Meall nan Tarmachan SE Top (NN 589385, 922m)
Meall nan Tarmachan (NN 585390, 1044m)
Meall Garbh (NN578383, 1027m)
Beinn nan Eachan (NN 570383, 1000m)
Creag na Caillich (NN 562377, 914m)

14.8 kilometres
850m of ascent

Some days even I give up on trying to come up with new ways to climb old hills, and just go out and walk a classic route. So this is one of those days—an anticlockwise circuit of the pleasantly lumpy Tarmachan Ridge above Loch Tay. The fact that I haven’t been this way for a while is well demonstrated by the route plan I left with the Boon Companion before departing, which claimed that I would be setting off from the Visitor Centre below Ben Lawers—which turns out to have been demolished (and the site restored to its natural state) a decade ago. But no-one told me.

So I started out from the new car park (sans Visitor Centre), a little to the south of the old site, and followed the signposts, which shepherded me out on to the hillside along a well-worn path. This gave me a glimpse of the dam on Lochan na Lairige as I climbed westwards:

After passing an odd piece of industrial wreckage, in the form of a ruined metal tower and its wooden base, the path turns north to head up towards an unnamed south-easterly outlier of Meall nan Tarmachan.

From the outlying summit, there’s a steep descent, then a stile to cross, and a steep pull up on to Tarmachan proper, with a fine view east towards Ben Lawers (in cloud, below), and westwards along the winding Tarmachan ridge.

(Tarmachan, by the way, is Gaelic for “ptarmigan”, though there were none of the birds in evidence. The mysterious p at the start of the English spelling of the bird’s name is a piece of pseudo-etymological fixer-uppery originally perpetrated by Robert Sibbald in has natural-history text Scotia Illustrata (1684). He seems to have imagined the name was Greek in origin.)

Meall Garbh was the next objective. Its name means “rough lump”, and it’s the craggy object in cloud-shadow at left of frame, above. The path continued along the ridge, leading me easily down to the lochans in the col, and then more steeply upwards. Ahead of me, I could see a couple apparently making rather heavy weather of the last rocky section below the summit. They were scrabbling around with walking poles that had been set to a convenient length for level walking, but which were actively counterproductive for anyone trying to ascend a 1:1 gradient consisting of chunky boulders. There’s some sort of corollary to the old wisdom about ice-axes, here. It’s commonly said that people often venture too far on to steep ground before thinking to get their ice-axes off their packs and into their hands. The inverse seems to be true of some walking-pole users, who get themselves into an awkward fankle on steep ground when they’d be better off stowing the poles on their packs and freeing up their hands.

I resisted sharing this wisdom with them, however. They stepped politely aside to let me overtake them, and I gave them a cheery greeting, to which they responded with gloomy silence. Oh well.

Beyond the tiny summit of Meall Garbh, the ridge becomes narrow and airy for a while.

Then it kind of disappears ahead, and you begin to wonder how on earth the path is going to get down to the next col, which now seems to be almost vertically below. There’s a turn, and a steep descent, and then a madly eroded section that descends through steep rocks with some disconcerting exposure to the left.

Here’s the view down to the path in the col from just above the awkward bit:

There is, reputedly, a path that circumvents all this unpleasantness to the right—I confess to not noticing where it branched off on the ridge, but spotted it when it rejoined the main path, just above the col.

Then up again towards Beinn nan Eachan, which is, incongruously, the “mountain of horses”. I stepped up off the path on to a little grassy knoll that provided a nice spot for lunch, as well as a fine viewpoint back towards Meall Garbh and the perils just survived:

If you enlarge the picture, you should be able to make out how the main path seems to seek unerringly towards the nasty craggy stuff. I suspect this started out as quite an easy descent, preferable to the steep grassy slope to the north (left as you look at the picture), but decades of erosion have transformed it into a slightly awkward scramble. I waited with a mixture of interest and apprehension to see what would befall the pole-wielding pair on this route, but they never appeared.

I paused to take a picture of the distant peaks of Stob Binnein and Ben More, still sporting their last remnants of snow, before crossing my own little patch of snow on the ascent of Eachan.

The oddly eroded summit with its tiny cairn gave me a view of my final hill of the day, Creag na Caillich, “crag of the old woman”.

It’s certainly craggy enough. Perhaps the old woman owned the horses. Poor Caillich is an innocent victim of the culture of hill tabulation, which I introduced in a previous post. My 1:50000 Ordnance Survey map gives its height as 916m, which is a tad over 3005 feet. That height earned it an entry in the last edition of Munro’s Tables (1997), as a “Munro Top”. But in 2015 it was resurveyed, establishing a new, more precise height of 914.3m—tragically four inches short of the magical 3000-foot criterion. The 2021 edition of the Scottish Mountaineering Club’s Munros guide therefore dismisses it with the phrase: “many people will now miss it out”.

Well, that says more about “many people” than it does about the hill, so I went and climbed it. On the way, I made note of a path descending southeast into Coire Fionn-Lairige from the lowest point in the col, which I designated as my return route.

The grassy summit of Creag na Caillich gave me a fine view down to the head of Loch Tay:

It’s possible, apparently, to continue the traverse down the ridge that you can see at right of frame above, and to follow a path that sweeps west and then east again to circumvent the final crags and link up with the end of a long vehicle track that serves a succession of little dams on the streams of Coire Fionn-Lairige—the folks at OpenStreetMap have certainly plotted such a thing (their data are used in my map at the head of this post), but I can’t vouch for it, because I headed back to the col to pick up the path I’d noted previously.

Which I promptly lost after only a few hundred metres. For what it’s worth, OpenStreetMap suggests that I went right across boggy ground while the path went left. But no matter—Coire Fionn-Lairige was easy grassy walking, and I chose a line that directly descended the steeper upper reaches, and then traversed gently southeast across the lower slopes using the low mound of Meall Liath as my marker.

This brought me out on the aforementioned dams track. Then it was just a matter of marching a couple of miles in the afternoon sunshine, while enjoying the views of the ridge I’d just traversed.

Hill of Strone (NO 288729, 850m)
Driesh (NO 271735, 947m)

18.3 kilometres
890 metres of ascent

Driesh is usually climbed along with it neighbour to the west, Mayar. Most people seem to come in from Glen Doll in the north, a route I’ve previously described, but the longer approach from Glen Prosen in the south has its merits, which I’ve also written about. Having also approached Mayar across the plateau to its west, I thought I might restore some sort of cosmic balance by walking to Driesh along the ridge to its east.

Previous wandering in the area revealed upper Glen Prosen to have been hard hit by Storm Arwen earlier in the year, with many trees down, some damaging property and others obstructing tracks in the Glenclova Forest.

The track from the road-end beyond Glenprosen Lodge, leading up by the Burn of Farchal and emerging at the Dead Water, has been cleared. But, at the time of this trip, my planned approach along the track running north from Cramie was blocked by windfall on a broad front just south of the stile and gate below Cairn Inks.

So Plan B was to head east from Cramie along the track to Craigiemeg, then turn north over the open moor immediately after emerging from the forest. Here, there’s a 4×4 track, just two parallel grooves in the heather and unmarked on any map I’ve seen, which runs parallel to the forest fence to serve the grouse butts on Mount Bouie.

There’s room for a couple of cars at the road-end, and also a flat bit of ground between road and river just short of Glenprosen Lodge, which has something of the aspect of a parking area (there’s a waste bin) but which also seems to fulfil a function as a turning area for large vehicles (the semicircular ruts of large tyres were evident). So I tucked my car well to the side and clear of the ruts.

(At this point, I’ll intrude a little premonitory and explanatory note on toponyms for non-Scots, to reduce the number of linguistic diversions in my walk report, which is already unusually crammed with interesting place-names. There are two Shanks and two Snecks coming up. A shank, in a topographic context, is a sloping ridge descending from a hill summit; and a sneck is a steep-sided col between two hills.)

My route began at the entrance to Cramie farm, where I was briefly distracted by a sign on the gate:

At first I parsed “Caution Walkers” as an instruction for walkers to be cautious of some unnamed peril, but then decided it was a directive aimed at drivers, warning them to be alert for walkers on the track. Or so I hoped.

I turned right at Cramie (the left turn goes up the hill until it eventually encounters the swathe of windfallen trees previously mentioned), passed a telephone mast, went through a gate, and then turned uphill next to the deer-fence that protects the Glenclova forestry. (Why this patch of forest in Glen Prosen is named after the next glen to the north is a mystery I have yet to solve.)

After a steep pull up a grassy slope, I picked up the 4×4 track, and marched north along one of the slots in the heather left by the vehicle wheels. As I rounded the corner on Craigiemeg Hill, I was able to get a view into Glen Clova through the gap between Cairn Inks and Cairn of Barns—the distant crags, by my estimation, are the cliffs above Loch Brandy, along which I’ve previously walked.

Cairn of Barns has nothing to do with farm buildings—in Scots, the barns in this context are large rocks. Cairn Inks is something of a puzzle, however, since the Scots word inks refers to water-meadows—shoreline pastures that are intermittently flooded by the spring tides. Watson hazards that the name might originally have been Carn Ing, invoking an old Gaelic word ing meaning (among other things) “neck of land”. And my view of the Craigs of Loch Brandy in the photograph above is indeed permitted by the low neck of land between Cairn Inks and Cairn of Barns. So it all hangs together.

There’s a natural law that, whenever one encounters a truly stout and well-maintained deer-fence in the Scottish Highlands, there will be deer inside it. And, sure enough, I soon scared up a couple of roe deer on the forest side of the fence. A couple of buzzards drifted over to see what I was up to, and then a pair of ravens came by, seeming to scold me with their flight calls.

Just before the ascent of Mount Bouie, I crossed a little lump with the intriguing name of West Mackermack; there’s an East Mackermack nearby. Mackermack is probably muc earranach, “area for pigs”, which gives a hint of what land-use must have been like in the days before the moorland became a managed duoculture of heather and grouse. And Mount Bouie gives another clue—it’s monadh buidhe, “yellow hill”, implying that it was once covered in grass, rather than the solid covering of heather it now sports for the benefit of the grouse and the people who shoot them.

After descending Bouie and crossing the unimpressive Sneck of Inks, I finally reached the northeast corner of the deer-fence, and a view of Hill of Strone in the distance.

Another, lower fence continues up the hill to the ridge-line, and I elected to slip westwards over the little wooden section in my picture, so that I could be on the same side of the fence as Hill of Strone. I needn’t have bothered, though, since I found a gate in the fence higher on the hill, of interesting construction.

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a sliding wooden gate before. (In the photograph I’ve opened it slightly to check that it actually worked the way I thought it did, but I closed it again afterwards.)

From Cairn Inks, I was able to look down on the storm-induced carnage among the trees below. Here’s a view of the huge area of windfall that blocks the eastern track through the forestry:

There’s a path along the ridge-line between Cairn Inks and Hill of Strone:

This provides easy walking, with views back down into Prosen on the left, and the more dramatically steep-side Clova to the right. In the image below, you can see the grey bulk of Lochnagar on the skyline, with the cleft of upper Glen Clova in the centre, and the bulges of Craig Mellon and Cairn Broadlands peeping out from behind the foreground crags of Corlowie (coire loaigh, “corrie of the calves”) at left. I’ve visited both Mellon and Broadlands on a previous excursion, and have also written about my walk along the northern rim of upper Glen Clova.

After a short pull uphill, I reached the rounded summit of Hill of Strone. (In topographic terms, Gaelic sron, “nose”, indicates the end of a promontory of land. I’m guessing the sron that gave Hill of Strone its name is the southward ridge now called the Shank of Strone.) This gave me a view across to Driesh, which retained a crescent of snow on the rim of an unnamed shallow corrie.

It looks like more easy strolling in the photograph, but tucked away between Strone and Driesh is the cleft of the Sneck of Farchal, above Corrie Farchal in Glen Clova:

Watson translates Corrie Farchal as coire faireachail, “corrie of watching”, and certainly the upper reaches of the corrie, below the Sneck, would be a good vantage point, looking out over the junction of Glen Doll with Glen Clova.

The pull out of the Sneck on to Driesh was madly steep for a short distance, and then it lay back on to the long, easy-angled shoulder visible at left of my photograph, which took me to Driesh’s crowded cairn.

In many visits, I’ve only ever had the summit to myself in the foulest of foul weather, or the poorest of visibility.

After lunch at the cairn, I walked a little east of south until I picked up a view of the Shank of Driesh below, my route back down into Prosen:

You can see the prominent vehicle track that runs along the Shank. My old OS 1:25000 shows this trending around the west side of the shallow Corrie of Lick, whereas my aim was to keep to the east, heading towards Cairn Baddoch (the wooded summit in the middle distance above Prosen, in my photograph). I cast around for a path that appeared on my map, but was not evident on the ground, and then headed off cross-country, picking my way along fairly easy routes created by recent muir-burn, only to discover that the track I was aiming for, shown by the OS on the shoulder of Cairn Baddoch, didn’t exist either. So I descended through more muir-burn until I reached a decent track on the east side of the Burn of Lick. Looking uphill, I could see that it quite obviously linked to the track on the west side of Corrie of Lick—if I’d descended a little farther before striking off cross-country, I’d have found it. (If you check the map at the head of this post, you’ll see the current arrangement of tracks, as well as my pointless eastward excursion through the heather.)

Then it was just an easy descent in the sunshine, accompanied by the strange, burbling calls of curlews in the glen below:

East Lomond (NO 243061, 434m)
West Lomond (NO 197066, 522m)
Bishop Hill (NO 185043,461m)

20 kilometres
710 metres of ascent

Having previously climbed West Lomond and East Lomond from the Craigmead car park, and having made a more recent traverse of Bishop Hill from the Holl Reservoir car park, I decided it was time to chain all three summits together into a circuit that would take me right around the three large reservoirs that nestle below these hills. The tracks on all three hills can be annoyingly muddy in places, so I chose a day that fell about a week into a period of static high pressure over Scotland. The dry spell reduced the amount of mud considerably, but unfortunately generated a lot of haze that obscured some of the longer sightlines.

I parked at Holl, and then headed down the short stretch of road that dips below the grassy slopes of the Holl Reservoir dam. Beyond the road end, the route crosses a bridge over the reservoir’s spill-way, and then follows a track that crosses the ridge of higher ground separating Holl Reservoir from Ballo Reservoir. In the plantation beside the path I could hear a wren singing, with its characteristic “soft machine-gun” trills, like this:

I cast about for sight of the bird—to be rewarded with no more than a momentary glimpse of a whirring, chocolate-brown blur as it dived for cover.

The path descends towards the buildings of Balgothrie, but then follows a tortuous and many-gated route circumventing the buildings and eventually pops out along the grassy shoreline of Ballo Reservoir, with a view of the cone of West Lomond in the distance.

The path eventually reaches the buildings of the Ballo Trout Fishery (visible in the distance above), then turns uphill after crossing the track that connects the fishery to Wester Glassie, and eventually emerges on the narrow ribbon of tarmac that serves the Craigmead car park from the south.

Here, I crossed over and passed through a field gate on the opposite side of the road, at left of frame in my photo above. There’s a fairly evident track that takes you through open pasture towards East Lomond here, but I made a bit of a dog-leg around the margin of the first field to avoid disturbing a flock of sheep before getting out on to empty grassland.

After a while, a rather impressive building appeared, surrounded by interpretive boards:

This is an old lime kiln—now pretty much in the middle of nowhere, but once it was a bustle of activity, roasting limestone to produce quicklime (calcium oxide) for fertilizer and building mortar. Why here? Because the central cone of East Lomond is surrounded by layers of Carboniferous coal and limestone, among other things. So back in the day the kiln could be supplied with raw material that was dug out of the ground in the immediate vicinity.

Onwards and upwards, then, joining the main drag from Craigmead to East Lomond and striking steeply up the final cone.

On a previous visit, I encountered a dog perched on the summit view indicator, but I had the place to myself this time. West Lomond stood out against a bank of distant haze, and Bishop Hill looked distinctly murky.

I descended to the main westerward track, following it almost as far as Craigmead before hanging a right turn on to a subsidiary track that joins the road a little north of the car park, almost opposite the entrance to the broad track that serves West Lomond.

After a couple of miles, I had to decide between going straight up the eastern side of West Lomond, or following the spiralling tourist route that branches off to the right.

Last time, I’d gone for the direttissima, so this time I took the spiral, just for a bit of variety. This cranks through a good 180 degrees before eventually climbing steeply towards West Lomond’s oddly eroded trig point.

The way in which the concrete base of the pillar now stands proud of the surrounding terrain makes it a fine place to sit down. So I was enjoying a Mars bar and the hazy view of Bishop Hill when I heard the sound of a phone ringing somewhere out of sight on the approach to the summit. Oh dear. I braced for one of those long business conversations that seem to take place on top of hills with phone reception these days, only to hear the phone’s owner take the call and say: “Ah’m oan the hill, man. Ah’ll phone ye back. Aye, tonight.” End of call. That’s the spirit.

Then I headed southwards off the summit, on a knee-straining path that drops down to a stile and then continues its descent over eroded ground to the head of Glen Vale.

I’ve been over this stile before, and reported it as being in poor repair, but I was pleased to find it had had some work done since I last saw it.

Having arrived at the lowest point, with a view down into Glen Vale, I started up the obvious track on to Bishop Hill, encountering about the only bit of serious mud on the whole expedition, in a little sump around the access gate. Here’s the view back to West Lomond:

I climbed alongside the fence for a while, until another little metal gate appeared on my right, giving access to the slopes of Bishop Hill, along a path that eventually emerged on to the long summit ridge.

As I strolled south towards the highest point, I suddenly noticed that an aero engine of which I’d been only subliminally aware had changed its tone quite dramatically. I glance up, and glimpsed a small aircraft diving away, having just released the tow-rope of a glider. Presumably it was one of the Eurofox tugs from the nearby Scottish Gliding Centre, delivering a glider to the region of ridge lift where the light westerly wind was striking the steep face of Bishop Hill, just to my right.

It wasn’t long before I arrived at the little summit cairn I’d previously encountered in thick cloud, but which now enjoyed a hazy view over Loch Leven.

I pressed on, then, towards Munduff Hill and the weather-radar station I described in my previous report from Bishop Hill.

Having navigated flawlessly to that summit in zero visibility during my last visit, I found myself wandering on to the wrong path now that I could see where I was going and was thinking about other things—so I had to take a short line cross-country, weaving through the abandoned quarry on the ridge, before I got back on track.

Then it was just a matter of picking up the service road for the radar station (also described in my previous report), and descending through the forest to join the long track through West Feal, which took me back to the car.

Bishop Hill (NO 185043, 461m)

13.5 kilometres
370 metres of ascent

Bishop Hill is a prominent ridge on the far side of Loch Leven for anyone driving on the M90. Together with West and East Lomond, it encloses an area of tilted terrain, dotted with reservoirs, northwest of Glenrothes.

I parked at the Holl Reservoir car park and set off to the northwest, picking my way along the branching network of tracks that provide access to the reservoirs and farmland. I was walking in cool February sunshine, but Bishop Hill to my west was shrouded in dense orographic cloud.

It was possible I was going to end up climbing into cloud; but as I watched a similar cap of cloud clear from the summit of East Lomond, I wondered if I might get lucky as the day grew warmer.

The tracks took me past the big grassy dam of Harperleas Reservoir and through the trees on its southern shore, before turning into a narrow path. By the time I reached the little footbridge over the Lothrie Burn, I was out on open moorland. And the cloud was still low on West Lomond (in the background of my photo below).

Things got boggy for a while, after which I encountered this modern marker stone:

It’s dated 2006, and the engraving reads:

Three
ancient parishes
come together
at this point

Strathmiglo
Falkland
Portmoak

It’s obviously a companion to the modern commonty marker stone I encountered when climbing West and East Lomond. I suspect these are the work of the Living Lomonds Landscape Partnership, but at time of writing their website has become inaccessible, so I can’t check.

The path then carries on in well-maintained condition, across the moorland to the head of Glen Vale.

Above Glen Vale, there’s a sudden choice of routes. One strikes off along the north side of the glen, guarded by a fairly fierce warning notice (of which more later); a more substantial path follows the south side of the glen; and one heads off uphill, eventually reaching the ridge of Bishop Hill.

I took the middle way—in part because I wanted a better view of the glen, and in part because making a more circuitous approach to the hill would give the persistent overhead clag more time to clear.

Glen Vale is a pretty glen, but it wasn’t looking its best, with its winter crop of dead bracken looking drab under the overcast.

The crag in the middle, above, used to house an overhanging outcrop of rock called John Knox’s Pulpit, though there’s no evidence that John Knox (the founder of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland) ever preached from it. It was, unfortunately, blown up by Fife Council in 2004, because it was deemed dangerous—certainly, as the warning sign suggests, the crags are prone to rockfalls.

Geograph offers a “before and after” pair of images taken by Ian Bruce, which I’m allowed to reproduce here:

The upper photograph dates from 2003, the lower from 2006. You can follow the links in my copyright notices to see them in their original context.

I walked on a little beyond the crags, and then followed a path that strikes steeply uphill on the north ridge of Bishop Hill. This took me into cloud at about 350m, but just before the view vanished I walked a short distance to the west to obtain a dim view of Loch Leven below.

As I was lining up the photograph, a low, thrumming swoosh-swoosh-swoosh sound started up behind me, for all the world like a nearby wind turbine. And then it started to get closer. I flinched and turned, to discover a raven flying past at shoulder height, cocking its head to eye me suspiciously. I’ve never been close enough to a raven to hear its wingbeats, and it was the best wildlife encounter of the day; indeed, of the year so far.

Then it was just a matter of following an obvious path running alongside the remnants of a once-substantial boundary wall, until I arrived at Bishop Hill’s little summit cairn. Here’s the view:

Pushing south through the mist towards the little outlying summit of Munduff Hill, the navigation got a little harder—the path became fainter and developed a tendency to divide and reconnect for no obvious reason. I then arrived at a busy little crossroads in the middle of nowhere, with a group of young people suddenly appearing out of the mist to my left, chattering merrily, before disappearing into the mist to my right, apparently oblivious to my presence. After which a solitary mountain-biker popped up from the left, gave me brisk nod, and then disappeared off behind me.

More braided faint paths ensued, until I got to the summit of Munduff, which is marked by a flat rock bearing a curious incised pattern:

I’ve no idea of the significance of this. It looks for all the world as if a passing Nazi suffering from constructional apraxia had attempted to engrave a swastika. (But I presume that’s not what actually happened.)

Having never visited Munduff Hill before, I was in some doubt about my route down. I anticipated following the line of the forestry fence for half a kilometre to the northeast, to pick up the main track descending to West Feal and my route back to the car. But the map also showed a track branching off the West Feal track and coming up through the trees to terminate at some sort of building just inside the forest fence, right next to the Munduff summit. Whether or not I could get to it was another matter, since I’d no great desire to climb a deer fence and push through dense conifers, should that be required. But I thought I’d take a look at the potential access before heading down to my default exit.

My first surprise came when the “building” loomed out of the mist ahead:

This proved to be a Met Office weather-radar installation. And next to it was a gate in the fence, with a short path leading down past the tower to the service track beyond. There was only one hitch, in the form of a tree that had been downed by the recent series of storms:

It was, however, easy enough to just walk around through the grass on the other side of the tower.

Then it was just matter of descending through the forest (which was, rather spookily, still retaining some ground mist here and there) and then following the broad track to West Feal, and then beyond to the road and the car park.

The Goal (NO 361639, 459m)
Hill of Couternach (NO 356659, 512m)

13.7 kilometres
470 metres of ascent

The Airlie Memorial stands on the shoulder of Tulloch Hill, which is the prow of a long ridge separating Glen Prosen to the west from Glen Clova in the east. It’s another of those places conjured into legendary status in my childhood, because my father would often point it out and extol its virtues as we drove past on our way to somewhere else entirely. Every now and then in adult life I would remember that I still hadn’t got around to visiting it. So a few days short of the winter solstice, with limited time on my hands, I decided that Airlie Memorial Day had finally arrived, after half a century of anticipation and prevarication.

But as I drove up the road between Kirriemuir and Dykehead, I began to feel a few misgivings. Chainsaws had been at work on either side of the road, clearing fallen trees and branches. A mere fortnight after the destructive winds of Storm Arwen was perhaps not the best time to embark on a walk that began with a climb through forest. Oh well, I thought. We’ll soon see.

I parked in the rough and muddy little car-park at the corner of the Glen Prosen road (NO 371606), where a post-Arwen notice from the Airlie Estate advised me that I should not attempt to clear fallen trees myself, as this could result in injury. That didn’t sound promising, but I set off up the steep track to see what progress I could make. And things went swimmingly at first, until I got high on the exposed southern shoulder of the hill, where all retrospective hell let loose. The path disappeared under the branches of a fallen tree, and beyond that was a blasted landscape of sheared-off stumps, root-systems tilted to the vertical, and heaped branches. Oh dear.

So I picked my way upwards, occasionally encountering little segments of the track barricaded by fallen timber at either end, but mainly just improvising a line that trended uphill. At which point, I climbed into low cloud. Turning back seemed like it might involve even more effort than just pressing on to the tree-line, and eventually I eased my way through a final tangle of branches to see the silhouette of the Airlie Memorial looming at me through the mist, like the opening paragraph of a Gothic novel.

It’s a stonking great pile, twenty metres high, raised in memory of David Ogilvy, 11th Earl of Airlie, who died at the Battle of Diamond Hill during the Boer War.

For a fly-round on a clear day, take a look at this drone footage, which also shows my onward route along the ridge, as well as the surrounding forest in happier days:

I skirted the impressive bank of cotoneaster that surrounds the base of the tower, and headed north along the ridge-line track. Ahead, sunlight began to glimmer, and I eventually walked out into clear air, with a view of my next hill, intriguingly named The Goal.

On the near skyline at right, you can see my next problem. Before rising on to the rounded moorland summits ahead, my track traverses one more little patch of woodland. And it was blocked by another tangle of windfall. Stymied, I looked around for alternative routes, and immediately spotted a track coming purposefully up the hillside from Glen Prosen.

It wasn’t marked on my map, but I figured it would either represent another route into the forestry, or circumvent the little patch of trees entirely. So I dropped down a short distance over rough ground, scrambled over a ludicrously deep ditch … and discovered that the new track terminated at a turning circle and what looked like a chemical toilet, a few metres short of a new deer-fence bounding the forestry.

So I found myself obliged to make a long descent through a previously forested area that had been cleared and replanted. I was aiming for the track that starts from a layby on the Glen Prosen road near the old farm of Dalchip and rises on to the western shoulder of The Goal—you can see it in the distance in the photograph below.

I’ve always thought that, if I ever break my leg on the hill, it will be on this sort of reused forestry ground—full of hidden holes and old tangled branches. So I took my time and eventually arrived at the track, and the gate through which it accesses the open hillside. Freedom! From there, it was easy enough to regain my lost height and arrive at the round summit of The Goal.

I’d been seriously contemplating baling straight back down into the glen, given the tiresome clambering that had been involved in getting this far. But the weather was clearing, and the play of low sunlight and mist across the autumnal grass of the ridge was inviting.

So I followed the track and the fence in straight-line segments, across the whaleback above the Craigs of Lethnot, and on to Hill of Couternach. In clear weather this would be a fine viewpoint into upper Glen Prosen to the west and the elbow of lower Glen Clova to the north. As it was, I had only tantalizing misty glimpses beneath the clouds.

Then it was back to the Craigs of Lethnot, where I diverted to the little cairn above the crags, for a view of the mist billowing through Glen Clova.

Back at The Goal, I picked up the track down to Dalchip and the road. Ahead, the Airlie Memorial, clear of mist at last, was silhouetted on the sky-line.

Once on the tarmac, I had just a mile to walk to get back to the car. But I marched on past the car park for a short distance to take in one last sight. My own photographs suffered from the poor lighting conditions, so I’m offering the one below instead, taken by the Boon Companion on a brighter day:

This is the Scott-Wilson Monument, raised in memory of Antarctic explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Edward Wilson. It’s admittedly an odd place to find an Antarctic memorial—it’s here because Wilson stayed at nearby Burnside Cottage in 1907 and 1908, during breaks from his work on the Grouse Disease Inquiry, and was visited there by Scott. Much of what would become the British Antarctic Expedition was therefore planned within a mile of this out-of-the-way corner in the road.

You can find out more about the monument on the website of the sculptor, Bruce Walker.

Tinto (NS 953343, 711m)

8.3 kilometres
510 metres of ascent

I feel vaguely embarrassed to be writing about an ascent of a popular hill by a popular route, but sometimes ingenuity escapes me.

Tinto is the site of a great missed pun opportunity for me. Decades ago, I was invited to climb it along with an acquaintance who was finishing his round of Donalds. It’s customary for a whole bunch of people to accompany these “final” ascents, and on occasion drink is shared on the summit. My plan was to take along a bottle of Spanish red wine in my rucksack, so that we could all sip vino tinto on the summit of Tinto. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make the appointed date, so that idea languished unrealized, as a strange inverse of esprit d’escalier.

Tinto’s name probably comes from Gaelic teinnteach, “fiery”, which may refer to an ancient role as a beacon hill—it stands out in isolation from the rest of the Southern Uplands and has long sight-lines in all directions. But there’s another possibility, which is hinted at in the large car-park on the north side of Tinto at Fallburn.

The car-park is surfaced, as you see, in strikingly pink gravel. This is an igneous rock called felsite, and it’s often used to produce the sort of gravel that people surface their garden paths with in the UK, but you don’t often see it in a car park. The reason it’s here, at Tinto, is because Tinto is basically a big lump of felsite. It originally formed when magma gathered and cooled in an underground dome called a laccolith. As the overlying strata wore away, eventually this lump of felsite ended up on the surface, and the rock has been quarried all along the southern face of Tinto.

.So the exposed rock of Tinto is pink, particularly strikingly so after rain, and so some people wonder if Gaelic teinnteach may refer to the fiery colour of the screes on Tinto’s southern side, gleaming in the setting sun.

About half a kilometre from the car-park, the path passes a low mound on the left. This is Fallburn Fort, the remains of one of many prehistoric fortifications that dot the landscape in these parts. It’s a moderately impressive double ring of ramparts on the ground, but remarkable difficult to photograph. Here’s a section of the outer rampart, with the broad path ascending Tinto in the background:

The Tinto path is horribly eroded, with water damage in the central part driving people to walk along the edges, which merely extends the damage outwards:

I pressed on upwards to reach the little shoulder of Totherin Hill, and made a brief excursion to visit its neat little cairn and admire the view, which was too hazy to capture usefully with the camera. The path beyond Totherin was less eroded, but buffeted by a damp, chilly westerly wind, which was blowing rags of cloud across the summit above me.

I paused to admire the strange pattern of muirburn on neighbouring Scaut Hill. I’ve never seen heather management done in so many tiny patches before:

And shortly after that I was at the summit, which is essentially one big cairn—a broad conic frustum of pink stones piled several metres high, reputedly dating back to the Bronze Age. It’s difficult to appreciate it as a human-made structure, but once you know what it is you can begin to get a feeling for the prehistoric importance of this hill. Tinto Cairn is surmounted by a neat little view indicator, which promised me views as far as the English Lake District and Ireland, but haze and sweeping ranks of low cloud obscured much of the view.

Tinto is one of those hills with a summit that sits higher than its Ordnance Survey triangulation pillar. I was going to say that the pillar itself sits alone and unloved several metres lower than the view indicator, but I see that someone has actually painted a heart on it. So maybe not unloved, after all:

To the south, I could glimpse the River Clyde gleaming silver beyond Dungavel Hill:

After a bite of lunch in the tiny lee of the view indicator, I headed back the way I had come for a while, but aiming to diverge from my route of ascent and follow a very noticeable track that descends along the southern flank of Totherin Hill.

This would not only let me drop out of the wind for a while, but would also let me visit one more prehistoric location before finishing my walk.

It proved to be a pleasant track, flanked by the world’s most dilapidated and least functional electric fence.

It took me down to a little lochan flanked by wild-fowling hides, and an unexpectedly padlocked gate. But I walked a short distance north-west along the barbed-wire fence, and found a spot where I could slip through between the strands and then climb up on to the little lump of Park Knowe, where the Ordnance Survey had marked a circular antiquity they called an “enclosure”. The Canmore entry for this feature describes it as possibly of “funerary or ritual origin” and reports that its double row of low circular banks is unusual “in that many of the stones are angular slabs set on edge”.

These stones protrude a short distance above the soil, and my photograph gives an inadequate impression of this double rank of low stones sweeping around in a wide circle on the rounded summit of this little hill. It’s a remarkable place.

And then it was just a matter of finding a line of descent across rough ground to reach the car-park. Along the way, the sun came out behind me.

Ben Shee (NN 952039, 516m)
Cairnmorris Hill (NN 933016, 606m)
Skythorn Hill (NN 926013, 601m)
Andrew Gannel Hill (NN 918006, 670m)
Ben Cleuch (NN 902006, 721m)
Ben Buck (NN 896014, 679m)
Ben Buck NE Top (NN 904024, 583m)

20 kilometres
790 metres of ascent

Most of the foot traffic on Ben Cleuch, the highest point in the Ochil Hills, comes up the shorter routes from the south. So this probably falls into my recurring category of “much-visited hills from unusual directions”, though the Ochils are so well-trodden that my own route described here is unlikely to be a great rarity.

I drove to the head of Glen Devon, and parked in a layby on the A823, at NN 948052, just opposite the access road for the Glendevon reservoirs and Burnfoot Wind Farm. It turns out that there’s also a little car park a couple of hundred metres up this road, just beyond the “no unauthorized vehicles” sign. And people did seem to be blithely driving all the way up to the upper reservoir—there were three cars parked up there later in the day, with a little family group milling around with small children and push-chairs.

From the car I walked up to the impressive green embankment of the Lower Glendevon dam. The road takes an S-bend at this point, curving left after it crosses the outflow of the dam, and then curving right again. Peering over the bank below this second curve, I had a view of a picnic table and interpretive sign, tucked below the north side of a little rectangular plantation of conifers, on the far side of the Frandy Burn.

The burn was an easy step across, and then I went through the gate and followed the rough grassy track that curves around behind the table before ascending the hill on the left side of the photograph above.

That was my link to the tracks that loop around Ben Shee, between Glen Devon and Glen Sherup. The Ordnance Survey doesn’t show all these tracks, but you can see them on my map at the head of this post, and find them on the map in the Woodland Trust’s little pdf booklet, here. The mixed woodland on this side of Ben Shee (Gaelic beinn sithean, “hill of the fairies”, for some reason) is very open—so, rather than make a zigzag approach along the forest tracks, I took a direttissima line between the trees to the summit.

This afforded a fine view over the Lower Glendevon Reservoir, with the unmistakeable silhouettes of Stuc a’ Chroin and Ben Vorlich on the horizon beyond:

It also gave me a view over my planned route for the day, with the grassy ridge stretching out over Cairnmorris Hill, connecting to Andrew Gannel Hill and Ben Cleuch on the skyline, and then descending towards the Burnfoot Wind Farm at right of picture below:

There’s a narrow path crossing the summit of Ben Shee, and I followed this down to join my onward track to Cairnmorris Hill. A flock of sheep on the summit of Cairnmorris managed to do a briefly convincing impression of a herd of deer as I approached.

It’s all rolling grassland up here, and the walk to Andrew Gannel Hill via Skythorn Hill was enlivened only by the need to cross a stile en route.

These two hills had me reaching for Angus Watson’s toponymic guide, The Ochils.

“Skythorn” sounds like something out of Middle-Earth, and seems an odd name for a low, rounded grassy lump. Watson was no help, however, recording only that “This name is obscure to me.”

And no-one seems to know if a person called Andrew Gannel ever existed. The original Ordnance Survey Name Book records that “It is said to have gotten this name from a person who lost his life close by in a storm.” There’s also a potential Gaelic derivation from an sruth gainmheil, “the sandy stream”, but Wilson is unconvinced by this, citing the rarity of Gaelic watercourse names of the form [article]+[noun]+[adjective], and the fact that the Gannel Burn, below the hill, was previously known as the Gloomingside Burn, which suggests it got its current name from the hill, rather than the other way around.

But whatever its story, the Gannel Burn runs along an impressively incised valley, one of several on the steep southern flank of the Ochils overlooking the Firth of Forth:

From the summit of Andrew Gannel, I followed the path to Ben Cleuch.

Here, I was joining the usual southerly approaches to Cleuch, and (having seen no-one all morning) I started to encounter other walkers in ones and twos along the ridge-line.

The summit of Ben Cleuch bears a handsome, if somewhat weather-worn, view indicator:

Reassuringly, no-one had dumped their dog on top of it for a photograph, a phenomenon I’ve recently encountered on East Lomond and Ben Vrackie.

After a bite of lunch, I wandered down the grassy shoulder of Ben Buck, visited its flat summit and tiny cairn, and then hopped over the fence to make a straight descent towards the Burnfoot Wind Farm.

There was a track marked on my OS 1:25,000 map, linking the turbine service road to the fence that surrounds the wind farm, and I anticipated finding a gate at that point. The wind farm turned out to be rather more extensive than my map indicated, but there was indeed a gate just where I’d expected it.

From there, I headed for my last hill of the day—an unnamed grassy lump, surrounded by turbines, which the good people over at the Database of British and Irish Hills have dubbed “Ben Buck NE Top”. Which is as good a name as any, I suppose. Here’s its summit:

From here, I dropped on to the service road and headed down towards the Upper Glendevon Reservoir and my return route via Backhills Farm. A chance alignment of road, turbine blades and sun meant that a short part of my route turned positively stroboscopic, as the shadows of successive turbine blades swept hypnotically over me from left to right.

After crossing an impressively broad and robust wooden bridge below Backhills Farm (presumably a relic of the wind farm construction), the map shows the track turning north and running up the east side of an arm of the Upper Glendevon Reservoir. On the ground, however, the Broich Burn runs cheerily along between grassy banks, with only a stranded rowing boat and some suspicious horizontal markings high on the banks to reveal that there’s a bit of problem with the reservoir level.

A dry summer has seen water levels fall so low that the buildings of the old Backhills Farm, which used to lie on the banks of the River Devon, have emerged into the fresh air again.

When this happened previously, back in 2003, it tempted the headline-writers at the Daily Record to dub the ruins the “Village of the Dammed”. Boom, boom.

I walked out on to the dam to get an impression of how low the water really was. Below, you can see the U-shaped concrete wall of the shaft spillway, which limits the height of the water when the dam is full, stranded many feet above the current water level.

Farther down the glen, the Lower Glendevon Reservoir was looking a bit thirsty, too.

At which point, I rejoined my outward route and headed back to the car.

Here’s the most exciting wildlife encounter of the day, a Buff Ermine caterpillar making a dash across the road: