When Charlie Kelly first messaged saying he wouldn’t make it home that night, his partner wasn’t happy. It was September 6, 2023, a Wednesday, and the 56-year-old, a keen hillwalker, had left the house that he shared with Emer Kennedy in Tillicoultry, near the Scottish city of Stirling, before she went to work. His plan was to climb Creise, a 1,100-meter-high peak overlooking Glen Etive, the remote Highland valley made famous by the James Bond film Skyfall.
The weather was unusually mild for the season, and Kelly thought he might even have time to “bag” a second Munro, as the Scottish mountains above 3,000 feet are known. In his time