The mountain literature competition is held each year

An account of a desperate solo climb on a mountain crag picked up first prize in a mountaineering literature competition.

Ian Blake’s The Climber’s Tale won the top award for prose in the Mountaineering Council of Scotland’s annual competition.

The council said the Gairloch man’s story had a twist in the tale.

David Wilson of Harrogate, North Yorkshire, took the top poetry prize with his The Climber, a portrait of the life journey of Polish mountaineering legend Wanda Rutkiewicz, who died on Kanchenjunga in the Himalaya.

Alan Laing won not one but two prizes in a mountain writing competition. The Balbeggie, Perthshire, man took second prize in the prose section and came third in the poetry section.

Mr Laing is no stranger to the competition, having taken third prize in the prose section last year.

This year the judges praised his Death and Life on the Mountain, an ‘imaginative exploration of the life of a mountain’ which starts with the scattering of ashes on a Scottish hill.

His poem Land of the Mountain and the Flood took as its topic the hills – and the rain. The judges described it as ‘amusing and ingenious’, with ‘a great rhythm that evokes falling rain’.

Second prize in the poetry category went to Jack Hastie, of Kilbarchan in Renfrewshire, with Resurrection 1959, capturing a long-gone era in Scottish mountaineering.

The MCofS has been running its Mountain Article Competition since 1987, seeking out the best in mountain writing seeking out the best in mountain writing, whether fact or fiction, prose or poetry.

First prize in the prose competition is £150 and first in the poetry competition is £100, each also receiving a free weekend pass to the 2015 Edinburgh Mountain Film Festival in February.

The winning essays and poems will also be published in the February edition of Scottish Mountaineer, the quarterly membership magazine of the MCofS.

All the winning entries will also appear on the MCofS website.