Drium na Sgriodain (NM 978654, 734m)
Sgurr na h-Eanchainne (NM 996658, 731m)

15 kilometres
910m of ascent

Here’s one I prepared earlier. I walked this route last summer, during my little blogging hiatus, but it’s one of several hill visits that are worth sharing here.

In a well-ordered world, Sgurr na h-Eanchainne would be the highest point on this circuit. It’s the lovely shapely cone that’s visible from the Fort William waterfront, as you look down Loch Linnhe.

But it’s not a well-ordered world, and a bit of lumpy plateau a mile or so to the west is a few metres higher. Concerning this, the Scottish Mountaineering Club strikes a surrealist note in their 2002 edition of The Corbetts & Other Scottish Hills:

… it is not quite the highest hill, being just overtopped by the flat mass of unnamed Druim na Sgriodain

Ceci n’est pas un nom, to paraphrase René Magritte.

No matter. The pair are linked by a lochan-pocked ridge above Coire Dubh and so make a fine circuit, regardless of which has the high-point honours.

And then there’s this:

The hill is probably most often climbed using a sea-borne approach across the Corran Narrows, which has a certain exotic appeal. (And yes, Sgurr na h-Eanchainne was still obscured by low cloud, after a night of heavy rain, when I parked my car at the Corran “ferry terminal” and walked aboard. But I was not downhearted—the forecast was for improvement later.)

I walked off the ferry on the Ardgour side and turned left, heading for the village of Clovullin. My planned route took me up the driveway of Ardgour House, and then on to a service road to a telecom tower, which looked as if it would give me access to the north bank of the Allt a’ Choire Dhuibh—the burn descending out of Coire Dubh, which was my access point to the hills above.

This sort of thing can go badly wrong, however—it’s not the first time I’ve run into a massive gate and stout fence blocking access along such a route. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover an interpretive signboard, marking out my route for me, beside the driveway.

The board explains, among other things, that Ardgour House was the seat of the Macleans of Ardgour, an offshoot of the Macleans of Duart, on Mull. In English, they’re all just Macleans, but in Gaelic the two families had strikingly different patronymics. The Duart Macleans were styled Mac Gille Eathain, “son of the servant of John”, in this case supposedly Saint John the Baptist. (Rounding the edges off that, and knowing that the “th” is silent, we can see where the Anglicized form Maclean comes from.) But the Ardgour Macleans had the Gaelic patronymic Mac Mhic Eoghainn, “son of the son of Ewan”, sometimes shortened to Mac ’ic Eoghainn.

All that, if you’re still with me, goes some way towards explaining the curious name of a water feature on the Allt a’ Choire Dhuibh—Tubhailt Mhic ’ic Eoghainn, which translates as the “Towel of Maclean of Ardgour” or, more simply, “Maclean’s Towel”. More on that later.

So I carried on up the drive, turned right just before the gates of the big house, and made my way up to the telecom tower. From here, a short muddy path and a splashy traverse of a patch of marshland got me to the base of the hill. (According to OpenStreetMap, there’s a path through the trees on the southwest side of the tower, which would have avoided my rather damp route around the northeast side.)

My route lay straight up steep grass, roughly northwest towards the point at which the burn issued from the corrie above me. But first I made a brief diversion to visit the “Towel”. The Ordnance Survey Name Book describes it as “A waterfall on Allt a Choire-dhuibh. Situated a little north of Dail an Eais, so called from its resemblance to a towel slung loosely over a man’s arm.”

A pretty obvious muddy track took me through the undergrowth alongside an old stone boundary wall, to emerge at a picturesque little fall that bore about the same resemblance to a towel as any other waterfall of roughly rectangular aspect. Which is to say, a bit but not a lot.

Now, this is just the lowest bit of white water along the Allt a’ Choire Dhuibh’s steep descent from the corrie above, and you can find several photographs and maps online placing the “Towel” at various points along that course. But this one (at NM 998645) is the one that the Ardgour Estate calls “Maclean’s Towel” on their Facebook page, so that’s good enough for me.

Back then, to actually climbing the damn hills. The path upwards was intermittent at best, and I made another side journey (visible on my GPS track at the head of this post) to look at a somewhat less impressive waterfall higher up, but eventually arrived beside the very nice waterslide issuing from the corrie. Here’s the view back towards the Corran Narrows:

Above me, I could see the rocky nose of Creagan Stob an Ribean.

There’s allegedly a path up there, leading on to the ridge (you can see the OpenStreetMap version plotted on my map at the head of the post), and the Scottish Mountaineering Club’s The Grahams & The Donalds (2022) offers it as a route of descent from their counterclockwise tour of the hills. But, having struggled to follow the path so far, I decided I didn’t really fancy trying to find my way up through the steep craggy stuff.

Instead, as I peered into the corrie itself, I could see a steep, but crag-free, grassy slope giving access to the ridge.

So I headed into the corrie, skipped across the headwaters of the Allt a’ Choire Dhubh, and climbed the slope.

Did I mention it was steep?

Not for everyone. I wouldn’t fancy it in the wet, and I certainly wouldn’t want to come down it, but it was safely doable with a little help from the hands.

Once on the ridge, it was just a matter of weaving gently upwards through grass and tiers of low slabby stuff. I strolled on around the corrie rim for a while, looking back towards the ridge I’d ascended (at right, below), and down to the Corran Narrows.

Then I zagged back towards the unimpressive summit of Druim na Sgriodain. But it’s undoubtedly a great viewpoint, even on a hazy day—here’s the view west into Ardgour, with Garbh Bheinn (885m) the highest and pointiest summit visible, just left of centre.

I mentioned the height of Garbh Bheinn, because there are a lot of Garbh Bheinns around (there will be another one along in a minute)—it just means “rough hill”, of which there’s a plentiful supply. Druim na Sgriodain means “ridge of the scree slope” or “ridge of the stony ravine”—there’s one of the latter on the Coire Dubh side, but I didn’t see much scree.

After admiring the view, I tucked myself out of the wind next to a fine little summit pool, and had a bite to eat.

The big distant lump on the horizon at left is an end-on view of the Mamores. In the middle is the ridge of Mam na Gualainn, on the north side of Loch Leven. And on the thin edge of visibility just to the right of Gualainn is another Garbh Bheinn (867m), this one on the south side of Loch Leven. It’s probably just me, but being able to see two Corbetts with the same name from the same spot was oddly satisfying.

On, then, threading my way around little crags and lochans, to Sgurr na h-Eanchainne.

The Mamores are looming to the right of Eanchainne; to the left, almost hidden by haze, is Ben Nevis with a light coating of snow it had acquired overnight, while it rained on lower ground.

The old Ordnance Survey Name Book for Argyll translates Sgurr na h-Eanchainne as “rock of the wild myrtle”, which doesn’t seem right. A sgurr is a high, pointed hill, which I think you’ll agree is apt in this case. And my Gaelic dictionaries provide a number of different names for myrtle, but none seems to be a match. A direct translation produces, puzzlingly, “peak of the brains”. More convincingly, it’s perhaps just a corrupt rendering of Sgurr na h-Eanaich, “peak of the mat-grass”.

Its summit bears a fine cylindrical “Vanessa” triangulation pillar—a low-weight alternative to the familiar, square “Hotine” pillars.*

And, as you can see from my high vantage point, the pillar sits about a metre below the rocky outcrop that forms the summit of the hill.

After admiring the hazy view for a while, I retraced my steps to the low point of the ridge, and descended easily back into Coire Dubh.

This was easy-angled stuff, and is probably the least vertiginous way in and out of the corrie.

Back the way I came, then, finding the path still difficult to follow, even on descent. A glance back from the Ardgour House driveway revealed threatening cloud closing in again behind the sunlit hill, with the Allt a’ Choire Dhuibh forming a white ribbon below the corrie, still in spate from the overnight rain.

So the weather had been kind to me. The only disappointment was that I was down so early that the Inn at Ardgour, just opposite the pier, was still closed, so I had to get back on the ferry without so much as an alcohol-free cider, on which I’d rather set my heart.

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* Oh well, since you ask … The Hotine pillar got its name from its designer, Brigadier Martin Hotine. But the Vanessa pillar should really be the Venesta pillar, from the company that built the tubular moulds.