Today, the home page has acquired a new menu item: Sidlaws. This links to a set of pages that I’ve rather grandly entitled a “photographic gazetteer” of the Sidlaw Hills. There’s an introductory page (packed with useful background information, though I say it myself), and then a set of pages dealing with all the Sidlaws in alphabetical order—saying where they are, which hills they’re next to, what their names mean, some information about the summits, some notes containing anything else that I thought was worth mentioning, and some photographs. Oh, and links to any blog entries describing a visit to that hill.

The idea for putting this together occurred to me this spring, when I realized that I had stood on top of, and photographed, almost all of the named hills in the Sidlaws range (and several unnamed ones). My various Sidlaws posts are among the most popular in terms of traffic arriving through web searches. Apart from walking logs describing visits to some of the more popular hills, there’s very little information out there on the web, and it’s widely scattered. So I thought I’d try to provide a sort of unified resource describing these interesting but largely neglected hills.

In the last few months I’ve been dotting around in odd moments, filling the gaps in my photographic record—I wanted to provide pictures of each hill, of the summit of each hill, and also of any interesting objects on the summits or slopes. I’ve been defeated on a summit visit only once, by a dense new forestry plantation on a minor bump that I considered omitting from the gazetteer. But it has a name, so it’s in there. (See if you can find it.)

Each page is headed with the view that appears at the top of this post. It’s the classic “ABC” view that is familiar to all Dundonians—Auchterhouse Hill, Balkello Hill and Craigowl.