Moonwalker - Adventures of a Midnight Mountaineer

CONFESSION time. After many years of mountain subterfuge, I have decided to come clean. 

All these hills I claim to have climbed over the past 35 years or so? Well here's the truth – I haven't actually done them at all.

Four rounds of Munros? Hah! No chance – never even managed to complete one. 

The big finish on the Corbetts? Or the Grahams? Never happened.

And what about that grand finale for the Full House on Ben Nevis? Fake news, I'm afraid.

All those pictures standing at cairns? The beautiful backdrops? The smiling faces at the summits? Fake. Fake. Fake.

It took an enormous amount of work and ended up costing a small fortune to pull this off, but it obviously worked. No one has ever suspected a thing.

So why the big confession now? I simply can't live the lie any longer – and this just seems the perfect day to get it off my chest.

I did set out with the intention of doing the Munros. But it was a lot of hard work for little reward and on the umpteenth occasion where I was pictured standing at a pile of rocks in a sea of grey with no view, it occurred that I could have claimed to be anywhere.

 My back garden, for instance. Especially as I live on a corner of Scotland's east coast, where the haar rolls in from the sea and swallows the landscape fairly regularly. And so the idea was born – I would become a mountain faker.

All I had to do was wait for a wet and miserable day, gather a few dozen stones from the rockery and shape them into a rough pyramid, change into hillwalking gear then strike a mountaineer's pose – with obligatory man-leg of course – and Bingo! I had climbed a Munro. The first couple of times were simple but I realised that to make this system work long-term I would have to make sure the cairns always looked a bit different.

 It was easy enough to check out what the real summit piles looked like from online hill sites: the hard part was getting the right type of rock that was local to the various parts of the country, so I had to become a bit of an expert in lithology.

I did get a few strange looks from the neighbours due to the constant heavy lorries driving in and out with deliveries of tons of rocks of all shapes, sizes and composition. Granite, sandstone, quartzite, gabbro: you name it, I ordered it. However, that was nothing compared to the complaints that followed when the scale model of the In Pin arrived on a low loader to tower over the neighbourhood. The police escort for the vehicle, complete with flashing lights, probably didn't help matters.

If I couldn't source the relevant rocks, I just used panoramic backdrops from websites and got myself photoshopped into the landscape.

Faking the Donalds proved to be simple beyond belief. All I had to do was stand beside a broken fence in a field or on a grassy knoll – a much-used prop in conspiracies over the years – and it was just like the real thing.

It was more complicated to include friends and acquaintances in the summit celebrations photos. Some had been out with me in those early shrouded days, and I was able to use the pictures to re-include them for other peaks. But many simply couldn't remember which hills they had done or when anyway, so it was easy enough to persuade them they had actually been there.

 Sometimes I had to resort to more devious methods, such as using lookalikes from a casting agency. The resemblances were uncanny but I did have to shell out a lot of money for the privilege. It all added to the illusion – and the cost.

 The total outlay of this ongoing fakery has been astronomical but I did at least manage to recoup some of the outlay by re-selling some of the accumulated boulders. (By the way, if you know anyone who's looking for a few tons of rocks at a discounted rate, please get in contact.)

 Was it worth it? Well, in hindsight, it might actually have been easier and far less expensive just to climb all of those mountains, but then where's the fun in that?