A ONE-man play which imagines what it would have been like had George Mallory survived his Everest climb is to be staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Highlands-based writer John Burns won the prose category of the Mountaineering Council of Scotland Writing Competition in 2011 with a tale about surviving an avalanche.

His play, Mallory: Beyond Everest will be staged 90 years after Mallory and his companion Sandy Irvine vanished on their final push toward the then unconquered summit of Everest.

There is an on-going debate about whether they were the first to scale the peak, 30 years before Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay.

The new play imagines a Mallory who survived Everest and came back from the summit to be knighted for his achievement in scaling the mountain.

Mr Burns came up with the idea while he was curled up in a tent in the Cairngorms.