How Britain�s most daring climber became the focus of his wife�s Bafta-winning film
Interview by Richard Baynes

AS he gets to the crag, Dave MacLeod drops his bag on the ground and seconds later is under a jutting overhang on the huge heather-capped boulder. He makes gymnastic and complex climbing moves in quick, controlled bursts. It's difficult to take your eyes off his dynamic performance. His wife Claire arrives a few moments later, then sits calmly watching, cool and impassive. Sunlight plays on the birch trees and Glen Nevis on a bright June day with a gentle breeze, is a wonderful place just to be. MacLeod cracks a joke and Claire's face lights up as they share the laughter.

At 30, MacLeod is without much doubt the best climber in Britain. His biography includes a string of "hardests" in climbing disciplines from boulder climbing to Scottish winter mountaineering. His most recent climb is Echo Wall, a 200-foot route high on the north face of Ben Nevis and a likely call for the hardest traditional rock-climb in the world. It is a terrifyingly dangerous undertaking: the normal climber's rope-work system cannot protect some of the hardest, most gymnastically difficult parts of the climb. A fall would be fatal.

It's Echo Wall that has shed some of the limelight on Claire MacLeod. She made a 40-minute film showing her husband's preparation for, and ascent of, this slice of sheer, blank-looking rock. The film has won several awards at mountain film festivals in Britain and abroad. Most recently it earned her the Scottish New Talent Bafta for best director.

Making the film together has cemented a business partnership which the couple have been developing in earnest for the past two years, since they abandoned town life to make a living in the Highlands from MacLeod's climbing and whatever his wife could turn her hand to. For men like MacLeod, though, the hunger for more, and tougher, adventures after each climb is insatiable. He has set his sights on a line on the massive St John's Head in Orkney, a quarter of a mile high and overhanging for half that distance.

Much of the climb, known as the Longhope Route, has been pioneered by others. MacLeod hopes to complete a new finish to it that could be technically harder than Echo Wall, through overhanging bands of sandstone 1200 feet above the Atlantic. The plan is for Claire to film that too, and MacLeod is full of enthusiasm for the project.

His wife is more measured, and perhaps that's to be expected. In filming Echo Wall, she made routine trips almost to the top of Ben Nevis for days and months on end, then suspended herself from a web of ropes, sometimes high in the air, to get the action sequences at the heart of the film. Even so, she's not a climber, or even a great fan of the outdoors. Perhaps most surprisingly, until she started shooting the footage that would become her award-winning film, she had never picked up a film camera.

At their whitewashed, newly decorated house overlooking Loch Lochy, north of Spean Bridge, the couple talk about themselves, their recent successes, and their plans. MacLeod grew up in Glasgow until the age of 11, when his parents moved to Bearsden. At 13 he started exploring the wider area on his bike and realised the Highlands were on his doorstep. Hillwalking trips followed, until he saw climbers on the steep walls of Dumbarton Rock and realised that was what he was looking for. A degree in sports science at the University of Glasgow was followed by a master's at Strathclyde. Since then he has endeavoured to make a living from climbing.

Claire was in the year below MacLeod at Boclair Academy in Bearsden, and they got together when they were 15 and 16, marrying in 2001. She tried climbing in her teens - "I was trying to impress him," she says - but realised it wasn't for her. Her career path was much more conventional - she did a degree in photography at Edinburgh College of Art, but became manager of an opticians' shop.

The couple moved to Dumbarton but were regularly travelling north for MacLeod's climbing, and the idea of moving to the Highlands took root. They first lived in Fort William before moving to their present home a few weeks ago. Inevitably, MacLeod has already built a climbing training wall - overhanging at a 45-degree angle - in the spare room. They make a living from a variety of sources, although from MacLeod's battered G-reg hatchback it's clear being the best climber in Britain isn't the key to the kind of fortune other top sportsmen make. MacLeod's website sells a range of DVDs and climbing T-shirts. His wife's main business, aside from film-making, is Velvet Antlers, a website selling hampers of Scottish produce. Then there's MacLeod's sponsorship deals with a variety of climbing-gear makers.

He also coaches climbing and gives lectures about his adventures. A few months ago I attended one in Glasgow. MacLeod is a compelling speaker, and one line sticks in my mind. "The biggest risk you can take," he said, "is to not take a risk."

Like so much of what they do, the idea of Claire making Echo Wall came about because they couldn't think of a good reason not to just take a chance on it.

"I'd seen David being filmed for previous DVDs, and I'd seen him filming with the BBC, and I thought it looked interesting," says Claire. "It looked like fun to get up in the morning and go and film stuff - who wouldn't like to spend their life doing that? I'm not sure who first suggested me filming Echo Wall; possibly it was me in the pub, where all the best ideas start." She laughs. "I just thought I would really like to make my own film, so we started saving for a camera."

The first thing she needed to film was MacLeod climbing unroped up a massive wave-like overhang, in Spain, as part of his preparation for Echo Wall. It is possibly the technically hardest solo climb completed by any climber.

"He left for Spain and the camera arrived the day before I flew out to join him. I turned it on for the first time in the apartment, so there's typical pictures of stuff upside down and then we cut to David stony-faced, prepared for the climb."

It would take an expert to see this footage in the film was the work of a complete beginner. Part of the thrill for Claire of winning the Bafta was the fact that she was up against film-makers who had trained for years before launching themselves as directors. Besides working out which buttons did what on her camera, she had to learn the editing and story-telling process from scratch. Her art school background helped in framing subjects, and she says her love of mainstream films - she used to go to the cinema three times a week - gives her a familiarity with the grammar of moving pictures.

It wasn't easy, though. Just getting to the massive Tower Ridge on Ben Nevis would deter the faint-hearted.

"One time when I was walking up with all the gear, I started wondering why no-one else had made a film like this on Ben Nevis," she remembers. "And David just says, Because it's just too hard' and I'm kinda wondering, What am I doing here if that's the case?'" He hadn't told me that before."

Macleod chips in, "Yeah - but if it was all too easy it wouldn't have been such a good film " He admits to being obsessive. In one of the most telling scenes in Echo Wall he is seen spending days on end shovelling an entire snowfield - literally tons of snow - away from above the climb. Water was dripping onto the rock and making it too slippery to climb.

"My strength is being a stubborn bastard," he declares. So what is that like to live with?

"If something needs done, nothing else gets done until it's finished," says Claire. "And yes, I used to complain about that, and I think it's because I was shut out of the process. But now I am included in the process I do get involved with it and it's a lot easier."

Clearly they prefer to have all the income from DVD sales flowing into their coffers, rather than using another film-maker, but there are other advantages to Claire filming. Part-way through Echo Wall, MacLeod is shown gluing together a piece of new equipment specially made for the climb. We see the titles of the books he's using to weigh it down - all the classics of climbing literature, Hard Rock, Cold Climbs and the rest, being put to a practical use. It's a good in-joke.

I ask whose idea it was. "It just happened," says Claire, "but we realised it was good as it happened. That's the beauty of my following David about because I am his partner and have access to all this stuff a film-maker wouldn't."

Surely this intensely personal relationship to her subject must have another downside. She has to film her husband doing things that could kill him. I think momentarily of Ricky Hatton's girlfriend, and her horror at watching him being pounded unconscious in the boxing ring by Manny Pacquiao.

Claire explains she has seen MacLeod do hard, testing climbs since she has known him. Before she took up filming she would often belay him, holding the ropes at the foot of a climb in a braking plate, to ensure a fall would be stopped by gear placed in the rock-face.

"Filming him doing dangerous routes actually makes being there a lot easier," she says. "I think it's because I am concentrating on something else, making sure he's in frame and in focus, it's recording properly and I'm looking through the lens it somehow allows me to be a lot more detached."

She admits to being a worrier and in past years. When MacLeod was out in the mountains in winter, she would "give him hell" for not phoning her to tell her he was safe. "But since we have been working together and I've been out in winter a couple of times, I have seen what goes on and it has taken away the fear of the unknown for me," she says.

MacLeod believes the risks he takes are small, because he prepares so hard and so seriously for each undertaking, weighing up problems and focusing on how to deal with them. He says it's when you're not concentrating you're at the biggest risk.

"The closest I've come to death was outside the Western Infirmary in Glasgow when I nearly got knocked down by an ambulance," he says. He was listening to music on headphones and didn't hear its siren."

The pair should be in Orkney this week for a first look at the Longhope Route, and to work out if and how Claire will make a film of the ascent. "Aw, the juggin'" she groans, referring to the method of climbing up ropes using clamps. "The juggin' and the exposure and the abseiling - climbing it'll be nothing, it's the filming that will be the task."

At the crag we visit together, Polldubh in Glen Nevis, I watch as MacLeod casually climbs unroped down a short route. It's of a standard that, after 28 years of climbing, I would struggle to get up with a tight rope from above. As we pack up to leave, the conversation turns again to Orkney and the difficulty of filming the climb there. "Claire will be in a tent on a portaledge to keep her warm," he says, before describing how the portable platform can be suspended on a cliff face.

Claire, meanwhile, is giving him a cool, half-amused look which indicates that the decision as to whether she will be on the portaledge, or even making the film at all, depends very much on what she wants to do. The sheer drop she would be suspended over is clearly occupying her thoughts.

I have a feeling she'll get over it, and in a few weeks' time this quietly determined young woman will probably be dangling above the Atlantic, capturing perfectly the moment when her husband risks everything and proves once again that he's the best there is.