Skye's Cuillin Ridge is a unique adventure. It is mountaineering on a scale you'll not

find anywhere else in the UK, requiring

levels of physical and mental stamina of Alpine proportions.

Mountain guide Martin Moran has described it as ''more prolonged than the ascent of Mont Blanc'' with bits of rock climbing, ''harder than anything on the Matterhorn and almost as knackering as the two put together''.

Moran should know. He's climbed and run the ridge some 20 times in total, and failed on it almost as often.

A few weekends ago I climbed the ridge with a couple of friends. Actually, that's being slightly economical with the truth. We almost climbed the ridge, reaching Bruach na Frithe before exhaustion, knee pain, mist and darkness forced us to bail. From Gars-bheinn to Sligachan took us 20 hours. Not bad considering we did it all. The knee slowed us down and the party contained only one climber.

However, Rob Woodall's impressive achievement earlier this spring of running the Greater Cuillin Traverse, (the Cuillin Ridge plus Bla Bheinn and Clach Glas) and the peaks of the Red Cuillin, plus outlyers, in less than 24 hours puts our modest achievement into perspective. Woodall didn't claim to be first with this ''enchainment'', just the first to make the round in 24 hours. It was a wise move, as he probably wasn't the first.

Enter Clive Rowland, of Inverness. Rowland has climbed in the Himalaya with Chris Bonington and Doug Scott, and has explored and climbed on Skye and in the North-West Highlands for more years than he cares to remember. In a quick flick through the rock-climbing guidebooks for these areas his name crops up alongside the likes of Patey and Nunn from the '60s and '70s.

''A lot of the time we climbed in the North-West we didn't bother to record things,'' Rowland recalls. ''A very good friend of mine has done dozens of new climbs all over Scotland and he hardly ever bothered to record them. He prefers it like that, because then the next climber to do the route can think he's the first, with all the excitement and mystery that involves.''

In the summer of 1982, Rowland was home from the Indian Himalaya after failing on a mountain called Thalay Sagar. The all-star cast of Rowland, Joe Brown, Mo Antoine and Bill Barker had got to within 300 feet of the summit by a new route, which would later gain classic status. ''For once in my life I didn't return home from the Himalaya ill,'' he explains. ''I'm normally a wreck, but that time I came back very fit and very frustrated.

''Once a year I punish myself with a 30 or 40-mile walk, and doing the whole Cuillin, black and red, seemed a good challenge.''

Rowland asked around and no-one had heard of anyone combining all the mountains into a continuous round. Climbing solo and unsupported, he set off from Sligachan at 10am on July 21, having hitched to the starting point. At 5pm the following day he stumbled back to Sligachan after 31 hours.

''It took me ages and I make no bones about it, but, quite frankly, I wasn't counting the

minutes. It was in a heat-wave and I was really getting dehydrated when I was doing the Reds. I actually dropped off the route at one point because I saw this burn about 1000 feet below. I probably sat by that burn for the best part of an hour, just drinking, drinking and drinking.''

While full of praise for Woodall's sub-24 hour team achievement, Rowland retains an open mind when it comes to records. ''I'm not trying to say I did it first. All I am trying to say is that I did it 17 years ago and someone could easily have done it way before me. There were lots of fit mountaineers around in the '20s, '30s, '40s and '50s, weren't there?''

Certainly the Cuillin Ridge was soloed as early as 1920 by Howard Somervell, later on Everest with Mallory in 1924, in an impressive 14 hours 30 minutes. However, the Greater Traverse, the logical geological, physical and Munro extension to the ridge, wasn't completed until 1939 by Charleston and Forde in 20 hours.

In some ways, linking the spiky gabbro Munros of the Black Cuillin with the easier, lower and more rounded granite peaks of the Red Cuillin seems unbalanced and illogical. The feat may have been achieved before 1999, but never recorded for those reasons. Woodall and his team richly deserved all the praise they received after their sub-24 hour achievement. However, as Clive Rowland has shown, many of the more obvious challenges among the mountains of Scotland have already been attempted and achieved - if never recorded.