Chapter 3 focuses on the history of Britain’s only mountaintop weather station, on Ben Nevis in Scotland. It was the idea of the Scottish Meteorological Society. Clement Wragge offered to test the location by taking observations daily on the summit. In doing so Wragge conducted and represented himself like an Alpine mountaineer or Arctic adventurer. The chapter then traces the establishment of an observatory on the summit, and its brethren observatory at Fort William. The chapter focuses on what life was like for the observers working on the summit. It also discusses the observatory’s financial insecurity and its conflicts with the Meteorological Council in London. The Council’s refusal to increase the observatory’s annual government grant was blamed for its closure in 1904, while the observatory’s critics blamed its failure to contribute to forecasting.

The central feature of Bert Bissell’s life was his deep-seated Methodist faith. Bissell went to the hills (always the hills for him) to renew contact with this faith rather than to discover it for the first time. Climbing mountains in search of God has a long history and Bissell’s dedication to it suggests we should not be too quick to construe ruralism or nature worship as a displacement of religion. Nevertheless, even in Bissell’s case, other elements than religion contributed to his ruralism, including strong physical and social impulses. Perhaps most important of all was the need to shore up his own sense of self in the face of a world moving rapidly away from his most cherished beliefs and values.