High Times

When Joss Lynam was a small child growing up in London's Highgate in the 1920s, he became intrigued by the books his mother was reading. Martha Lynam collected books on Tibet, and these now belong to her son. They are thick, hard-backed tomes with dark covers and alluring titles - A Conquest of Tibet, Black River of Tibet, No Passport to Tibet. One has a picture of a stampeding yak on the cover, and many line-drawings within of the mountainous Tibetan landscape and its people, which stirred the imagination of the young Joss. (Christened James, the family pet name of Joss has stuck with him for life.)

When he was seven, his aunt took him to the cinema to see a documentary film on the 1930 Kanchenjunga expedition, which had been led by Frank Smythe. He was entranced. "All those wonderful horizons of snow and ice, and the idea of climbing on them. The sense of danger attached to it all."

His parents, Martha and Edward, were Irish emigrants. Edward Lynam worked as the superintendent of maps in the British Museum, so cartography is something which mountaineer Joss Lynam has long been familiar with. There was one sibling, a sister, Biddy, who died seven years ago: "she just missed her 75th birthday," Lynam says, with a tiny shiver of mortality. His own 75th birthday was in June this year.

Although the Lynams lived in London, they were always an outdoor family, often going camping and walking in Devon and Cornwall. "So it wasn't a completely urban upbringing. I had a happy childhood. No hang-ups," he says firmly.

Joss Lynam turned 18 in 1942. "If you had the right scholastic qualifications - maths and physics - the army would take you and train you immediately." He was sent to India, where he learned to speak Hindi and worked with engineers for the Indian Army until the age of 23. During that time, he experimented with climbing in the Himalayan foothills north of Delhi, where he was posted; this was his first opportunity to tackle really big challenges.

He quotes the oft-used paradoxical phrase, "I had a quiet war," with just a touch of irony. Lynam was de-mobbed in April 1945, so "fortunately missed" at first-hand the savagery and bloodshed that followed Indian partition in August of that year. Quiet war or not, the conflict's aftermath must have affected him. He lost a close friend during that time, who had remained behind in India and was murdered in the ensuing madness.

After the war, Britain's universities were over-subscribed, as five years' of would-be freshmen who had been in service all scrambled to gain entrance at once. Encouraged by his Irish parents, Lynam came to Dublin to study engineering at Trinity.

Two seminal things happened in his years at Trinity. One was co-founding the Irish Mountaineering Club (IMC) with Bill Perrott in 1948, at a meeting in Dublin's Central Hotel in Exchequer Street. There were 50 members initially. They popularised Dalkey Quarry as a rock-climbing venue, and published the first rock-climbers' guide to it. Within two years, the IMC had climbed all the major ranges in Ireland, Wales, and the Lake District.

The IMC was also open to women. The second defining event of those university years for Joss Lynam was meeting his future wife, Nora Gorevan, at one of the IMC's climbs. At the time, she was working as a secretary for the Catholic Standard. "My first memory of Nora is of her falling into a river." They married when he graduated.

"I got a 2.1 from Trinity, but I should have got more if I'd given more of my attention to engineering and less to climbing," he says, which suggests the spirit of competition which has been with him all his life; not many people cite their exam results - unasked - decades later.

He changed his British passport to an Irish one when he married, and has kept it ever since. For the first eight years of their marriage, the Lynams lived in Wales, and then Ambleside in the Lake District, close to prime hill-walking and mountaineering territory. "I've been extremely lucky in life, the way engineering and adventure sports have meshed closely together. Each has helped advance the other." Two of their three children - Ruth and Nicholas - were born during these years.

Lynam's voice is a very quiet one, which doesn't pick up well when it's played back on tape. When he speaks of Nicholas, his only son, the tape becomes almost inaudible. Nicholas died 12 years ago. "Kidney trouble," he whispers. "He was 31." The tape whirrs on. When he speaks again, it's in the language of pure stiff-upper-army-lip, that attempts to camouflage unspoken feelings. "It was all a bit traumatic and sad, but there you go." Is he religious? "I would call myself agnostic," is the reply, although he is anxious to stress that Nora is Catholic.

When the work in the Lake District finished, he put his CV around again. The fact that it included his previous experience in India, and his interest in mountaineering, proved decisive in landing him a job back in India. The job was helping to build a dam in Orissa. "Later on, the chief engineer told me when he'd seen the bit about the Himalayan expeditions on my CV, that he reckoned I'd be able to put up with the conditions in India."

Nora returned temporarily to Ireland to have their third and last child, Clodagh. Although Nora had always gone on expeditions with him, once their children were born, she stopped. "But she knows what makes me tick, and she's never stopped me going on expeditions; she's always encouraged me to go. For me, the essence of mountaineering, and even walking, is that you yourself are very much in control, or you're supposed to be. You're dependent on your own abilities, physical and mental. You go out there and you don't bloody know if you'll get back. That's where the excitement is for me."

The wandering years ended in 1965. Ruth was 11 by then, and they didn't want to send her away to boarding school. Nor did the prospect of sliding into life as permanent ex-pats attract them. "If I had stayed out there much longer - I was 42 when I came back to Ireland - it would have been very difficult to get a job."

The family came back to Dublin in 1965 and settled in Roebuck, in the house where Joss and Nora still live. It was a good time to come back. Lynam got a job straight away with the team who were building the Dun Laoghaire car ferry terminal, and renewed his contact with the IMC. The children went to local schools, and Lynam put on his crampons and set to scaling many new challenges.

To date, he has participated in 14 major expeditions. Among these were expeditions to Greenland in 1968 and 1971; to a previously unclimbed peak in the Zanskar in Kashmir in 1984; and to the Tienshan Mountains in north-west China as recently as 1995. There was also the 1987 Tibetan expedition to Everest's north peak, known as Zhangzi: over half a century after reading his mother's books about the place known as the Roof of the World, Lynam finally got a chance to see Tibet for himself. "It's a wonderful bleak country, on such an enormous scale."

"I never carried pictures of my family with me when I was away," he says, adding pragmatically: "On expeditions, you carry as little as you can." The one item that was packed for every trip, "until it grew a hole in the bottom", was a large yellow plastic mug. "It annoyed everyone because it was bigger than everyone's else's," he recalls happily.

Lynam's expeditions post-1986 are all the more remarkable for the fact that by then he had had a quadruple bypass. "Without it, I wouldn't have been able to climb any more. It did give me a leap physically, but the curve of old age comes at you from the other direction." Whatever about fellow mountaineer Chris Bonnington doing wonders for the sale of Beefy Bovril in the 1970s, Lynam is a walking advertisement for the benefits of heart surgery.

While the surgery was unquestionably successful, he was less than impressed at the logistics of the whole procedure. In an interview in 1988, he said: "It was either the Blackrock Clinic or queuing up for two years in a public hospital. It's something that angers me intensely. I certainly couldn't wait for two years, so I had to produce £5,000 immediately. You can't go until the bill is paid."

Meanwhile, there were many administrative hats to keep spinning in the air back in Ireland. In 1969, Lynam became a founder member of the Association for Adventure Sports (AAS). He was a council member of Cospoir from 1978-1984. From 1978 until this year, he edited the journal, Irish Mountain Log. The current issue has no less than five articles and interviews in praise of its departed editor. "I'm not responsible for that issue!" he points out several times, although he is clearly chuffed as anything with it.

Since 1986, he has worked first for the Board of Works, and now with the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, on helping to preserve the Skelligs. As a civil engineer with a climber's steady feet and head for heights, he had the job of maintaining the ancient beehive huts and oratories which cling like barnacles to the splinter-like sides of Skellig Michael. "They needed an engineer who would be quite happy scrambling around on those rocks." He was out there eight times last year alone, staying overnight in the Department's huts, and loves the careful judgment the job requires.

"In a way, it has the same attraction as rock-climbing, when you examine the structure of those old buildings," he explains. "You wonder if you touch this rock, or take it away, how will it affect the others. It's a bit like playing Spilikins."

In 1983, Lynam was made redundant from his job as an engineer. "It was the best thing that could have happened," he says now stoically. At the time, however, it can't have been easy for a man of his generation to make the initial adjustment to becoming yet another statistic of the recession. But he had good contacts and managed to get enough freelance work to keep going, including lecturing in Bolton Street. Then there were also the walking guides he was editing for Gill & MacMillan, although, as he points out, books like this rarely make much money. Of more significance was a family inheritance, which provided "a cushion".

The 1980s were not an easy decade for Lynam. Following redundancy in 1983, he had his bypass operation in 1986. The following year, his son died. Within four years, he had suffered blows to his pride, his health, and his heart. Yet he seems to have recovered exceptionally well from at least two of these three. The death of one's child is darker territory entirely. Someone who has known Lynam for many years observes that the birth of his first grandchild, Christopher, Clodagh's child, at around the same time, in a way helped him cope with the loss. Perhaps the highest-profile position he's held in recent years is that of chairman of the National Waymarked Ways Committee, which he took up in 1984. This job was, and continues to be, voluntary. Ireland now has several long-distance way-marked ways, including the Wicklow Way, the Kerry Way, and the Slieve Bloom Way.

"In 1948, if you wanted to walk across someone's land, it would never occur to me not to go across it - it would never have occurred to me or the farmer that there was anything wrong with it. Now you have a completely different situation. Access to the countryside is getting more and more difficult, mainly because of larger numbers walking now. If I could break free of all my other commitments, what I'd most like to try and achieve is to get some reasonable solution to the problem of access to the countryside. But nobody wants to know about it." Eco-tourism, such as cycling and walking holidays, are becoming - slowly - popular in Ireland. As a people, we're not anything as energetic or enthusiastic for hill-walking as our British neighbours, but tourists are certainly keen on hill-walking and cycling-based holidays. The popular guidebook series, Lonely Planet, has just published its first edition of Walking in Ireland, and presumably its staff have researched the market and are confident it will find many buyers.

"Walking routes are a pretty harmless form of tourism. When we started with the way-marked ways, we were thinking about doing something in Ireland for Irish walkers, but now the emphasis seems to be on attracting foreign tourists. There are quite a lot of foreign groups doing organised walks on those long-distance ways now, but not many Irish."

On the morning of his 75th birthday this summer, Joss Lynam celebrated by re-climbing a route on Luggala he first pioneered in 1949. Who knows what he'll want to tackle for his 80th? Eileen Battersby is on holidays