This year, the Crow Craigies Climbing Party returned to Ullapool after a long absence.

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Cul Mor (NC 162119, 849m)

12 kilometres
720m of ascent

Cul Mor is one of a succession of isolated summits lined up beside the A835 as you head north from Ullapool. It’s particularly striking when seen from the path network of the Knockan Crag Nature Reserve, and our walk started from some roadside parking just a few hundred metres beyond the turn-off for the Nature Reserve car park. Its name means “big back”, and there’s a Cul Beag (“little back”) nearby.

A decent path took us up to about 500m on the shoulder of Meallan Diomhain, at which point the going got rocky and the path turned into a succession of cairns.

We skirted around the summit of Meallan Diomhain, with the intention of heading into the Fluich-Choire, and then on to the northeast shoulder of Cul Mor. But we also wanted a view towards our route down—a planned descent into the unnamed high corrie that lies between Cul Mor (the summit at left in my photograph above) and its outlier, Creag nan Calman (at right). The splendidly named Allt Lochan Dearg a’ Chuil Mhoir (“Burn of the Red Lochan of Cul Mor”) descends from this corrie in a series of slabby steps, and we wanted to eyeball a potential route of descent that avoided any steep, slippery ground.

A trace of a path was visible descending from the lowest point in the corrie rim, tracking southeast below Creag nan Calman, and we figured that we’d get down without too much difficulty if we then took a line well to the Calman side of the burn.

Fluich-Choire is the “wet corrie”, and is more of a saddle than a conventional corrie. It was full of small pools scattered among eroded sandstone outcrops.

Our final route of ascent followed the skyline above, over rapidly steepening ground and a final hundred metres or so of grey quartzite boulder-field before the ground lay back and we reached the summit.

With plenty of stone immediately available, the Ordnance Survey surveyors had made the decision to fashion the triangulation pillar from cement and local stone, rather than carrying up their usual load of concrete.

From the summit, we looked north into the classic “cnoc and lochan”* landscape of Lewisian gneiss—an intricate pattern of low hummocks and shallow lochans:

That landscape is broken here and there by mad sugar-loaf mounds of Torridonian sandstone, like Suilven:

Our descent path was easy to find in the col between Cul Mor and Creag nan Calman, and after its long traverse to the southeast, it took us zig-zagging safely down the steep ground beside the burn in much the fashion we’d planned.

To get back to our outward route, we had a brief, steep pull back up Meallan Diomhain, and visited its little summit cairn:

And then back the way we came.

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Rhue Point lighthouse (NH 092974, 2m)

11 kilometres
220m of ascent

Faced with a day of low cloud and rain coming in at lunchtime, we were wondering how best to use the morning when we chanced on a map tucked away in a folder in our self-catering cottage. A path was marked, running up the coast from Ullapool to the lighthouse at Rhue Point. Ideal, we thought.

So we wandered from our house up the road to Castle Terrace, and then followed a sign for “Riverside Walks” down to a rather splendid causeway crossing the Ullapool River.

A bit of scrappy route-finding ensued, before we emerged beside Ullapool’s golf course. A warning sign urged us to stay on the shore out of golf-ball shot, but you can see that my doughty companions, having noticed a complete absence of golfers, weren’t disposed to follow instructions:

This, as it turned out, was the last route marker we encountered. At the end of the golf course, we descended to the shore and trudged uncomfortably along the shingle for a while, passing the disintegrating hulk of a fairly large boat:

Then we ran out of beach, and found ourselves climbing over a rocky promontory that didn’t feel like any sort of path. Beyond that, we found a route through the undergrowth for a while, and then got ourselves back on to a grassy section of shoreline. This took us as far as the outlet of the Allt an t-Strathain, where we decided that we’d had quite enough shore-walking for a while, and so followed a rough track up through the fields to the road. From there, we strolled along the tarmac for a kilometre to a small car park, and then followed a path out to the lighthouse—arriving just in time to watch the morning ferry departing towards Stornoway.

We went back by more or less our outward route. First, back to the shoreline:

Here, our walk was constantly accompanied by this noise:

Oystercatchers were nesting on the shingle, and were very keen to warn us off:

Then back along a faint path across lumpy bracken-choked hillsides:

But we had one major breakthrough. In the absence of any actual path markers, we realized that this sign probably indicated the existence of a route across the bottom end of the crofters’ fields above the beach:

Entirely dogless, and routinely circumspect around livestock, we passed through a gate, traversed the fields, and emerged through another gate above the beach—to discover that we’d successfully circumvented the awkward rocks that had blighted our outward journey.

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“Aeroplane Flats” (NC 294231, 650m)

14.5 kilometres
700m of ascent

On 13 April 1941 an Avro Anson aircraft, on a training flight out of RAF Kinloss in foul weather, transmitted a distress call:

Icing up … lost power in port engine … losing height … descending through three thousand feet

No more was heard from the aircraft, and it wasn’t until 25 May that a shepherd happened on the wreckage, and the bodies of the six crew members, on a high sloping meadow between two northern ridges of Conival. RAF personnel made the decision to bury the crew on the spot, and it remains one of the highest and most remote Commonwealth War Graves. The tilted moorland surrounding the grave site has since acquired the informal name “Aeroplane Flats”.

We made our way to it on a day of bleary intermittent sunshine, starting from the car park at Inchnadamph, and setting off along the Gleann Dubh track which takes walker towards the high summits of Conival and Ben More Assynt. But just before the footbridge over the Allt Poll an Droighinn we turned on to a well-maintained stalker’s path that took us north towards Fleodach Coire. (Fleodach means “pertaining to Clan MacLeod”, so this is MacLeod’s Corrie—a reference to the MacLeods of Assynt, who once owned this land.)

Our first stop was on the lip of the corrie, at a small and rather wonky wooden shelter:

From here, we could look across to the sun shining on the ribbon of waterfalls descending from Lochan nan Caorach.

Just out of sight above the falls was Aeroplane Flats. But our stalkers’ path got us there by an indirected route. First across the boggy lip of the corrie:

And then on a long ascending diagonal to the shore of Loch nan Cuaran, where the path ended. We half-expected to find a boat-house or anglers’ shelter up here, but saw nothing.

The ground was rocky and broken, full of odd little lochans and surprisingly wide streams:

But, after a bit of awkward GPS-assisted navigation, we crested a rise and saw Aeroplane Flats. The memorial seemed tiny, and would have been difficult to pick out among the rocks were it not for a faded poppy wreath that must have sat there since Remembrance Day on 11 November.

The inscription reads:

HERE LIE THE CREW OF RAF ANSON N9857
WHO CRASHED IN BAD WEATHER DURING A NAVIGATION TRAINING EXERCISE
ON 13 APRIL 1941

F/O. J.H. STEYN D.F.C.
P/O. W.E. DREW
SGT. C. McP. MITCHELL
F/S. T.B. KENNY
SGT. J. EMERY
SGT. H.A. TOMPSETT

ALSO COMMEMORATED AT INCHNADAMPH (OR KIRKTON) OLD CHURCHYARD

As I took the photograph above, I heard this:

It was the only curlew I heard during the entire trip.

Nearby, embedded in the moorland, is one of the aircraft’s Armstrong Siddeley Cheetah engines:

Scattered through the peat hags are other aircraft parts, including the wheels and undercarriage.

It is, you will gather, a melancholy place. We stayed there for a while, and then made our way back the way we had come.

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Canisp (NC 202187, 846m)

13 kilometres
790m of ascent

Canisp is another one of those Torridonian sandstone monoliths that protrude from the Sutherland landscape. There’s some controversy about the origin of its name in his Scottish Hill Names, Peter Drummond rather poo-poos the idea that it comes from Old Norse kenna ups “well-known house roof” (because of its whale-back shape), and favours some sort of Gaelic origin involving the old word can, “white”, for the pale grey of its quartzite upper slopes.

Two lay-by parking areas at the north end of Loch Awe give access to a wooden bridge across the River Loanan, and the open moorland and hillside beyond. On our outward route, we walked straight down to the lochside, and then had to plowter through boggy ground to reach the bridge—we found the actual path on the way back.

Beyond the bridge, there’s a clear path across blanket bog, which leads on to the rocky shoulder of Canisp where, as on Cul Mor, the onward route is marked by occasional cairns. But it was impossible to get a rhythm going on the ascent, because of the sheer density of scattered rock:

And it got quite steep:

So I was glad of the pause afforded by taking this photograph. I’ve no idea why this particular rock, among so many others, should have what appears to be a fresh fracture plane exposing its native, unweathered colour. I cast around for its other half, but found nothing.

The wind was blowing so hard on the summit ridge that it blew my sunglasses off my face. So we were glad to find a sizeable shelter cairn at the north end of the ridge:

Unfortunately, it was almost as windy inside as it was outside—the wind was blasting straight through the gaps in the stonework. Eventually we walked around to the leeward side, to get double the protection.

And as we ate lunch, we enjoyed the view of the other side of Suilven, across Loch na Gainimh:

And then out into the wind again, blowing so strongly into our faces it occasionally managed to get inside my mouth and make my cheek go flup-flup-flup.

We were glad to notice a better descent route, which got us out of the wind sooner, and took us down a (largely) rock-free valley between the main ridge and the little outlier, Meall Diamhain.^†

Well down the hill, we sought rightwards for a while until we converged on our outward route. As we retraced our steps through the bog, a couple of irate dunlins swooped overhead—presumably they had a nest nearby.

As you listen to those dunlin alarm calls, imagine, too, the sound of an irate human cry, as one of our number received a direct hit from their droppings. (It wasn’t me.)

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Beinn Eilideach (NH 170926, 559m)

10 kilometres
580m of ascent

Beinn Eilideach is the prominent hill on the left as you look towards the head of Loch Broom from the Ullapool waterfront. Eilideach is another interesting bit of Gaelic, meaning “full of hinds”, though we saw no deer during our visit.

With heavy rain forecast for the afternoon, we chose it as a morning excursion for our final day.

We drove, somewhat ridiculously, for the short distance through town to the large car park just south of Ullapool. From there, we walked up the steep tarmac road serving the scattered houses of the Braes of Ullapool, turned off on to a farm track, and then exited the farm enclosure through a gate on to the open hillside.

A fairly substantial track runs alongside the Allt a’ Choire towards the hill, switching from its east to its west side as it goes along. It ends at a small dam, tucked into a steep-side gully. This seems to have been the location of a succession of water-management projects going back to the nineteenth century, according to Canmore. (There’s the remains of a sizeable concrete water tank farther down the hill.)

On-line walk reports for this hill mainly describe a pathless slog through heather from this point onwards, but after some discussion we decided to cross the dam to the east side of the river, and see what we could find.

And lo! on the east side, at the top of the loose rocky slope you can see in the image above, there was a well-trodden path heading in the right direction. So we followed it:

It afforded easy walking and took us to within 500m horizontally, and 100m vertically, of the summit. So that turned out well.

At the top of the hill is another of those trig points constructed out of local stone and cement, with a shelter cairn built around it.

But it’s not the highest point on the hill. For that, we had to walk a short distance farther east, to reach some slabby stuff that’s a metre or so higher than the trig point.

But the whole summit plateau was a splendid viewpoint. To the southwest we had the jagged profile of An Teallach:

To the northwest the view down Loch Broom to Ullapool:

And to the north an array of sandstone peaks, some of which we’d explored earlier in the week:

(The view above spans from cloud-shadowed Ben More Coigach on the left to Canisp at the extreme right.)

And today’s bird soundtrack was supplied by a couple of golden plovers, warning us off from their nest on the summit.

We returned by our outward route, finding the path again without too much trouble, and teetered safely back across the dam. Just before we reached the farm buildings, we had our best wildlife sighting of the entire trip:

A golden-ringed dragonfly landed next to us and appeared very reluctant to take off again. If you enlarge this image, you’ll just be able to see why. It had just caught a wasp, and was intent on restraining it, while the wasp continued to put up a struggle.

And so back to the car, after another fine week among the hills.

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* A cnoc is a small hill; a lochan is a small loch—which pretty much summarizes the appearance of the landscape. If you pronounce cnoc in the Gaelic manner (roughly croch-g) no-one will know what you’re talking about. The phrase is often rendered “knock and lochan”.

^† If that name Meall Diamhain seems familiar to you, it’s because we encountered Meallan Diomhain as an outlier of Cul Mor. Meall means “lump”, and meallan is a little lump, so these are words applied to small rounded hills. Gaelic diamhain/diomhain is odd, though, because it means “idle” or “useless”. The relevant Ordnance Survey Name Books translate Meall Diamhain as “Idle Hill” and Meallan Diomhain as “Idle Little Hill”. The diamhain spelling seems confined to Sutherland (four hills called Meall Diamhain are recorded in that county). There’s a scattering of ridges called Druim Diomhain across Argyll, Inverness-shire and Ross & Cromarty. One of these, above Kilfinan Bay on Loch Fyne, is translated as “Lazy Ridge: i.e. the ridge where people were in the habit of lounging about.” I’m prepared to bet neither of the hills mentioned here have attracted many loungers. Perhaps the “useless” epithet is more likely, given how rocky the two hills are.

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Auchterhouse Hill (NO 354397, 424m)
Balkello Hill (NO 361394, 397m)
Craigowl Hill (NO 377400, 455m)

7.8 kilometres
365m of ascent

For complicated reasons that need not detain us here, The Oikofuge hasn’t been getting out much of late, to the extent that I had to miss this year’s rendezvous of the Crow Craigies Climbing Party.

But as I started thinking about creeping back into the hills, it occurred to me that I’ve never described the classic “ABC” circuit in the central Sidlaws. Auchterhouse Hill, Balkello Hill and Craigowl* are a very familiar trio on the northern horizon for Dundonians. I used them as the heading image for my Sidlaws Gazetteer:

My previous Sidlaws posts have concentrated on reporting my various explorations and navigational difficulties getting access to and then following the ridge—but this one is a well-travelled route for me, and a very pleasant short outing, so I’m going to pitch this post as a guide for anyone wanting to take the same walk.

I parked in the gravel car-park in the Balkello Community Woodland, and headed through the gates in the northwest corner. My route through the woods followed a set of waymarked posts—at first purple and red, then plain purple. This eventually pops out of the trees under a row of electricity pylons, where I turned left to follow another path that passes through a gate and then rises slowly beside a stone wall:

At the top of the rise, next to a pleasing little stone stile built into the wall, there’s a sharp right turn to take another path that climbs more steeply between gorse bushes, which were flowering madly at the time of this visit:

The path eventually arrives at a little green gate and a signpost:

The route here turns left without passing through the gate, and then it’s plain sailing, sticking to the path as it takes an ascending zig-zag, and ignoring a branch that would take you down into the pass between Auchterhouse and Balkello (picturesquely named Windy Gates). When the tree-covered summit of Auchterhouse hill is in view, the path splits. The path to the right heads for a distantly visible gate, and then curves back towards the summit. My route goes left at this point, but will descend back to that gate in due course.

The open forest on the summit of Auchterhouse Hill is a feature that distinguishes it from the rocky baldness of Balkello, and the telecommunication jungle on top of Craigowl. But it seems that this pleasant little forest wasn’t always here. Back in 1848, in his Flora of Forfarshire, William Gardiner calls this hill the “White Hill of Auchterhouse”—and the word “white” was usually used to distinguish bare, grassy summits from dark, heather-clad summits. But if the name does indicate that Auchterhouse Hill was once grass-covered, it was perhaps already out of date when Gardiner used it—by the 1860s the Ordnance Survey shows the entire hill covered in trees, the small area today being a mere remnant. The ramparts of a prehistoric hill fort reputedly surround the little summit knoll, but I’ve never been convinced I can identify them.

To get to Balkello, you could retrace your steps to the short branch path that descends into Windy Gates, noted on the way up, but I think a more pleasant route stays inside the forest on the northern slopes of Auchterhouse Hill. When standing on the summit, the departure path lies to the left of the path on which you arrived. It takes you down to reach the gate noted on the way up—go through it and follow the path beyond.

This takes a pleasantly winding route through the trees above the headwaters of the Haining Burn. The only navigational decision involves a T-junction at which you turn right, towards Balkello, rather than left (which would take you down to join the main track to the Denoon Glen).

Just after this junction, you should be able to glimpse a dry-stone structure on a slight rise to your left, served by a narrow path. This proves to be a substantial two-room howff, now sadly lacking a roof.

Just downhill from this impressive structure, and overlooking the path, is a sort of dry-stone armchair. Here it is, with the howff in the background:

As you approach the little complex of fences and gates in the pass between Auchterhouse and Balkello, you can easily pick out two ascent routes for your next hill—one broad and eroded, and one narrow path sticking close to the fence:

Pass through two gates, and follow whichever route you fancy—I went for the narrower one on this occasion, which stays close to the fence for a while and then makes an abrupt turn towards the summit.

Balkello Hill plays host to a view-indicator cairn honouring blind hill-man Syd Scroggie—I’ve written about him before. Here it is, looking back towards the wooded summit of Auchterhouse Hill:

Unfortunately, some madness induced the writer of the otherwise touching dedication to misname the location as Balluderon Hill:

The name “Balluduron” correctly applies to the western shoulder of Craigowl. As the Ordnance Survey Name Book for Forfarshire recorded in the mid-nineteenth century:

This name applies to a continuation of Craig Owl Hill and sloping gently southward. The term Brae would be more applicable to it than Hill.

A couple of paths leave the Balkello summit towards Craigowl, and they cross and separate after a short distance. You should keep left on a line that takes you towards the fence. The rightward trending path descends to a track that eventually curves back into the Balkello Woodland—follow that if you want to skip the ascent of Craigowl.

The descent from Balkello gives a good view across to the paths ascending the ridge of Balluderon Hill towards the telecom masts on Craigowl’s summit. The best ascent is along the obvious path close to the fence-line. The prominent grassy track running diagonally across the hillside serves a defunct quarry, and is unhelpful.

Go through a gate in the pass between Balkello and Craigowl, and head uphill. The long ridge here is covered with a confusing and apparently pointless network of minor paths, particular higher up, but the route is easy to follow—always keep close to the fence on your left.

Near the Craigowl summit, as the communication masts and their associated buildings and fences loom, a fence comes uphill from the right and forms a T-junction with the ridgeline fence you’ve been following. Each of the three fences is served by a little stile close to the junction. The obvious route to the summit carries on uphill ahead, but instead turn left across the first stile, and follow a slot through the heather that takes you between a couple of the fenced telecom buildings and on to the service road.

Follow the road uphill, and then climb the little grassy mound that hosts the Craigowl triangulation pillar.

As my quotation from the Ordnance Survey above shows, Craigowl used to be Craig Owl, from Gaelic creag gobhal, “forked hill”. I’ve puzzled over this name for years, since nothing is less forked than the long whaleback of this hill. The best explanation I’ve seen comes from David Dorward, who suggests that the “forked” refers not to the hill but to a road that used to cross the pass immediately to the east. The Old Glamis Road coming north from Dundee divided at the summit of the pass, allowing travellers to choose either a high or a low route into Glen Ogilvie. The former still exists, as a farm track; the latter is only just detectable as a diagonal groove across Craigowl’s northern slopes, which catches and retains the snow for longer than the rest of the hillside.^† Here’s the fork as shown on Bartholomew’s half-inch map of 1903:

The southern approach to the trig pillar has long been blocked by a dilapidated extension of the ridgeline fence, but in recent years this has acquired a tiny one-step stile. From the pillar itself, it’s blocked from view by the fence around a recent addition to the telecom clutter. But if you walk around the left side of this little enclosure, you’ll find it.

Cross this, and descend back to the fence junction and its three stiles, where you’ll see a narrow path heading off downhill to the southwest.

This route, faint in places, takes you in a long diagonal across the south face of Craigowl, eventually arriving at a substantial farm track that serves a dumping/storage area in the abandoned Balluderon Quarry. This track can be horribly muddy after rain, and I prefer to peel off early and descend more steeply towards Linn of Balluderon.

Years ago, I built myself a little cairn to mark the turning point. My GPS places it at NO 3714639650.

Instead of continuing along the diagonal path, I turn left down a grassy sward towards a noticeable eroded gap in the gorse bushes below. There’s a path of sorts beyond this, but in summer it tends to fade into a wildflower meadow, and the easiest way to maintain the correct line of descent is to head towards a distant, but prominent, electricity pylon rising from the northeast corner of Balkello Woodland below.

Eventually another apparently impenetrable barrier of gorse is encountered, but there’s another eroded gap in it, easily discoverable if you’ve kept to approximately the right line. (For those using GPS, I find it at NO 3701539311.) Beyond this, you look down towards the Linn of Balluderon, with the lower end of the farm track descending from Bulluderon Quarry crossing in front of you.

Cross the farm track, and head directly towards the gorse bushes bordering the scattered trees ahead. (In season, you may need to thread your way through some bracken above the farm track.)

Walk downhill along the edge of the gorse, and you’ll eventually find a gap leading to a slight dip into a narrow burn, and beyond that a wooden gate. (Just before this gap, there’s another, narrower one containing a metal fence post and with no view of the gate.)

This gate is the return route to the car park. It opens on to a broad track (in fact, the one descending from near the summit of Balkello Hill) which soon takes you down to the Balkello Woodland, and a signpost pointing the way to the car park. Follow the red and purple waymarked posts through the woodland, and you’ll emerge on your outward route at the picnic area just a couple of hundred metres from the car park.

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* Although the Ordnance Survey calls this “Craigowl Hill”, the name is tautological (the craig already implies a hill), and it’s known locally as just plain Craigowl.
^† This diagonal rake also shows up well in aerial photographs, and was once marked as a path by the folk at OpenStreetMap—that’s since been corrected. In reality, it’s now no more than a linear mound and ditch, choked with vegetation.

The Law (NS 910996, 638m)
Andrew Gannel Hill (NN 918005, 670m)
King’s Seat Hill (NS 933999, 648m)

17.4 kilometres
910 metres of ascent

Another loop in the Ochils, this one taking advantage of the Devon Way cycle/pedestrian path to make a return from Dollar to Tillicoultry. And, again, it was designed so that the return limb of this clockwise loop passes over the outward limb of my previous loop—the Glen of Sorrow circuit. As well as providing a kind of neatness that’s gratifying in itself (to those of a particular turn of mind), this sort of design lets me revisit Matters Arising from the previous walk.

I started by walking up the Mill Glen from Tillicoultry—a deeply incised gorge featuring a path that clings precariously to its sides, zig-zagging back and forth across the river on an impressive seven bridges within a single tortuous kilometre:

The last bridge deposits you at the foot of the steep southern face of The Law.

The exposed rock at the start of the path is a little awkward to negotiate, and I wouldn’t fancy coming down it in wet weather or snow, but above that first section it’s simply a matter of grinding upwards. And as I did that grinding, I met a man coming down who introduced himself by declaring “I see you’ve chosen the hardest way up!”

Now, in my experience, anyone who greets you with a sentence beginning, “I see you’ve chosen …” is under the impression that you’ve made a mistake, and that you need to have that explained to you. So I pointed out that he seemed to have chosen the hardest way down, and then we parted amicably on a score of 15-all.

The Law eventually levels out into a grassy ridge that takes you on to the shoulder of Ben Cleuch. Here’s the view back along the ridge:

You can also see that it’s a bit misty, which wasn’t in the weather forecast. And a dense gloom to the west suggested that an anticipated weather front had decided to arrive half a day early. I’d originally intended to make the short excursion to the top of Ben Cleuch, but a sudden blatter of rain made me reassess my plans—it would be nice to get around my planned hills in decent visibility.

So I turned instead towards Andrew Gannel Hill:

At the stile in the foreground, I would start to retrace the short Andrew-Gannel-to-Cleuch section of my previously reported circuit, Ben Cleuch From The North.

I crossed the relatively slight intervening dip and was soon approaching the summit of Andrew Gannel.

The lone figure, hood up and back turned to the damp wind, continued to contemplate the distant misty scenery during the time it took me to reach him and walk past him. I’m not sure what he was looking at, but he seemed sufficiently intent that it would have been churlish to interrupt his meditation.

I’ve written before about the question of who (if anyone) Andrew Gannel was—see my walk report Ben Cleuch From The North for that.

From Andrew Gannel, I headed towards my final summit of the day—King’s Seat Hill.

Now I was retracing the outward limb of my Glen Of Sorrow Circuit, though I was able to ascend more directly than I’d previously descended, because I could easily pick out the appropriate path as I stood in the marshy col between the two hills.

This time, I remembered to stop and take a picture of King’s Seat’s summit ridge:

The little cairn in the foreground marks the true summit—the rocky outcrop in the distance, beyond the summit pool, hosts a lovely shelter cairn, but is slightly lower.

My descent took me past the Spitfire memorial, which I described in detail last time I came this way. Farther down, I paused to investigate a geological feature I’d marched past during my previous ascent:

These narrow, jagged, rocky ridges flanking a deep cleft are called the Kames. Or so it seems—the feature name on my 1:25000 Ordnance Survey map sits a bit farther south than the ridges, on an area of undistinguished undulating moorland, but the original Ordnance Survey Name Book had this to say about the toponym:

This name applies to a Rugged and Rocky Ridge, situated on the south east of the King’s Seat Hill. Property of Sir A. Orr. The Ground is being much broken in consequence of some parties boring, endeavouring to discover lead some years ago

There are actually several of these ridges, parallel to each other, and their name comes from the Scottish word kame, meaning “comb”—a reference to the shape of a cock’s comb. Scotland actually boasts a number of placenames incorporating kame or kaime. And, because this sort of landscape feature is often formed from gravel deposited by a glacier, the word kame has become a technical term in geology. I’ve spent a bit of time trying to find out if these Kames are also kames in the geological sense, but have come up empty.

I decided to make a small detour to walk through one of the deep gullies between the ridges. It was a pleasant enough diversion, albeit a bit leg-breaky in places where larger rocks had accumulated.

After I’d found my way out on to the moorland again, I followed a fence-line for a while until a gate let me reconnect with the path system.

As I approached the final descent into the head of Dollar Glen, I paused to look across the Burn of Sorrow, to see if I could figure out how my descent route from Saddle Hill had gone astray in its last few hundred metres. From this vantage point, my error was obvious.

When the Saddle Hill path had appeared to terminate at the head of a gully, I tried to descend to the burn that way—which quickly becomes overgrown and very steep. Instead I should have turned sharp right, and picked up a descending path through the bracken which would have taken me to the bridge over the Sorrow. Easy once you know.

Down, then, passing into the glen below the ramparts of Castle Campbell.

Dollar Glen is like a replay of Mill Glen, albeit slightly muddier. I took some photographs, but low light and lots of trees make them pointless. Eventually I popped out in a little area of parkland on the edge of the village of Dollar, and followed the Dollar Burn as it descended, in rigidly canalized form, through the town. I was aiming to reach the Devon Way, a mixed-used cycle/pedestrian path that would take me back to Tillicoultry along the north bank of the River Devon. I ended up with a choice between following the east bank of the Dollar Burn through what seemed to be the grounds of a primary school, or crossing the burn on a bridge and walking down its west side. I chose the latter, walking through a residential area and then down a narrow path sandwiched between the river and people’s garden fences. Eventually I had to squeeze out through a narrow gap between a bridge railing and a tree, which you can see to the left of the picture below:

It wasn’t ideal, and the walk down past the primary school looks luxurious by comparison.

The Devon Way (like many other modern cycle routes) follows the line of a now-defunct railway line—in this case, one that used to connect Kinross and Alloa. And the platform of the old Dollar railway station is still visible, though the station buildings are all gone and replaced by modern housing.

Like many of these old railway routes, it can make for quite tedious walking—long straightways between embankments aren’t my favourite.

But later there were views of the River Devon on the left, and across the fields to the steep southern face of the Ochils on the right. I photographed this odd enclosure without being sure what it was at the time:

I wondered if it was an old walled garden that had grown seriously out of hand, but couldn’t see a house that might be connected to it. Later, a bit of research with old maps told me that it was a private burial ground belonging to the old Harviestoun Estate, owned by the Tait family—which accounts for its local name, Tait’s Tomb.

Eventually I popped out in Tillicoultry next to the monstrous Sterling Furniture shop, just as the rain started in earnest. Then it was just a short traipse along the high street to get back to my car.

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