Often referred to as the ‘Father of Scottish mountaineering’, Harold Raeburn certainly had a pedigree second to none in the early days of mountain exploration in Scotland and further afield. Born in 1865 and having studied chemistry at the Watt Institute in Edinburgh, he joined the family firm as a brewer. Raeburn left a legacy of high quality climbs on the Scottish mountains, many of which were way ahead of their time in technical difficulty, one of the most remarkable being a winter ascent of Green Gully on Ben Nevis in 1906, a formidable and much sought after ice climb a hundred years later. Well travelled in the Alps, Norway and the Caucusus, he was appointed as mountaineering leader in the 1921 British reconnaisance expedition to Mount Everest and it must have been for one or all of these trips that he acquired the altimeter that we have, as one of our most treasured possessions, here in the collection. One time stalwart of the Ladies Scottish Climbing Club, Reverend Anne Whinning, kindly donated the altimeter to our collection, having bought it for a few pounds in a sale, some research may discover the altimeter’s journey, but for now that’s all we have. We do know that Harold produced a book called Mountaineering Art in 1920, and sadly died in a sanitorium for the mentally ill in December 1926, aged 61 – a sad end to a glittering mountaineering career.