Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

The Princess of Wales has climbed Britain’s three highest peaks. Alone. For others. And for reasons she knows better than most

This weekend, while the rest of the country got on with its Saturday, the Princess of Wales walked to the top of the three highest mountains in the UK.

Ben Nevis. Scafell Pike. Yr Wyddfa. Scotland, England, Wales. Three nations. Three summits. One woman who, two years ago, could not have known whether she would stand on any of them again.

We have watched the careful return that followed. Tonight, I think I understand a little more about what that return cost – and what she decided to do with it.

The challenge was undertaken for The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity. The hospital, in her own words, is “a place that holds great meaning for me.” She does not say more than that. She does not need to.

Her message, posted at seven this evening, is not the language of a press office. It is the language of someone who has been there.

“Cancer doesn’t just affect the body,” she writes. “It changes how you think and feel and profoundly affects every aspect of life. I know this personally.”

That single line – I know this personally – is the whole thing. Everything that follows hangs from it.

She did it solo. On the route she was supported by Mountain Rescue, and nothing more. No entourage. No cameras at her shoulder. Just the climb, and the people whose job it is to bring you home off a mountain.

At the finish, in Wales, her family were waiting. Prince William. Prince George. Princess Charlotte. Prince Louis. Mr and Mrs Middleton. Her brother, James. The people who went through the worst of it with her, standing at the foot of the last peak to watch her come down.

She did not climb for the photograph. She climbed to make a point about what comes after the medicine stops. Holistic care. The whole person. The part of recovery that does not show up on a scan. “Healing,” she writes, “is not just about fixing what is wrong. It is about finding balance in how we live.”

And then, near the end, the sentence she will be remembered for: “bravery isn’t just about pushing forward. It is about knowing how to stay grounded, connected and present, no matter the terrain, or landscape you are walking through.”

She wrote that about a mountain. She meant something else entirely.

The final image was taken at the summit of Ben Nevis, at dusk. The highest point in these islands. The light going. A woman at the top of the country, looking out.

From five past seven, the public can do something with all of this. The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity has opened a page – royalmarsden.org/princessofwales – and the aim is bigger than one climb. The goal is a blueprint: to make supportive, whole-person care a standard part of cancer treatment across the nation, not a luxury for the lucky few. Research will sit alongside it, to prove what works and when.

That is the legacy she is reaching for. Not the mountains. The people still at the bottom of theirs.

She ends with five words. They are addressed to every person in this country who has heard the news she once heard.

“Please know you are not alone.”

Signed, simply, C.

Catherine is a one off. Another royal first.

(Photo: C/0 Kensington Palace