I introduced the Crow Craigies Climbing Party last year, when I described our trip to Bonar Bridge. This year took us to a cottage at Corrour, at the east end of Loch Ossian.

Loch Ossian has a certain glamour to it—a remote and pretty loch that takes some effort to get to. Most people arrive by train, at Corrour Station, which sits in splendid isolation in the middle of a bog about a mile from the west end of the loch, and they either stay in the station’s limited accommodation, use the Youth Hostel on the loch shore, or camp.

Our aim was to climb the higher hills surrounding Ossian. In a week dogged by rain, we nevertheless managed to make a pretty thorough job of it, as a map of our various routes shows:

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Sgor Iutharn (NN 489743, 1028m)
Carn Dearg (NN 504764, 1034m)
Diollaid a’ Chairn (NN 488758, 925m)
Geal-Charn (NN 469746, 1132m)
Aonach Beag (NN 457741, 1116m)
Beinn Eibhinn (NN 449733, 1102m)
Meall Glas Choire (NN 436727, 924m)

29.4 kilometres
1580m of ascent

We walked up the Uisge Labhair, where a winding boggy path follows the north side of the river all the way to the Bealach Dubh. But a couple of kilometres before the bealach, we climbed northeast up the slopes of Sgor Iutharn, crossed the summit and peered down the rocky crest of Lancet Edge. From there, we went west to the dip below the massive bulk of Geal-Charn, and then north along a traverse that brought us out at the path between Geal-Charn and Carn Dearg. There’s an obvious line initially, which weaves pleasantly enough across rocky shelves dotted with tiny lochans, but the last hundred metres before the path involves traversing a steep grass slope a long way above Loch an Sgoir—tussocky enough to provide secure footholds, but distinctly unpleasant if you have any sensitivity to that sort of exposure.

Once on the path we ambled out to Carn Dearg, which gave spectacular views of a cloudy Ben Alder, and a glimpse of the legendary (but sadly closed) Culra Bothy in the valley below. Sleety rain blew through on a cold wind while we were on the summit, and we walked into the teeth of it to recross Diollaid a’Chairn, before the sun came out again for the slog up Geal-Charn.

After the slog, the stroll—Geal-Charn’s big grassy plateau was a welcome relief after the steep ascent. From there we wove our way across to Aonach Beag, then the long, curved ridge of Beinn Eibhinn, with its twin summits a couple of hundred metres apart.

A grassy ridge, a short but steep pull up Meall Glas Choire, then a long descent through heather and bog (easily managed by staying as high as possible for as long as possible), and we were at the little dam on the Uisge Labhair, with just a kilometre-and-a-half of service road to walk down to our cottage.

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Beinn na Lap (NN 376695, 935m)

6.5 kilometres
540m of ascent

Morning rain cleared in the afternoon, and we nipped up Beinn na Lap by the tourist route. Usually this is a smash-and-grab hill, climbed between trains from Corrour Station, but we lazily drove along the lochside and parked at the foot of the muddy path. It’s just a matter of walking directly uphill for a while, and then along the ridge for a while, to get to the summit.

At the cairn, we found some plastic shot glasses stuffed into the cairn, which we tidied away and carried down with us. A later check of social media revealed that, two days previously, there had been no less than three parties on the summit celebrating the completion of a Munro round. It appears that for some people it’s too much effort to carry down a tiny plastic object weighing a few grams, once they’ve finished using it.

Three simultaneous completions on Beinn na Lap seemed remarkable, so I contacted Dave Hewitt, who maintains a database of Munro completion dates and final hills. In Dave’s dataset, Beinn na Lap is the third most popular final hill, after Ben More (Mull) and Ben Lomond. He has records of ten days when their were double completions, and one amazing day when five separate parties were celebrating a final Munro on the hill. (Gad, I’m glad we didn’t run into any of that.)

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Carn Dearg (NN 417661, 941m)
Sgor Gaibhre (NN 444674, 955m)
Sgor Choinnich (NN 443683, 929m)

13.1 kilometres
920m of ascent

We had 24 hours of continuous heavy rain the next day, and despondently watched the rivers filling. Our plan to visit Ben Alder went on hold, since it involved a double crossing of the broad Uisge Labhair. So when we ventured out the following day, our next trip was designed to avoid river crossings.

We headed south, along the track to the dam on the Allt a’ Choire Chreagaich. The Harvey’s 1:25000 map shows a couple of handy ATV tracks branching off from this, and we used one of these to get ourselves high on the slopes of Carn Dearg (yes, another Carn Dearg). We had a sunny day, but a strong westerly wind blew us over Dearg and on to Sgor Gaibhre. From there we descended into the Bealach nan Sgor, below Sgor Choinnich. There’s a lovely shelf of rock at the east side of the bealach, creating complete shelter from westerly winds, and we were able to tuck ourselves in there and have a bite to eat without the wind blowing our crisps out over Loch Ericht.

Then over Sgor Choinnich and down to join another of the ATV tracks shown by Harvey’s. This took us down to the dam again, and what turned out to be an easy ford in the narrow river. (Plan B had involved pushing through the forest and/or climbing a deer fence to avoid the river crossing, so we were pleased to get back to our starting point so easily.)

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Ben Alder (NN 496718, 1148m)
Sron Coire na h-Iolaire (NN 513704, 955m)
Beinn Bheoil (NN 516717, 1019m)

33.2 kilometres
1580m of ascent

The next day, the forecast predicted light showers at three, and rain setting in at seven in the evening. With a day of dry weather and an easy river crossing under our belts, this was our chosen day for Ben Alder. It was just a pity that the weather forecast was completely wrong, over the whole of Scotland, on that day.

We went back up the path beside the Uisge Labhair until we drew level with the Bealach Cubhann and the broad western shoulder of Ben Alder. The river crossing was easy, exploiting one of the many shallow gravel banks at this point. On the south side of the river, there was a short stretch of bog-trotting before we were able to strike off uphill and then along the easy angle of the ridge towards Alder’s huge summit plateau. A ring ouzel flirted with us for a while, until we were safely off his territory.

We climbed into thin cloud, which seemed on the verge of clearing by the time we reached Alder’s huge cairn and lightning-struck trig point. But after twenty minutes, we were still sitting in cloud—so we pushed south along the crags above the Garbh Choire, finding an intermittent path and running into a couple of young folk on a Duke of Edinburgh Award expedition, coming up from Benalder Cottage. At that point, the rain started, about seven hours early.

The path vanished into the confused ground of the Sron Bealach Beithe, and there was a little tricky navigation in poor visibility to keep ourselves safely away from the crags on the north side.

Visibility returned in the Bealach Breabag, and we could see Loch Ericht and Loch a’ Bhealaich Bheithe on either side of us, apparently enjoying thin sunshine—we seemed to be trapped in a little local weather caused by a cap of orographic cloud on Ben Alder and neighbouring Beinn Bheoil. On the ridge of Beinn Bheoil, we could see the rest of the Duke of Edinburgh crew, trudging upwards.

So, in a half-witted triumph of hope over experience, we climbed Beinn Bheoil. The rain got heavier; visibility closed in farther. It was miserable.

Back to the bealach then, and the prospect of a long walk home around Ben Alder. We squelched down the path to Benalder Cottage (an idyllic location, and a haven that allowed us to duck out of the rain for a few minutes). Then we squelched up the long, beautifully engineered stalkers’ path that links Benalder Cottage to the Bealach Cumhann. It was nice not to have to watch our feet for a while, and pleasant to know that the navigation was easy from here on. But persisting rain and the swollen rivers coming down off Ben Alder to our right reminded us that we still had a broad river crossing between us and home.

But the ford turned out to be still easy, and we churned wearily back to the cottage in boggy conditions. All in all, it was a criminal insult to two gorgeous hills to climb them in such foul conditions.

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Beinn a’ Bhric (NN 317642, 876m)
Leum Uilleim (NN 330641, 909m)

11 kilometres
600 metres of ascent

Our last day involved another morning of rain, followed by a quick circuit of the Leum Uilleim horseshoe. Leum Uilleim is “William’s Leap”, but no-one seems very sure who William was, or where and why he leapt. This another hill that’s usually climbed between trains at Corrour Station, and it’s probably most famous for its guest appearance in the film Trainspotting:

We parked the car next to the station, crossed the railway line, and then followed a track that ran alongside the rails for a while before turning uphill on to the ridge of Tom an Eoin. From there we walked across to the rocky little summit of Beinn a’ Bhric, and then on to the cairn of Leum Uilleim. Both these hills are simply jaw-dropping viewpoints—the Ossian hills to the east, the Treig hills and Grey Corries to the north, a complex cavalcade of the the Nevis range, the Mamores, Glen Coe and the Black Mount to the west, and a long jumble of hills stretching from Bridge of Orchy through the Lawers range to Schiehallion in the south.

We gawped, we chortled, we spun on our heels and argued about what we were seeing—and then we dropped steeply off the Sron an Lagain Ghairbh, crossed the bog, and drank some beer (at an eye-wateringly marked up price) at the railway station.

A very fine last day.

Laidloon Hill (NO 393420, 312m)
Broom Hill (NO 383421, c290m)
Gallow Hill (NO 391413, 378m)
Tealing Hill (NO 407402, c260m)
Ironside Hill (NO 399411, 354m)
Finlarg Hill (NO 406419, 336m)
Kincaldrum Hill (NO 414436, 309m)
Hayston Hill (NO 408449, c235m)

17.7 kilometres
580m of ascent

It’s distinctly possible that no-one in the entire history of humanity has linked these two obscure little hills in a day’s walk before. (I do these things so you don’t have to.)

Each of them is a rather minor outlier from the main ridge, neither of them with what you’d actually call a summit. Tealing Hill is west of the road-crossing at Lumley Den, and Hayston is to the east. So this trip also addressed a minor agenda of mine, which has been to join up the obvious Sidlaw ridge walks (the sections bounded by the various road passes) with linking walks that traverse the passes. I’ve already done this for the slightly tricky links across Ballo Glack and Glack of Newtyle; the A923 crossing at Tullybaccart is straightforward, with a car park more or less on the ridge line and paths going off on to the hills in both directions; and the minor road crossing that separates Bandirran Hill from the rest of the ridge is rendered essentially impassable by the presence of Collace Quarry in the west side of Dunsinane Hill. So that leaves only the A928 crossing at Lumley Den—a steep-sided dell, stoutly fenced on both sides and distinctly unpromising-looking for a traverse.

But I had a plan. I parked at the layby just west of the Den, at NO 399418. There’s a metal gate in the fence at the east end of this layby, fastened with a rusty chain and hook, that gives access to the heathery slopes below Ironside Hill and Laidloon Hill. There’s rather a network of vehicle tracks in this marshy little depression, one of them prominently ascending the shoulder of Laidloon and then crossing the top of the hill just a few metres from the summit. (I briefly wondered if the little patch of marsh accounted for Laidloon’s name, supposedly from Gaelic leathad lunnd “slope of the marsh”—but there’s much more boggy ground on the other side of the hill, between Laidloon and Broom Hill, to judge from the network of drainage ditches marked on the map.)

The highest point is marked, not so much by a cairn, but by a sort of puddle of stones, which partially concealed a plastic clip-top box containing what seemed to be some sort of geocache. From here, there were fine views over the mouth of Glen Ogilvie and into Strathmore.

From there, I followed another track down and then up again to join the ridge between Gallow Hill and Broom Hill. A stout fence runs along the ridge line, broken by a single gate where the vehicle track crosses into Glen Ogilvie. Life is easier if you go through the gate to the southwest (Glen Ogilvie) side.

The summit of Broom Hill is on this side of the fence, although you have to climb another fence that crosses the ridge to get to it. On this trip I actually managed to find a single broom plant (namesake of the hill) on the Broom Hill ridge line, mixed with the predominant heather and gorse.

I retraced my steps and then went up Gallow Hill—a broad vehicle track on the Glen Ogilvie side of the fence makes the ascent much easier than the slog through trackless heather on the other side. At the summit, the cairn is just on the other side of the fence, but the wire is bent and slack at this point and very easy to get through.

Beyond Gallow Hill, I followed the fence down to the old stone wall above the telecom mast (there’s a little rusty iron gate in the fence here, hard against the wall), and gawped briefly at the fragile little inspection gondola, dangling from a wire, that allows access to the top of the mast.

Then I followed the wall east to an awkward three-way fence junction (at NO 398409). From here, I could see the gentle convexity of Tealing Hill—covered in grazing land, sheep and fine old dry-stone boundary walls.

I needed to get down to the edge of the farmland, which involved shinning over this three-way junction. I got myself on to the west (grassy) side of the fence running downhill, rather than its east (heathery) side, and followed it down to the field walls—where there was another nice old iron gate. So I did a circumambulation of the field walls (crossing some pretty, open moorland on the way) with the intention of getting as close as I could to Tealing Hill without getting in amongst lambing sheep. As it turned out the relevant fields were empty, so I was able to walk right to the vertiginous summit of Tealing Hill. I then crept slowly through another couple of fields with sheep at their far ends, and back out on to the hillside.

Flushed with the success of that little adventure, I climbed back up to the triple junction I’d come down from, hopped over it again, and slogged up a short heathery slope to the top of Ironside Hill, my last hill on this side of the Den. The hill supposedly gets its name from iron oxide in the soil, but I didn’t glimpse a single patch of exposed soil from which I could judge that.

Straight back to the car, then, and across the road and slightly downhill, to the bridge over the burn draining from the marsh below Laidloon. There’s a wooden fence on the bridge, which abuts the wire fence beside the road—with room for a person to slip through between the posts. There may be issues with lambing in this area, April to October, but when I was there (late March) the moor was devoid of sheep. There’s not much ascent to Finlarg Hill from this point, but what there is is heathery, and it brought me out at an electric fence I recalled from my last approach to Finlarg, from the opposite direction. As before, I was able to find a place to slide under the electric fence, and then slip through between the stands of the barbed-wire fence beyond it.

I had a bite of lunch on top of Finlarg, admiring the still-snowy tops of Ben More, Ben Lawers and Schiehallion, poking up over the horizon beyond the wind farm on Ark Hill, across Glen Ogilvie.

Then on along the ridge to Kincaldrum Hill. From my last time here, I knew to stay on the east side of the fence that runs along the ridge line—avoiding the complications of heather and electric fences to the west. There’s one cross-fence (the first after leaving Finlarg) that needs to be slid through, but the others were all easily traversed at gates or stepped over at sagging points.It was a fine stroll, enlivened by a little group of deer that eyed me reproachfully from the field below as I passed.

A tongue of forestry that abuts the fence at NO 411434 is easily circumvented—there are gates in the ridge fence on either side of it, so I was able to hop over on to the west side, nip past the thick trees, and then hop back to the east side again.

The name associated with the 309m trig. point that marks the highest point on the north end of the ridge is a little uncertain. The Ordnance Survey applies the name Kincaldrum Hill to the far north end of the ridge, where it terminates in a 291m summit above Kincaldrum House (Gaelic ceann caled druim means “at the head of the hard ridge”). The name Hayston Hill is applied to the northwest slope that leads down to a short ridge overlooking the farm of Upper Hayston. So the highest point, marked by the triangulation pillar, is left without a name, but with two nearby possibilities. It seems to me that the name Hayston should properly refer to the ridge above Upper Hayston (hills commonly being named after farms, hereabouts), leaving Kincaldrum as the best name to associate with the summit of the main hill, which lies just above the farm of East Cotton of Kincaldrum. So that’s the usage I’ve adopted here.

From the meadowy top of Kincaldrum, I wandered down to my last hill of the day, although it doesn’t have much of an independent summit.

I descended the slope the OS marks as Hayston Hill, and then walked out on to the flat moorland ridge beyond. The area is chopped up by little disused quarries, and ornamented by a copse of windblown Scots Pines.

Beyond the pines, there’s a prehistoric cairn marked on the map. The Sidlaws have a number of these summit cairns, but most are covered in turf and undergrowth, rendering them invisible to the untrained naked eye. This one, though, is indicated on the map by a little circle of outward-pointing arrowheads, suggesting that some sort of noticeable convexity should still be visible. And so it is—not just a high bushy knoll, but a definite trace of a circumferential rampart, too. I sat and ate an apple next to it, and spent a moment wondering who had once come up here to build such a thing, and why.

The return to Lumley Den was eased by a vehicle track that services the rather pretty dry-stone grouse butts on the ridge. (The hill itself was hotching with young pheasants, all resplendent in the sunshine with their fresh adult plumage—perhaps some of them were even the same stupid birds I met as juveniles last year, when I came this way from Arniefoul.)

The track takes a long diagonal through the heather above Ironharrow Well, and eventually emerges on the ridge at the little tongue of woodland (NO 411434) I mentioned above.

The days was cloudless blue by this time, and seemed to be entirely without wind—but some zephyr was certainly still present, blowing a cloud of spider-silk caught in the wire fence into sparkling horizontal threads.

At Finlarg, I decided I’d walk down through the pasture rather than crawling back through Electric Avenue—maybe I could eventually find a route on to this hill that didn’t involve dicing with electricity.

I discovered that the barbed wire fence continued straight downhill, descending extremely steep ground into Lumley Den, while the electric fence that runs parallel to it along the ridge diverges westwards, following the edge of the dip into the Den. Just as the ground began to get excessively steep, I found a sagging point in the wire fence that let me step over it, and follow the electric fence across the heather. This got me to a rather striking vantage point looking down into the Den from on high.

And as I approached the road, I found that the electric fence sagged to the ground, making it easy to step over, right where it joined the roadside fence at NO 400417—at which point, someone had wrapped the barbed wire of the roadside fence in plastic tubing, making it safe to climb over. It looks like a deliberate but informal access point—over the roadside fence, over the electric fence, up the shoulder of the Den and then over the sagging fence there and out on to the open hillside. But how long it will last is anyone’s guess.

Unnamed Point 273 (NO 276349, 273m)
Blacklaw Hill (NO 288344, 284m)
White Hill (NO 274338, 233m)

10.5 kilometres
240 metres of ascent

You’ll perhaps recall my previous expedition to Blacklaw Hill—I went in from the north, which turned out to be a minor assault course, and went out to the east, which took me into the unnerving neatness of Piperdam. I wasn’t that taken with either approach, so I thought I would explore access from the west.

I parked at the gate to Little Ballo woodland (NO 269348), which has enough room for three or four cars without obstructing access. Down the forest track, turn left at an unpromising pile of gravel, and a path takes you to a gate, a broken fence, the Blacklaw Burn, and the south side of Blacklaw ridge.

From there, a track sweeps around the west end of the hill and then up on to the shoulder. The main navigational difficulty here is chosing which track to take to the summit of the unnamed 273m western top of Blacklaw Hill—like Blacklaw itself, the summit area is dissected by multiple quad-bike tracks. From the top, the view east makes it clear why this is the “Black Law”—law is a Scots word for “hill” (especially an isolated, conical hill), and the thick heather makes it look almost black on an overcast day. The “isolated, conical” aspect is best appreciated from the east—from Dundee it appears as a distinctive dark triangle.

So it’s an easy, if muddy and unsightly, stroll along the ridge to Blacklaw (the “Hill” is, we now know, tautological). On the way along, I happened on a rather grim-looking trio of quad bikers, creeping slowly along the ridge. Given that all the muddy track up here is presumably for their entertainment, they didn’t seem to be having much fun.

I’d previously crossed a tangle of tracks between Ledyatt Wood and Blacklaw (which now make sense to me as an abandoned section of quad-bike trail), and thought I’d see if I could make a link along the north side of the hill, between those tracks and the track that had taken me on to the west end of the ridge. No luck on that one—there was no path to be found. The bottom-land is fairly boggy, but it was easy enough going as I contoured along the hillside. After a while, I arrived at a track descended from the col between Blacklaw and its western top, which linked me back to the way I’d come.

A little cloud of bramblings blew through at that point. I find these little birds hugely frustrating—I never seem to get close to one, only ever identifying them by their little social calls and the flash of white rumps as they shoot away from me.

Back at the gravel pile near my starting point, I turned left instead of heading back to the car. This took me down a broad forestry track that slowly turned into a narrow, muddy slot between whin bushes, flanked on the right by a barbed wire fence. To judge by the footprints, it’s well travelled. I wonder what takes people back and forth between Little Ballo and Dron so frequently, along a path that isn’t entirely pleasant to walk.

I turned off to the right at a metal gate in the fence, at NO 282338, on to a track marked on the 1:25,000 map. For a while this seemed gloomily unpromising, until it burst out into the open ground around Redmyre Loch.

Something very strange was happening out on the loch, to judge from the intermittent blasts of sound, vaguely reminiscent of a hunting horn, wafting over from that direction. I strolled down to the water’s edge, to see nothing but a pair of mute swans, who certainly seemed an unlikely source for the racket. But after I’d peered at them suspiciously for a while, the true source of the noise swam into view—a little flotilla of wintering whooper swans, vocalizing at each other madly for some obscure cygnean reason.

Here’s what they sounded like:

(Recording by Matthias Hemprich, XC301063. Accessible at www.xeno-canto.org/301063. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.)

I paid a visit to Redmyre’s fine mock-Tudor boathouse, and then followed another track marked on the 1:25,000 towards White Hill. I had thought there might be a little difficulty getting to the top of the hill through the forestry, but it proved to be a doddle. I turned left into a firebreak at NO 277339, right up another firebreak at NO 277338 (both marked on the 1:25,000), and found myself on the open summit of White Hill. The pale grass here suggests how White Hill got its name—in the days before the current forestry plantation, bare White Hill would have been a notable contrast with heathery Blacklaw.

There’s a track marked on the 1:25,000 that takes you off the north side of the hill and then loops around westwards. It’s probably the best route. I followed the firebreak due west, along the remnant of an ancient boundary wall, but it proved to be a little overgrown, and brought me out against the edge of the forest fence, which I had to follow north until I found a broken section I could step over. Then I was able to descend to join the aforementioned track that comes down off the summit of the hill.

From there, it was just a walk out to the road at Littleton and then up to my car. But there was one last curiosity—another seat-in-a-tree like the one I encountered on Bandirran Hill. This one has absolutely no potential role in fire-watching that I can detect, but seems instead to be there to give a view over the little loch nearby. Maybe someone uses it to shoot waterfowl.

I’ve been intrigued by the lost community of Smithton since I climbed Smithton Hill this time last year, and then read David Dorward’s description of its namesake—“Former farm-toun W of Lundie village, deserted, abandoned and demolished within the past half-century.”

This was living memory for Dorward, writing in 2004, because he used to visit Smithton with his father when he was a child. Dorward senior was a keen apiarist, and would move his hives to Smithton in the summer months so that his bees could exploit the heather bloom in the hills. Dorward wrote:

[I]t was almost completely obliterated shortly after its last inhabited cottage was vacated in the 1960s.
The Smithton was a crofting community at the top of a track leading west from what is now the village hall in Lundie […] The track was passable for a car when I was young, but is now not used even by tractors, since the upper gate is locked and fenced against rabbits; the alternative access, from Lochindores, once the main access and still marked by a line of trees along the hillside, is now equally impassible. […] I was told that the old croft at Smithton was bulldozed by order of the laird; the result is that a once pleasant spot is now derelict.

In Angus or Forfarshire: The Land And People, Descriptive And Historical (1880), Alex J. Warden rendered the name Smistoun, and claimed it was so-called “because mists lie long upon it”. (But one wonders why it wouldn’t have been called plain old Mistoun, in that case.)

More likely, then, is Dorward’s derivation, from Smith’s toun—referring to either the personal name or the trade of blacksmith. Although he writes “[t]here is no known smiddy that could have occasioned the name”, the Ordnance Survey one-inch map (revised 1895) shows a cluster of buildings beside the track between Lundie and Smithton, labelled “Smithy”. Interestingly, by the 1900 survey for the six-inch and twenty-five-inch maps, those buildings have disappeared, and the label “Smithy” is attached to what is now Lundie village hall. (The previous smithy site is now occupied by what may well be the muddiest farmyard in the Scottish Lowlands.) So it seems reasonably likely that Smithton was the blacksmith’s toun, and we don’t need to invoke any of the ubiquitous Smith family.

Smithton sat on top of a low rise called Smithton Knowe, above a pair of springs called Horse Well and Craig Well, and despite the lack of access along the old tracks, I wanted to take a look at the site. I started from Tullybaccart and walked up through Pitcur Wood, then along the eastern shore of Ledcrieff Loch.

Behind the the fishery building at the head of the loch, a path strikes northeast to reach the edge of the forestry at a gate (NO 272372). From here, a path runs below Lundie Craigs, coming out at the place where I had a close encounter with a herd of Highland cattle during a previous walk. So I combined my trip to Smithton with reascents of Lundie Craigs, Ardgarth Hill and Smithton Hill, but I won’t bore you with the details.

It’s possible to get directly to the site of Smithton from the forestry gate, if you turn immediately right up the hillside, following a path that runs alongside the fence. At NO 274369, this brings you to a gate, which gives access to a tractor track that runs across the boggy ground below Smithton Loch, then skirts around the north side of Smithton Hill and descends directly towards Smithton Knowe. There’s a maze of new barbed wire lower down, which occasionally cuts across the original line of the track, but the way ahead is always obvious.

The Knowe itself is a lumpy diamond of open woodland, 300 metres long by 100 metres wide, floating 50 metres above the lower farmland to the east. Very little evidence of the old buildings remains, but there is still a deep, rectangular, turf-covered depression at the site of the Old Mill Dam—once there must have been a pool here, providing a head of water for the buildings a short distance below.

I could see no sign of the original terrace of cottages, or the larger building beyond, but on the south side I came across the low remains of terraced walls, and a couple of gateposts mysteriously left standing.

These gateposts cause me a little excitement, because I had seen them before—in Colin Gibson’s pen-and-ink drawing of Smithton in its heyday, reproduced in Dorward’s book. I won’t infringe Gibson’s copyright by reproducing the whole thing here, but I’ll just show you a relevant sliver:

You can see that the small trees Gibson recorded within the wall are now fully grown. Messing around with the National Library of Scotland’s georeferenced maps of the area, and adjusting the transparency to fade back and forth between the twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey sheet and aerial photographs, I could also make out that the group of trees at the east end of the Knowe trace the original line of the walls of the larger building in that position. They seem too large to have sprung up from seedlings rooted in the ruined wall—I think, like the ones in Gibson’s drawing, they must have been planted as a windbreak within the walls when Smithton was still thriving.

Of Horse Well I could find no sign, but Craig Well is still there—a little brick structure isolated in the middle of a broad, muddy seepage from the hillside.

And that’s it. As Dorward says, the old routes from Lundie and Lochindores are essentially impassable—overgrown slots between two boundary fences, showing occasional remnants of the old stone walling; a line of new electric fencing cuts across the south side of the Knowe.

It’s still a pleasant spot, although it has a melancholy feel when you know its history. I wonder why anyone took the trouble to bulldoze the buildings?

 

Balshando Hill (NO 278355, 266m)

6.7 kilometres
140 metres of ascent

So, Balshando Hill was a bit of a puzzle to me. It’s a bald-topped mound surrounded by a ring of forestry with the charming name of Naiad Wood—a Greek mythological reference that’s unusual hereabouts. And around Naiad Wood there’s a ring of farmland. But the Ordnance Survey show a path marching in from the east and then zigzagging and looping its way through the trees to the summit.

So it looked like all I needed to do was park at the trout fishery at Ledyatt Loch, find the start of the marked path, and stroll up the hill. Well, the first problem was finding the start of the path, which involved pushing through a young grove of trees across boggy ground, with not much evidence that many people came that way. And when I got to the start of the path, I found out why not many people go that way—access to the open fields was blocked by a stonking great metal gate in a stonking great deer fence, padlocked from the Ledyatt Loch side (which seemed odd). So that was a non-starter.

A few weeks later, I was at Tullybaccart with the intention of taking a look at the various Lochindores lochs. Lochindores, according to David Dorward, is likely from Gaelic lochan dobhar, “little loch of the waters”—and that low triangle dotted with lochans is certainly a watery place. I hopped over a sagging bit of fence where the Kettins Burn leaves the boggy ground around the lochs and flows under the road towards the Glen of Pitcur. The two eastern lochans marked on the map showed no visible water at all—just walls of reeds surrounded by squelching tussocks.

The two western lochs were open water, dotted with mute swans and mallards. The westernmost loch sported a row of wildfowling hides along its shore, and a genuine quaking bog to its south—the sensation was like walking across a large, springy mattress or a very soft trampoline. A couple of fences cut across the area, but they’re easily crossed at convenient gates.

So, there I was, looking up at Balshando Hill from the west. Could I get up it from this side? After climbing Whinny Knowe (not much whin, thank goodness), I arrived at the big imposing deer fence that surrounds Naiad Wood.

Reasoning that there had to be a gate somewhere, and it was most likely to be on the east side where the alleged path marked on the map entered the forest, I followed the fence around to the north across empty grazing land, through a gate into another empty field, and duly arrived at a big metal gate, the twin of the padlocked one at Ledyatt Loch—but this one was simply closed with a loop of chain and a hook-and-eye fastening.

On the inside of the gate, I could see a large interpretive noticeboard—but the gate itself was so overgrown with vegetation I had to throw my full weight against it a couple of times to tug it open.

So it turns out Naiad Wood is a “Trafalgar Wood”—planted on the bicentenary of the naval Battle of Trafalgar, and named after the frigate HMS Naiad, which was present at the battle. The thirty-three Trafalgar Woods planted in the UK in 2005 all feature trees that were used in shipbuilding in the days of sail. Isn’t that a lovely idea?

But beyond the sign there is a tangled wilderness that gives the impression that the gate was closed in 2006 and never opened again. The long spiral up the hill is choked with chest-high grass. At one point I found a little wooden bench protruding from the undergrowth.

There had obviously been some intention for this to be a public place of enjoyment, but the locked gate at Ledyatt seems to have put paid to any chance of that. Which is a shame, because the bare summit gives pleasant views over the main ridge of the Sidlaws.

So, apart from my bog-trotting approach from the west, is there a sensible way to get to Balshando Hill? I walked over to the Ledyatt Loch trout fishery and found the locked gate that had stymied me previously. From the outside, I could read the CCTV warning sign next to it—so I’m guessing the gate is locked to stop poachers getting in, rather than walkers getting out.

Then I wandered around Ledyatt’s boundary fence, which is everywhere formidable, and blocks off a couple of gates and a stile that would at some time also have given access to the hill. Eventually I arrived at the gate of the field, which opens on to the access road to Ledyatt, just outside their gates at NO 283357. So that’s the only way in from the east, now—hop over the gate and walk around the high Ledyatt fences. But there isn’t a signpost anywhere suggesting that Naiad Wood even exists, let alone that it’s intended to be accessible.

On the way back, I went south around the woods, and took a couple of exploratory forays down to the fence that runs alongside Piperdam Burn—but it’s an unbroken barbed wire barrier, cutting off what might have been pleasant access from the woodlands at Little Ballo.

And so back to boggy Lochindores. To return to the car, I found a gate in the fence at the foot of the road embankment, at NO 268357. It’s invisible from the road, and allows you to pop up out of nowhere to startle motorists on the A923. Which is a bit of a mixed blessing, of course.

So that’s the story of Naiad Wood. Unlike my other Sidlaws explorations, this one makes me feel very slightly sad.

Another two-parter. These two outliers sit either side of the A923 just east of the point where it passes through the main ridge of the Sidlaws at Tullybaccart.

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Blacklaw Hill (NO 288344, 284m)

7.4 kilometres
200 metres of ascent

Well, this first one is a fine example of what happens if you just look at a map and choose what looks like the obvious route.

I parked at the trout fishery at Ledyatt Loch (a recently constructed body of water, absent from twentieth-century maps), and set off south through the trees. From the map, it looked as if a track and a firebreak would get me down to the Piperdam Burn. Google Earth showed a swirl of strangely pointless-looking tracks on the Blacklaw hill side just beyond the south-east corner of the plantation, so I thought I’d pretty easily find my way out at that corner and on to the hill.

Didn’t happen. The track going south petered out at a little turning point surrounded by fairly dense undergrowth—I made a couple of little sallies into the trees but soon got turned back. The transverse firebreak on the map at that point didn’t seem to exist. So I walked back to the line of the electricity pylons and used the open ground beneath them to take me to the east side of the plantation. There’s a little gate into a farmer’s field there, which probably provides a better line down to the burn, but I went steeply down through tussocky stuff and long grass at the edge of the plantation to wind up at a fence beside the burn.

The fence was easily climbed at its corner post, and then I had to cast about for a way across the steep-sided cut of the burn. One of the swirls of grassy vehicle track took me up to the  face of the hill, and then I went direttissima through very steep heather to reach the ridge. Turning east to head for the trig point, I found myself crossing what amounted to a dual carriageway of well-graded but very muddy tracks coming up the hill from the direction of Piperdam Loch—in fact, the whole summit area was defaced by a branching trackway. There was even a turning circle beside the trig point. Although there were some big 4×4 tyre tracks here and there, much of this racecourse looks like it is being used by quad bikes.

Predictably, the Ordnance Survey map provided no hint of any of this stuff. There’s a trace of it on Google Earth, but someone has evidently been very busy up there since 2009, when the Google photos were taken.

From the summit, the views down to the Tay estuary and Dundee are beautiful, so I stood for a while admiring the view, and then decided I’d follow a grassy track that descended eastwards towards Piperdam Loch, to see where it came out.

After turning very muddy on its way through the trees at the foot of the hill, the path deposited me, disorientatingly, on a golf course. I wandered up the side of the deserted fairways, picked my way across a little patch of rough ground between two houses, and stepped out on to pavement. Suddenly I was on Osprey Road, in the Golf and Leisure Resort of Piperdam—curiously reminiscent of the community of Stepford, Connecticut, in the film The Stepford Wives. Slightly muddy and dishevelled as I was, I was surprised I managed to get down to the end of the road without someone calling the police.

Then it was just a matter of walking back up the verge of the A923 to get back to my car. As my map shows, what started out as a simple there-and-back jaunt evolved into a pretty stupid zig-zag route. So I’m thinking of it more as an exploratory mission than a proper walk.

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West Mains Hill (NO 315376, 290m)
Bowhouse Hill (NO 306374, 265m)

4.8 kilometres
180 metres of ascent

For this one, I parked on the grass verge of the B945, on a little one-car flat patch at NO 321383, having spotted what I thought looked like a promising line on to a hill surrounded by farmland.

The route took me in through an open field gate and up the broad unploughed margin of the field. Above that, I stepped over a wooden fence and into some sort of main drag for cattle—they are presumably transferred back and forth between the hillside and lower grazing through this narrow slot between two patches of forestry. So the whole area was a churned mass of mud. Fortunately I was there after a frost that still hadn’t thawed in this shady spot, so I was able to levitate my way across what would have otherwise been a fairly slaistery experience.

Above the forestry, I was able to cross on to the open hillside near the corner of the fence at NO 315380, at a section where the top strand of barbed wire had been stapled low to create an easy step-over. Another strand of barbed wire just beyond that  had a long slack run to it at this point—again, an easy step-over.

Up the hill over tussocky stuff, and the curious pointed cairn was soon in view. It’s quite eye-catching from the road below, and I’d always been curious about its construction. I turns out to be close to four metres tall, cemented together, and crowned with a sort of acorn finial that presumably started life on top of a more conventional building. The Canmore archaeological website tells me that the whole summit area consists of a Bronze Age burial cairn 20m across, and suggests that the current pointy cairn was constructed using spoil from the 1897 excavation of the Bronze Age burial. I’m prepared to bet that fancy finial isn’t Bronze Age, though.

The summit afforded fine views of the central Sidlaws, as well as southwards towards the Tay estuary.

From there, I crossed the dip to reach Bowhouse Hill (that’s bow as in “taking a bow”, not “bow and arrow”). There’s a gate in the fence at NO 309375—it doesn’t open, but you can climb over alongside it. Bowhouse’s empty summit provides a nice vantage point from which to appreciate the steepness of Lundie Craigs.

So, back the way I came, except for a detour to take in the little unnamed 279m hump southwest of West Mains. On the way across to West Mains Hill proper, I crossed a muddy vehicle track coming up from the south, marked with boot prints. So it seems I’d managed to come up with another off-the-beaten track route up another hill.

Wildlife? The only wildlife of the whole day was the brown two-second blur of a wren, whizzing across my path as I dropped back down towards Cow Alley.

Round Law (NO 232337, 257m)
King’s Seat (NO 230330, 377m)
Buttergask Hill (NO 230340, 307m)

9 kilometres
330 metres ascent

This was a couple of hours of exploration, looking for a route to King’s Seat and Buttergask Hill that doesn’t involve traversing this section of ridge from either the Dunsinane end or the Gask end (a route I’ve previously described in one of my first posts about the Sidlaws).

As I wrote then, there’s a prominent vehicle track crossing between these two hills, but it peters out in brambles and barbed wire to the west, making it rather … um … challenging to get down to Legertlaw. The map makes access from Glenbran to the east look easy, and David Dorward describes that route in The Sidlaw Hills (which I’m going to keep recommending to you until you buy it). It’s a fine walk, but it does take you up someone’s driveway and then over their back fence. Writing in 2004, Dorward described the house at Whirly Law as “empty”, but I can only report that earlier this year there was paraphernalia laid out on the front grass that suggested the presence of a child and a horse. So I thought I’d take a look at the road up by Stockmuir, instead, to see if that blurred the boundaries between “right to roam” and “trespass” a little less.

I parked in a little roadside nook opposite the “tower” marked on the map at NO 249323. I’ve driven past this thing umpteen times, but never looked at it properly. It’s constructed of concrete, slightly ruined, and has the appearance of an agricultural silo with a decorative crenellation around its domed roof. Very odd. Canmore, my usual source of information about the mysterious buildings I encounter, has nothing to say about it.

Beyond the buildings at Stockmuir, the track marked on the map turns into an overgrown gap between fields—at one point I was pushing along a narrow trod through dead nettles and the tall woody stalks of some kind of umbilifer. It might not be the easiest walk in the spring and summer. The route can be circumvented a little by taking a parallel track along the edge of a field near the wind turbine.

Access to the open hillside comes at an electric rope fence. I’d never heard of electric rope until I did an internet search when I got home from this walk—I was a little bemused to encounter what looked exactly like a standard length of twine strung from electrical insulators. The line was dead as a doornail when I passed through, with a long stretch lying on the ground. But there’s a spring-and-hook gated section that makes it easily passable even if in good repair.

The track then transformed itself into a proper vehicle track again, running below King’s Seat, which took me up to a dilapidated gate at NO 231336. This is a good gate to know about, if you’re planning on linking King’s Seat with Buttergask, because it’s the only way between the two hills that doesn’t involve climbing over barbed wire.

I made a little side jaunt up Round Law, which gives nice views down Glenbran. On the east slope of the hill, beneath a lone tree, there’s an oddly shaped cast-iron memorial marker for one Iain Mallet of Glenbran. It’s a lovely spot—requiescat in pace, as Dorward wrote after visiting it.

From Round Law, I picked my way up through the heather on King’s Seat, along stream beds and deer tracks. For a hallucinatory moment I crested a rise to be confronted by what looked like two yellow spheres bouncing gently up and down in the middle distance. A long moment of incredulous staring revealed that these were the rumps of two deer, retreating at my approach, and otherwise perfectly camouflaged against the autumnal heather.

Back to the gate, then, and up an easy-angled track on to the round summit of Buttergask Hill. The name “Buttergask” always seems to have an English feel to it, to me, as if it has been imported from the Lakes or the Yorkshire Moors, but it’s Gaelic. Dorward derives  it from bothar, “road”, and gasg, “wedge of high ground”—a ridgeway, in other words, and if you follow the ridge beyond Buttergask you’ll eventually arrive fairly easily at Gask Hill.

Back at the gate again, I noticed a rather purposeful-looking slot track heading off downhill on the Round Law side of the fence (that is, the other side from the vehicle track I’d followed up). I thought I’d follow it down to the forestry, to see if it offered an alternative route back to the car. But it was full of hoofprints and round animal droppings, and soon faded out on the open hill above the forest fence. Presumably deer habitually follow the same line through the  narrow gap between the slopes of Round Law and the boundary fence.

So it was back the way I came. Not a perfect direct route to these hills, but I think the best available.