of walking is transformed into a specialized skill’ (Solnit, 1999: 133–134).

The multi-dimensional movements now required of the hill-walker have been subject to bio-mechanical prescription. For J. E. B. Wright (1955: 46) moving through the mountains was to be most accurately understood as an art requiring the ‘proper use of parts of the body’. Replicable anatomical practice required the hill-walker to concentrate on balance and maintaining equilibrium between the locomotive power of legs lifting and a straight back supporting. W. H. Murray (1955: 5) was similarly convinced that discipline was the means to experience ultimate liberation: ‘… we must … get for ourselves a real technical competence. When we have that we can walk safely; only then do we know freedom, and only in freedom can real joy be ours’. But in this science of bipedalism, actions tend to be isolated from context. A more persuasive explanation of this intimate phenomenology of a body's spatial realm is offered by Jan Hendrik van den Berg (1952: 170), who imagines traversing an irregular surface in the company of the mountaineer:

One hill-walker's description of grounded practice develops this relational theme, suggesting the scaled spatialities embedded in her own performance and a need to align different bodily capacities:

For our own notional hill-walker a change in conditions can necessitate different technical proficiencies. Featureless terrain, the absence of a visible path or a deterioration in the weather, encountered in any combination, mean that the embodied, relational dialogue must once again assimilate navigational technologies. Safe passage is dependent on continued map consultation and, for the first time, compass use in situ. Until now only a background presence in the walking experience, the compass now becomes its controlling mechanism. A bearing must be taken between two different points on route, and any judgement made of distance covered is predicated on a precise count of walking steps that have been taken. Instruction manuals and mountain instructors are quick to stress the significance of this skill: ‘… a sense of direction is a myth. On mountains and in bad visibility it is dangerous myth’. The chief skills for the hill-walker to master are reading the compass and then placing trust in it as a responsible device. In some measure, control and responsibility shifts from the hill-walker to the compass, which incorporates the technical solution to any navigational difficulty and can displace personal anxieties about safety and the unpredictability of conditions.

However once again, intimate observation and experience reveal a more complex arrangement of networked actions, intentions and agencies. For one walker, following a bearing requires a carefully co-ordinated series of skilled actions:

While the isolation of this calculated act seems to him like ‘the ultimate abstraction of the hill-walking experience’, it also requires a very intimate understanding of a body moving on the mountain. Starting with a baseline number of walking paces per 100 metres, a succession of quick and small adjustments are made to this figure according to the terrain underfoot and the purchase it offers. This process is explained by our walker as ‘reading the ground through your body’, where a tight focus must be maintained on only that which is immediate. Sensory feedback—‘this is tough and it hurts’, ‘I'm on a roll’—is determined in response to the feeling of leg muscles moving and foot placement.

Aligned with this practised response the counting continues; fingers occasionally clicking on a knitting counter carried especially to help keep tally. A halt in progress presumably, (hopefully), means the target point has been reached. Here, the walker takes stock, using the map to determine a new target point. And so the same process begins over again, and if weather permits, until the summit is eventually attained. In skilled hands, the compass is incorporated into a processing loop of thought, judgement and action that allows the walker continuously and fluently to adjust movement through an on-going perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds.

Arguably, what has eventually come to represent the walker's objective is not the summit itself, but rather the process of getting there, and getting back, and being able to judge and examine skills and abilities in transit. As Ingold (2000: 239) asserts ‘… we know as we go, not before we go. Thus the operation is not complete until one has reached one's final destination: only then can the traveller truly claim to have found his way’. In combination, a situated and emergent alliance between numerical order and bodily improvisation seems to erode the assured tone of the navigational instruction manual in which actions are presented as the execution of pre-conceived, cognitive plans. The notion of a rational sequencing of thoughts and actions is belied by practice where ‘discursivity and subjectivity are complicated by simultaneous pre-discursive encounters’ (Crouch, 2001: 70). The bearing, counted and paced out, is a constant within the complexity and unpredictability of the practised task. As Lucy Suchman (1987) persuasively argues, what surrounds this navigational calculation is a context of action in relation to surrounding objects, phenomena and subjective practice. It is the complexly layered and continuous dialogue of modifications between hill-walker, compass, map, the ground passed over and prevailing weather conditions that dictate situated practice. This, then, is to mobilize a specific quantification through a sensual process, following the bearing requires our walker to take the abstraction and act it out through an orderly performance.

Encompassing new means to navigate

Hill-walkers carry a keen awareness of historical practice with them, and purposefully inscribe techniques into their own preparations and actions. The learning walker is encouraged to adopt an entire language of Scotland's mountains into their personal identity and then to find orientation through acts of planning, walking, counting and collecting. Regular and knowledgeable references are made to the quantitative systems for ordering or abstracting embodied experience devised by Munro and Naismith. That there is on-going and active social life for these traditional methods and techniques perhaps goes some way towards explaining the ambivalence (and sometimes outright resistance) shown to particular technological innovations in walking. Attitudes displayed towards the use of Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receivers are a revealing case in point.

The recent advent of GPS devices as portable hand-held navigation instruments, and the rapid realization of their marketability for outdoor leisure practice, is based around the promise of immediate and precise locational data expressed as a set of geo-spatial co-ordinates (Parks, 2001). While this holds obvious appeal for mountain navigation, walkers often display a hesitancy or reluctance towards this technological innovation: ‘I have got one and I have used it. I try not to rely on it, I use it as a last resort … when we seem to be lost’. This statement captures a particular ethic of traditionalism in respect to skilled navigational practice that prevails among many hill-walkers. It is a commonly held expectation that knowledge and competence are accrued through practical application and well-grooved technique. For one experienced mountain guide: ‘the whole hill-walking experience is to do with making decisions on your own, or a group of people making decisions together’. To orient practice according to this ‘moral compass’ means that individual safety and responsibility are learned and, as a corollary, peer respect is earned. Such is the power of this code that one walker with an extensive tick-list of mountain summits still feels her achievements diminished for want of having taken on independent navigational responsibility. If for some practitioners an over-reliance on the act of following, rather than leading, is problematic, then GPS is further evidence of ‘a great move at the moment for people to hand over the decision making as if it is an adjunct to the whole experience’. Here, the basis of critique is one that understands GPS as a navigational guide, promoting a counter-intuitive logic where (in effect) you can know the exact position at which you stand, without any idea of where you are in a sensed landscape. As such GPS seems to be founded on a Cartesian, disembodied understanding of landscape.

Other active walkers give off similarly mixed messages about GPS and its possible uses: it is variously understood as a marker of increasingly professionalized practice, a mechanism to reduce personal risk, a dangerous gadget likely to encourage acts of irresponsibility and an intrusive presence in the hill-walking experience. Our mountain instructor suggested a cautionary and partial process of assimilation, with no displacement of compass work. A careful balance was suggested on acceptable technology, and on what are safe or acceptable forms of use. Meanwhile, a fellow walker—increasingly conscious of his wider responsibilities to friends and family—found a regular partner unprepared to join him on future outings to the mountains because of his choice to use a GPS for security. In this particular case, GPS seemed to disrupt the more intimate experiences associated with hill-walking in Scotland, and the seductive wilderness ideal that demarcates a space for leisure practice clearly separated from modernity.

The adoption of new technology is already delineating new forms of relational practice, and is the cause of a rescheduling in the acknowledged code for responsible, navigational conduct. Arguably, rejection also requires the reconfiguration of that same code. Evidently, the hill-walker holding this bit of ‘kit’ does not move across an isotropic plain, but acts in a social space. A technology of totalizing vision and knowledge that threatens to subsume personal practice can be understood alternatively as a facility that usefully extends bodily capacities and re-works versions of the self in nature. We suggest that attention can most usefully focus on the complex social mechanisms—stories, actions, histories and memories—employed in the active negotiation of this technology and the abstract information it offers. It is in such material and meaningful relations that the performativity of social identity becomes most apparent. There are clear continuities here with our treatment of the classificatory list, the map and the compass: all are technologies founded on the practice of abstraction and on sensual engagement. In an evolving genealogy of navigational technology in hill-walking, GPS certainly disrupts established modes of interactivity and relational conduct, but clearly does not disallow them.

Conclusion

Our chosen approach in this chapter has been to create a cultural biography of mountain quantification that focuses on the continuous social circulation and performance of facts. Framed in this way, ‘facts’ can then be more accurately understood as incomplete abstractions, since each is mobilized by different pairs of hands and feet, situated in historical contexts, and embedded in certain landscapes. The personal paths that they follow reflect the interplay between technologies, human agency and spaces of practice. None of our three narrated walking events can therefore be treated as static entities. Successively recalibrated through actions, they are bound to be always process and product. Consequently, we are not content to limit ourselves to the set of tropes currently employed in performative theories to explain elements of body movement and the experience of mobility: a smooth-textured, amorphous realm of fluids, flows, rhythms, contingencies and desires that does not seem to settle (Thrift, 1996; Urry, 2001). To these must be added, orderings, facts, classifications, formulae and quantitative abstractions which, while by no means fixed or permanent, are important presences and significations in the performance of nature. Perhaps we might consider them as friction points in the flow of fleeting improvisations that constitute our performances in, and of, these settings.

It is our hope that this chapter has begun to place numbers as social and performed entities, and has not simply played with them. In this we are conscious of how, for Trevor Barnes and Matthew Hannah (2001: 380), ‘to demonstrate that numbers partly construct reality, rather than only representing it’ requires work that explores ‘how context enters into the very pores of numbers and statistical techniques’. Using qualitative methods to explore the embodied animation of quantitative abstractions means being sensitive to contrasting forms of knowledge production, but not definitive as to their relationship. We certainly want to displace any crude definition of binary epistemological opposites, and thereby avoid the implication of an ‘either-or’ decision. According to James Corner ‘our knowledge and experience of space is more ontological or ‘lived’ than it is mathematical or Cartesian' (1999: 214). We would suggest that it is both at once, an alternative phenomenology dependent on the practice of abstraction in sensual movement. Moreover, by examining quantitative knowledge production and negotiation as performed practice we have begun to attend to the recent assertion that ‘… statistics are much too important to be left only to the statisticians. How and why they are constructed, by whom and about whom, how they are used and publicised, and to what ends and for those interests, are critical social scientific questions for critical social scientists' (Barnes and Hannah, 2001: 379–380).

Having so consciously emphasized not just the situated and the sensed but the processual aspects of walking, in conclusion it is worth posing the question: ‘are the chapter's three meaningful ‘events’ not then just a means to an end?’. If this was the case then abstraction and objectification would be always, and only, generative activities that achieve a desired result: fluent, safe walking. Here we might draw an illustrative comparison between the hill-walker and a musician carefully following a score comprised of close notation: once flow, order and rhythm are realized systematic practice dissolves into the full orchestral performance. We don't subscribe to this premise; nor we suspect would the many thousands of hill-walkers carefully plotting their own personal signature by name, date and number across Scotland's geography of mountains. As they themselves demonstrate, numbers, rules and bearings are emergent within the process of walking itself, and then in turn feed back into that process. Our intention has been to initiate a type of inquiry into pedestrian practice that scrutinizes the spatial orderings, localised identities and sentient improvisations that make facts and abstractions. That this has been possible through a palpable realm of gestures, movements, postures, protocols, actions and reactions might prompt comparative work in the continuing study of different performances of nature.