The Crow Craigies Climbing Party originated in the late 1970s, back during the Cold War when “CCCP” was an initialism known to all.* This alternative CCCP wasn’t so much of an Evil Empire, more of a small group of Dundonian school friends, just starting to wander around in the hills accessible from Dundee by public transport.

The “Crow Craigies” part refers to a lump in the undulating plateau between Glen Doll and Glen Callater—easy to get to for Dundee-based walkers, but on occasion difficult to actually find in poor visibility, being no more than one lump among several.

The friends eventually scattered; marriages, children and careers dominated lives for a while … and then in 2003 the CCCP was reborn, now in the form of a bunch of middle-aged guys with their own transport and a tendency to rent holiday cottages rather than camp.

This year’s trip took us to Bonar Bridge, for some hills in the Far North of Scotland—the five routes shown below.

The landscape doesn’t particularly lend itself to multi-hill days, consisting mainly of big individual lumps sticking up out of ancient bedrock. But what it did lend itself to, unusually, during our visit, was easy bog-trotting. Two weeks without rain had dried out the peat hags, and it became something of an obsession to exploit this opportunity for the easy crossing of otherwise difficult ground.

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Ben Hope (NC 477501, 927m)

14 kilometres
990 metres of ascent

We went up Ben Hope from the bridge at Alltnacaillich (“stream of the old woman”). Someone had just turned the river on when we arrived—the completely dry streambed was beginning to fill with water just as we crossed it, and we found a little dam further up the glen. We swung away east of the usual route, avoiding the eroded path on the way up. Plans to return to our starting point by the Leitir Mhuiseil were abandoned as the heat of the day ramped up—we all ran short of water, and so dipped steeply down the “tourist route” to refill our bottles from the Allt a’ Mhuiseil.

 

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Ben Klibreck (NC 586299, 962m)

15 kilometres
950 metres ascent

For Ben Klibreck we found some roadside parking near a handy bridge across the River Vagastie (NC 537288). The bogs below Loch Bad an Loch were dry, giving easy access to the south end of Klibreck’s long ridge. A marvellously engineered stalker’s path circumvented Creag an Lochain, taking us the summit at Meall nan Con with a minimum of up-and-down.

 

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Ben Loyal (NC 578488, 765m)

12 kilometres
700 metres ascent

Ben Loyal is the only igneous bit of landscape in the vicinity, decorated with some fine rocky summit tors. We exploited the dry bogs by coming at it from the east, where it’s easy to pull a car off the road at Lettermore. A rough 4×4 track goes from Lettermore as far as NC 603476, where it splits. On the way down, we discovered that the right fork is the better option, taking you high on to the hillside below Creige Riabhaich, from where it’s easy to cross to the main ridge at the outflow of Loch na Creige Riabhaich.

We climbed in mist and thin drizzle, only to break out above a cloud inversion just above Loch na Creige Riabhaich. This gave glorious views from the summit on An Caisteal (aptly named “the castle”), and from the tor at Sgor Chaonasaid.

 

 

 

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Ben Stack (NC 268423, 720m)

14 kilometres
860 metres of ascent

We made a classic traverse of Ben Stack—westward along Strath Stack from the estate buildings at Achfary, then up the steep western side of the mountain, along its narrow summit ridge, and down the eastern ridge, which is ideally angled for ambling. Dry bogs in the lower reaches made the return to the road easy. The ascent was enlivened by a visitor from RAF Lossiemouth—a Tornado GR4 blasted past, slightly below us, seemingly a stone’s throw from the mountain (I didn’t test this hypothesis), and performing a victory roll as it went.

 

 

 

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Meall an Fheur Loch (NC 361310, 613m)
Meallan a’ Chuail (NC 344292, 750m)
Beinn Leoid (NC 320295, 792m)

17 kilometres
1180 metres of ascent

There’s another fine stalker’s path that gives access to the hills around Beinn Leoid from the watershed above Loch More. There’s room for three cars in a flat space beside a passing place at NC 358333, provided the first two cars are parked considerately. We followed the path until it turned below Meall an Fheur Loch, and then we struck off uphill in a biting easterly wind. From there, easy traverses to Meallan a’ Chuail and then Beinn Leoid. Another nice path took us down into the corrie of Loch Dubh—but following it to the roadside would have brought us out on the shores of Loch More, a good five kilometres from the car. Time for another bog traverse! We contoured across the hillside for a couple of kilometres to connect to our original path beside Lochan a’ Chuail, and then yomped cheerily back down the way we’d come up.

 

 

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Finally, despite all that walking, the best glimpse of wildlife on the whole trip came from a chance encounter behind the Spar shop in Lairg:

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* When I was a kid, I owned a little Russian enamel badge commemorating the impact of Lunik 2 on the Moon in 1959. It was my pride and joy, and I wore it in the lapel of my school blazer. People in Dundee didn’t get to see a lot of Cyrillic back in the early ’60s, and they didn’t recognize “CCCP” as being the Russian equivalent of “USSR”. So they’d ask me, “What does the CCCP on your badge stand for?”
And I’d intone in my best Russian accent, “Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik.” Which was hardly informative.

With hindsight, I can only acknowledge that I was quite an annoying child.

Craig of Gowal (NO 232809, 927m)
Cairn of Gowal (NO 226820, 991m)
Creag an Dubh-Loch (NO 233822, 983m)
Broad Cairn (NO 240815, 998m)

25 kilometres
1100 metres of ascent

Glen Clova. I parked at Braedownie, paid the parking charge (one of many things that has changed in Clova since I started coming here), and set off up the glen towards the little woodland glade at Bachnagairn.

The footbridge above Moulzie, at NO 277788, was swept away in the December floods*, so the route to the head of the glen stays west of the river South Esk all the way at the moment—first up a waymarked forest path, then by a new (and correspondingly faint) trod in the riverside grasslands as far as the vehicular ford just north of Moulzie, and then by the usual old vehicle track.

At Bachnagairn, I struck off uphill through the forest to the southwest. The little patch of forest here was planted as a wind-break for a shooting lodge, now long dismantled. Bachnagairn is bac na gharain, “hollow of the crying one”, and the “crying one” is the wind. Despite the relatively high altitude and occasional wind damage, the larches seem to be thriving—the forest has visibly enlarged in the forty years I’ve been coming this way.

They’ve been doing a lot of maintenance work on the paths up here, so it felt slightly churlish to go off-piste. But I wanted to take a look at a feature marked on the map with the marvellous name of Glittering Skellies. A skellie is a ridge of rock. The rock here is mainly schist, which takes on a reflective sheen in the sunlight. And, sure enough, I encountered a couple of modest rock ridges and a few erratics as I plodded uphill, all of them entirely unglittering on a rather overcast day. There certainly were bright inclusions here and there, and occasional seeps of water that might create reflections.

Looking due east, I was evident that the Skellies are visible from only a pretty limited area on the glen floor, just at the bend below the rocky ridge of The Strone. Someone down there must have been regularly up and about in the early morning, to catch the occasional glitter from these rocks.

Then across the peaty outflow of Loch Esk. A stag posed on the skyline on the Craigs of Loch Esk, and a mountain hare darted away, its footfall generating a surprisingly loud, hollow drumbeat on the dry peat.

Next stop was the Fafernie Shiel. A shiel is a small building associated with summer pasturage. (The 1902 Ordnance Survey six-inch map also marks “Airlie’s Sheil” beside Loch Esk, but I saw no sign of it as I passed through.) The Fafernie Shiel is still visible, but as no more than the remains of four walls. It sits beside the Fafernie Burn (actually quite a healthy river), which takes its name from the Gaelic feith fearnach, “alder bog”—I saw plenty of bog, but no alders.

Then gently up on to Craig of Gowal, with an unhappy view down the glen towards a thickening roof of dark cloud. The wind was blowing up the glen towards me, and by the time I had reached Cairn of Gowal, it had brought the cloud to me—the summit of Broad Cairn disappeared, and Cairn Bannoch to the north-west kept fading in and out of view as cloud flowed across the col. The temperature dropped by five degrees, and I added an extra layer of clothing.

I climbed Creag an Dubh-Loch in poor visibility, pretty sure I was going to miss the hoped-for view down into the Dubh Loch, but I was lucky—I was able to exploit the occasional gap in the cloud to catch a glimpse of the dark depths. Dubh Loch is the “black loch”—Queen Victoria took a fancy to it, and dispatched James Giles to make a painting of it in 1849. (If you click on the link to the painting, you’ll no doubt be interested to know that I was peering down from the cliffs on the left-hand side.)

I also bemused a ptarmigan long enough to take its photograph.

Then across to the neat little summit tor of Broad Cairn, where I encountered a nice couple from Cumbria, sitting disconsolately in the mist. They asked me if I though the cloud would clear, and I assured them gloomily that I had seen black cloud roofing the whole glen to windward, so the current state of affairs was sure to persist for the next few hours at least. At which point the sun came out, the cloud blew away, and within a minute we were sitting in the middle of a sunlit panorama. So that was nice, although it rather undermined my pose as a wily old hill-sage.

We sat for a while, enjoying the sunshine, and then I clattered off down the awkward boulder-field on Broad Cairn’s east shoulder. The path below the boulders is now a huge scar on the mountainside, which took me down to Allan’s Hut—a high-altitude shelter for stalking ponies. It’s quite a complicated affair nowadays, with its own little paddock and a bench (labelled “Sandy’s Seat”) against its north wall. I remember its predecessor, a dilapidated wooden structure, missing multiple planks and apparently disused. In 1979, I arrived there at sunset with my friend Steve, and we pitched a tent inside it, the guy-ropes passing through gaps in the wall to be pegged down outside. So I was delighted to see that the tradition continues—in his Heights of Madness blog, Jonny Muir describes doing the same thing in 2009, with a modern tent inside the new building.

From there, a re-engineered path took me back to the bridge at Bachnagairn. The path looked like something the Incas would have been proud of. And big bags of stone littered the opposite hillside, around the connecting path to Jock’s Road. There’s obviously a lot of very welcome work being done to repair path erosion around here, and some of that work presumably comes from the £2 I feed into the parking meter at Braedownie from time to time.

I wonder what they’ll do about the washed-out bridge?

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* Note added in 2020: The washed-out bridge has now been replaced with a nice new one, and the nascent path on the west side of the river is returning to nature.

Beinn Mheadhonach (NN 880758, 901m)

23 kilometres
950 metres ascent

So, a bit of a change from the micro-level route-finding that’s been preoccupying me in the Sidlaws. This one’s a big, striding hill, tucked up the back of Blair Atholl, in that rather nebulous region referred to as “the Grampians”. The name of the hill is pronounced viˈɑnəx, Gaelic for “middle”. In hillwalking terms, it’s in the middle between two Munros, Beinn Dearg and Carn a’ Chlamain; geographically it’s in the middle between two glens, Gleann Diridh and Gleann Mhairc.

I walked up Glen Tilt, starting in the car park at Old Bridge of Tilt (NN 874662). Straight across the road and through a gateway takes you on to the main drag up the west side of the glen—a wide forest track with the River Tilt rushing through its steep-sided glen on the right.

On the map, it looks like you could stay on the west side of the Tilt all the way up to Glen Mhairc, but that would get you in amongst the Danger Area marked around the Croft Crombie rifle range. I’ve no idea how well that might go, and don’t intend finding out. So I crossed the Tilt on the Cumhann-leum Bridge. The name means “narrow leap”—the river didn’t look quite narrow enough for a running jump at the bridge crossing, but there’s presumably a narrow spot nearby.

Then, safely past the rifle range, I crossed back across the Tilt at Gilbert’s Bridge (the Ordnance Survey omits the apostrophe, but the bridge is named with the possessive both as a Listed Building  and on the ScotlandsPlaces geographical database). So far, I’ve had no luck finding out who Gilbert was, but he must have lived a long time ago—Historic Environment Scotland dates the bridge to 1759, so it’s older than a lot of countries.

From here, the way north is through an odd little gate that looks like something out of a low-budget 1970s science fiction TV series. A little way beyond that, you can save a bit of up-and-down by dropping off the main forest track on to a path that branches eastwards at NN 880701 and rejoins the main track at NN 883707. It takes you through clear-felled forestry on the flat-lands next to the Tilt, but you exchange easy walking on the up-and-down for tussocky, boggy stuff underfoot. You also pass below the ruined settlement of Ach Mhairc Bhig, of which more later.

Next, there’s lovely open woodland and sheep-mown grass, taking you down to the Allt Mhairc and the Ach-mhairc bridge. Uphill to the left are more ruins, the abandoned settlement of Sean-bhaile, which means “old town”. And across the river are more tumbled stone walls, Ach Mhairc Mhoir. Ach is a shortened form of achadh, a field or enclosure. So it looks like we have the old settlement of Sean-bhaile flanked by two enclosure systems, the small one at Ach Mhairc Bhig, and the large one at Ach Mhairc Mhoir (beag and mor being “small” and “great”, respectively). There were houses at all three locations.

The Canmore archaeological reference website has this to say about Ach Mhairc Mhoir and Sean-bhaile:

At NN 8866 7125 is the depopulated settlement of Ach’ Mhaire [sic] Mhoir, comprising twenty-seven buildings, four corn-drying kilns and several enclosures within an area of lazy-bed cultivation and clearance heaps. The remains vary from grass covered footings 0.5m high to drystone walls 1.5m high suggesting two phases of depopulation, the first beginning about 1850.

It’s from here that you get your first glimpse of Beinn Mheadhonach, as you walk north across rough pasture-land towards something marked on the map as the “New Bridge”. Given the age of Gilbert’s Bridge, “new” is a relative term, here—I find it marked on the 1867 Ordnance Survey six-inch map. There are trees growing out of its parapets. It’s not clear what it was used for. It obviously served the Sean-bhaile settlements, but even on the 1867 map, the track stops at the bridge—there’s no continuation on the far side of the river. I wonder if it was a way of getting animals safely across to graze on the slopes of Beinn Mheadhonach, which is otherwise moated in on either side by two rivers. But I’m open to suggestions or further information.

From the bridge, there’s a path all the way to the top, braiding here and there into multiple slots in the heather. The path I followed didn’t correspond to the zigzag marked on the OS 1:25,000. Higher up, at NN 878738, there’s a fork to the right that takes you around to the east side of the ridge. I found a nice cairn and shelter along there, but couldn’t quite figure out where the path was going, so struck off up-slope to rejoin the ridge-line path.A little cairn marks the summit, which is actually at NN 879754.

The OS marks a 901m spot height at the north end of the summit ridge at NN 880758, and those are the summit coordinates given by the Scottish Mountaineering Club (I’ve also used them at the head of this post), but on the ground it’s obvious that the southern end of the ridge is a couple of metres higher.

But I wandered over to the 901m point for the sake of the view down into the remote head-waters of the Tarf. (And, well, you know, just to be sure I was at the top.)

It was at this point that I realized that I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink during the three hours it had taken me to walk this far. Indeed, I hadn’t had anything to eat since the previous evening. I’d climbed the hill on a seventeen-hour fast. I mention this not because I think it’s remarkable or impressive (impressively disorganized on my part, I suppose). In fact, it used to be pretty commonplace—Tom Weir‘s book Highland Days is full of accounts of epic, multi-Munro days during the 1930s, pulled off while provisioned with water from the burns and a slice of bread he happened to have in his pocket. Nowadays, though, I seem to keep meeting people who think they’ll probably just die on the hills if they don’t have a constant supply of water, electrolytes and low-glycaemic-index carbs. But humans spent millions of years having to get up and trot about a bit on an empty stomach before they got anything to eat—turns out our physiology is still pretty good at managing that.

Anyway, it was blowing a hoolie on the top—at one point my sunglasses were blown clean off my face. So I dropped all the way back down to the blessed calm of the New Bridge for lunch. On the way down, I ran into another stone shelter, apparently assembled from the remains of an old stone wall that crosses the ridge at an altitude of 790m. But this one’s about big enough for an average dog, so I’m not sure what its function is.

Then back down the track to the car. It was a poor day for wildlife—a solitary stag and one grouse high on the hill; a couple of lizards in a scuttling, hyperactive frenzy on the warm, sunlit path; pheasants and a raven heard in the forest; and successive pairs of agitated chaffinches who supervised me as I passed their nests.

When I got back to the car, I was surprised to see that my GPS thought I’d ascended over a thousand metres. There’s 750 metres difference between the car park and the summit, and a fair bit of up and down along the track, but it didn’t feel that much. When I transferred the data to Anquet’s Outdoor Map Navigator (which has its own internal terrain model), I got essentially the same result, 1025m. But counting contours along the length of the track suggests that’s an overestimate—I can’t really find much more than an extra 100m of up and down in each direction, so I’ve trimmed the total ascent to 950m at the head of this post. I think the extra height comes from a GPS positional error as I passed through the trees, making it look as if I went up and down a bit more than I actually did. Whatever—you should certainly reckon on climbing more than the bare 750m quoted in the SMC’s Corbetts guidebook.

 

Berry Hillock (NO 372444, 282m [trig. point])
Carlunie Hill (NO 365432, 340m)
Ark Hill (NO 357426, 340m)
Unnamed Point 328 (NO 359408, 328m)
Denoon Law (NO 355444, 210m)
Crams Hill (NO 368450, 237m)

17 kilometres
580 metres ascent

Denoon Glen is the next glen west from Glen Ogilvie, site of my snowy floundering last week. So the purpose of this excursion was to explore the ridge between Denoon and Ogilvie, which I’d baled out of when the snow got too trying last time.

Denoon has a narrow ribbon of tarmac running up its floor, and at first sight there’s not much sign of potential access to the ridge across the farmland. Or, indeed, many places to park a car off the road. I rolled on to the grass verge at NO 368446, and walked back to a gate at NO 369447, which gave access to an empty field. At the top of the field, another gate let me into a sort of no-man’s land around the forestry plantation—a narrow strip of tussocky ground flanked by the forestry fence on one side, and the fence around a field full of sheep and lambs on the other. Apart from a bit of gorse, this was easy going, and it took me straight up to the boundary fence that runs along the crest of the ridge. At NO 371443 there is a space where a gate has been, now traversed by nothing more than two strands of barbed wire. In the absence of any other fence wire, it’s easy to duck through the gap between the two strands, provided you remember to take your rucksack off first.

And that was it—not many minutes after leaving the car, I was on top of Berry Hillock. The trig point is at 282m, but the ground is higher to the southwest.

The boundary fence follows the ridge to Carlunie Hill. Given that the fields on the east side of the fence were unoccupied, while those on the west contained sheep and lambs, I stayed on the east side. Three fences run up the slope from the Middleton farms, but none of them created a problem for me. The first, bordering a little patch of forestry, was in poor repair, and I stepped over a section that was missing its top wire. At the second, someone had wrapped a fertilizer bag around a section of the top barbed wire, creating an easy crossing point. And at the third, right at the summit of Carlunie Hill, the wire had been stapled deliberately low, and a chunk of fence-post was position to create a sort of stile.

It’s good striding country—springy turf and views on either side into the domesticity of Glen Ogilvie and the Denoon Glen.

Carlunie was bunny city, and panic was rampant as I ambled down the ridge towards Ark Hill. There was a wall in the way, which turned into a fence farther west. Between the end of the wall and the start of the fence there was a gap, at NO 363427. Ark Hill is dominated by stonking great wind turbines, and the rounded summit was noisy with their constant whump-whump-whump. I’ve walked with people who are reduced to frothing fury by the sight of a wind turbine, but I guiltily confess I quite like them. I do wish they weren’t quite so effective at killing bats, though.

Down, then, to a gate at NO 357423, and another at NO 358422. This brought me out at the head of the track that comes up from Chamberwells in Glen Ogilvie. In the other direction, I had access to the service road for the wind turbines, though I don’t know where the bottom end of that comes out.

But I wanted to head a bit farther south, to the head of the Denoon Glen below Auchterhouse Hill. This involved me in a gate-finding detour, eventually finding one at NO 364414, some distance down the Piperden Burn. Then onwards, through the remains of old slate-quarrying activities to the top of a 328m hill that doesn’t seem to have a name, but should have—it’s a nice vantage point.

Despite the fact this area is served by 4×4 tracks coming up from Glen Ogilvie, the Denoon Glen and across the main Sidlaw ridge, it has a feeling of remoteness to it. The sun came out. Curlews sang. I whistled a bit as I walked down to the little bridge over the Haining Burn at NO 357405. From here, I could follow farm tracks and tarmac all the way back to the car.

In his book, The Sidlaw Hills, David Dorward describes this area as a “favourite haunt of smugglers”, and says that the remains of their bothies are still visible. I didn’t see any bothies, but it’s easy to see that this was a good route if you wanted to get into Dundee unobtrusively from the north.

It was a nice stroll back down the glen. There’s an interesting feeling to be had from these low-level hills—a descent from windswept grouse moor to cosy farmland in the space of just a couple of kilometres.

Just beyond Easter Denoon farm, I swerved off the road to make a traverse of the odd little lump of Denoon Law, which is crowned with the ramparts of an Iron Age fort. The raised rim and central dip of the summit give the place the feel of a volcanic crater, albeit one full of mildly astonished sheep—I don’t think they get many visitors up there.

And then, just after Holemill, I took another swerve. It occurred to me that I might be able to get back to the car by going up and over Crams Hill.

Coming from the west, as I did, the summit is guarded by two fences. The first is easily circumvented if you go up through the woodland on the northwest side and then step through a gap in the wall. But the second is a serious and forbidding construction—a deer fence with an electric fence inside it. The top of the hill is only about 50m inside this fence, in the middle of rolling green pasture. This otherwise empty pasture was being grazed by a solitary deer, oblivious to the irony of her location.

Well, there had to be a gate at the other end, otherwise no-one could get in and out. My map showed that the (deer-fenced) woodland to the southeast contained a track that might bring me out at the far end of this vexatious pasture. Could I get to it? Turns out I could. The deer-fence protecting the forestry had a single low section in it, easily stepped over. Curiously, someone (or something) had prised up the bottom of this section, to create a crawl-way. I obviously wasn’t the first person to come this way.

Anyway. Into the forest and along the path, to pop out at a pair of gates that took me into the pasture. All I had to do was step over a strand of the electric fence. It was at knee-height. I’d been stepping over higher stuff all day. Odd how the prospect of an electric shock made it so much harder to step over. I was actually halfway over, one leg in the air, when I realized I was clutching the metal gate for support. Brilliant—the only thing worse than a tickle from an electric fence is a tickle from an electric fence while connected to a lump of earthed metal.

But I survived unshocked. Walked up the field along a narrow path trodden into the grass. Admired the view from the top, which was pretty much indistinguishable from the view to be had on the other side of the fence. Went back to the gates and the electric fence. Survived the crossing again. And then just dropped pretty much straight down to the road along a forest path that was marked on the 1:25,000 map.

Now that was the way I should have gone up in the first place …

Broom Hill (NO 383421, c290m)
Gallow Hill (NO 391413, 378m)
Ironside Hill (NO 399411, 354m)
Craigowl (NO 376399, 455m)

14 kilometres
430m ascent

The idea with this one was a ridge-level circuit of Glen Ogilvie—up on to the east side at Broom Hill, over the tops to Craigowl at the head of the glen, and then back along the west ridge to Berry Hillock.

So I parked off-road on a little patch of turf next to the turn-off from the A928 into the Denoon Glen. I figured I’d be coming off Berry Hillock somewhere on the Denoon Glen road, and it would be nice to have the car waiting conveniently nearby.

It was a strange and beautiful day. There had been unseasonable snow a few days previously and now, on a sunny April 30, the Sidlaws were still white.

I walked back down the road and turned into Glen Ogilvie. There’s an obvious route through the farmland, up on to the east side of the glen—a vehicle track that starts at the end of the public road to Dryburn, and climbs gently up below Gallow Hill, before crossing the Sidlaws ridge between Gallow Hill and Craigowl. It didn’t quite come out where I wanted to be, however. Instead, an open gate into a field let me climb up next to a new plantation and then out on to the open hillside through an obvious gap in the field wall at NO 380423. From there, I had a direct route to the start of my ridge at Broom Hill.

After that, it’s just a matter of following the fence southeast along the ridge to Gallow Hill. Or it would be, under normal circumstances. It was at this point I began to realize just how much snow had fallen in the last couple of days, and how much it had drifted. Although the heather was showing through in wide areas, the snowy patches between were knee-deep, and softening in the spring sunshine. I wove my way from one island of heather to the next, but it was slow going.

Gallow Hill’s cairn is just to the wrong side of the fence, but persistent walkers with a certain disregard for other people’s property have created a gap in the wire that makes it easily accessible. (Note added in 2019: The fence has now been repaired, but the highest point on the hill is actually on the fence-line, a heathery lump about 70m northwest of the misleading cairn. [And another note: Within a fortnight of my posting the previous correction, the fence was damaged again. The same thing has happened on the summit of Ironside Hill.])

From there, I post-holed my way over to Ironside Hill, above Lumley Den, and then post-holed back along another fence that turns into a wall behind the television mast on the south slopes of Gallow Hill. The fence that runs over Gallow Hill terminates here, against the wall behind the television mast, but there’s a handy little gate in it, hard against the wall, at NO 395408. I imagine it opens, but its lower edge was so deeply embedded in the snow, I just climbed over.

From that point, it’s only about a mile to the top of Craigowl, but things began to get really, really irritating. The drifting here was pretty extreme—I’d cross two or three snow patches an inch deep, and then on the fourth I’d suddenly drop hip-deep and have to crawl out. Or a single snow patch would alternate between inch-deep and knee-deep three times in twenty steps, destroying any possible walking rhythm. The snow was getting wetter and wetter in the sunshine, and I was getting wetter and wetter as I flailed around in it.

Meanwhile, nature was going about its business all around me—little frogs, stunned by the chill of the snow, could barely manage a couple of belated flops to get out from under my approaching boots; a male hen harrier flapped sullenly out of my line of march, maintaining an altitude of about two feet; deer dithered on the skyline and disappeared again; stonechats clattered furiously at me from the higher clumps of heather; and a quite spectacular fox’s earth turned up, improbably high on the side of Craigowl and slap-dab in the middle of the largest snow-free patch of heather I’d encountered. That fox obviously knows a thing or two about snow drifts.

At the top of Craigowl, I took off my gaiters and shook the compacted snow out of them. Then I took off my boots and tipped a demi-tasse of meltwater out of each. Then I wrung out my socks. For all that it was a glorious scenic day, packed with interesting things to look at, it was becoming unreasonably trying. And I had no reason to believe that the going would be any easier on the west side of the glen.

Reader, I baled.

I struck straight off into the glen, aiming to reconnect with the blessed tarmac of the Glen Ogilvie road at either Nether Handwick or Dryburn. Post-hole, post-hole, post-hole. Then hip deep, again, for the fifth or sixth time. There were wire fences around the empty pasture-land in the glen, so I followed a line of snow-choked grouse butts down the hill, thinking that they would be served by a path under the snow, and that would mean there was a gate close by—but no such luck. My alternative line from this point wasn’t at all clear, so I crawled under the fence where it crossed a little burn. Then I crawled under another fence. And at that moment, as I lay prostrate in the snow, a light aircraft flew low overhead. So I tried to make animated movements, for fear the pilot would make a radio call to report me as a corpse, newly thawed out of the snowdrifts.

But then … Farm tracks! Open gates! No snow! Joy! Until I remembered that I’d left my car parked uselessly far up the road. Sigh.

One of the interesting things about having your own website is that you get to see some of the search terms people have used to find their way here.  (Some of you have been talking to Siri while drunk, I see.) Someone pitched up recently having searched for “one long walk” along the Sidlaws, which sparked up a question I’ve been vaguely thinking about since I started this little project of exploring the Sidlaws ridge—how easy would it be to chain together a continuous traverse of the Sidlaws?

The problem really lies in the road crossings. Not so much the roads themselves, but the walker-hostile assortment of forestry, farms and fences that tend to flank the roads. It’s not immediately evident from the map what the best route from one bit of ridge to the next is likely to be.

So with stable high pressure and an easterly wind covering the tops with cloud, I thought it was a good time to go out and look at a couple of potentially problematic road crossings—Ballo Glack, between Gask Hill and the Ballo hills; and Glack of Newtyle, where the B954 crosses between Newtyle Hill and Kinpurney Hill. (Glacks are just steep-sided valleys, by the way. The word comes from the Gaelic, glac, and there are quite a number of “glack” place-names scattered around Perth and Kinross, Angus, Moray, Aberdeenshire and Highland.)

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Southballo Hill (NO 256348, 303m)

8 kilometres
360m ascent

I started in the morning with Ballo Glack. I parked at Tullybaccart, and wandered westwards along the forestry tracks on Northballo Hill. I’ve been here before, climbing the four hills in this little cluster. This time, I wanted to skirt around above Ballo Glack, checking the potential access to the road via the forestry tracks. (There’s no problem getting off Gask Hill on the other side of the road—as I’d found earlier, a track leads easily down through ravaged woodland right to the road.)

In particular I wanted to take a look at the rather nice path I’d seen descending towards the road the last time I was here (and, predictably for the Sidlaws, not marked on the map). But what a difference a couple of months have made! Last time I was on the Ballo hills, there was forestry work to the south of Laird’s Loch, closing off a short section of the forest track network. Now that section is open again, but there are huge tyre tracks tearing up long lengths of path, and the sound of heavy machinery on Northballo Hill itself. My chosen track was a macerated, muddy slog and, looking down through the trees, I could see the track that skirts along the north side of the plantation was similarly torn up.

What about my nice path? It was deeply eroded with mountain-bike tracks. In fact, there were a couple of mountain-bikers farther up the hill when I arrived. But they seemed to present no danger to me, since they were just cycling repeatedly into trees and laughing, for reasons best known to themselves.

I jogged down alongside the path to see where it came out, and found myself in a little muddy car-park just off the road at the start of the northern forestry track (NO 256343). The entrance to the track was closed, and the car-park piled with cut logs. At the south end of the car-park I found a promising-looking path (not marked on the map) going back up the hill, and undamaged by bike tracks [But see Update below]. So up I went. An easy angle got me back up to the forestry track I’d started from. It was still chewed up by heavy tyres.

Northern access looking unpromising for the time being, I headed south, and followed the zigzagging descending forestry track to another car-park (NO 249349). I strolled out to take a look at the signage at the entrance, and discovered the following:

Oops. It reminded of the time the Boon Companion and I walked for a couple of hours across open country in Iceland, at which point we encountered a fence and the back of a big, red notice. When we climbed over the fence to look at the sign we discovered it read, “VOLCANIC HAZARD ZONE. KEEP OUT.”

So—the forestry route across the Ballo section isn’t going to be pleasant walking for a while yet. How about the open slopes of Southballo Hill and Ballo Hill? They’re easy open pasture higher up, as I’d previously discovered, but closed off by fenced fields along the roadside.

On the way down to the Forbidden Car Park, I’d noticed another little path (not on the map!) striking south-east from the first bend as you ascend the forestry track. This took me quickly to a dilapidated wall with multiple gaps in it, affording an easy step-through to the open hillside, apart from a barrier of thick gorse growing along the burn. But with a little casting about I found a steep bank that sneaked me past the gorse, too (NO 251348). Look for two big trees close together on the opposite side of the burn:

OK. So there’s a reliable link from Gask Hill on to the Ballo hills, avoiding all forestry complications, if you just walk south down the road to the car park at NO 249349, and scoot across the burn at NO 251348. Yay. That was easy.

I strolled over Southballo Hill to find that the top of Ballo Hill was still heavily invested by sullen cattle, as it had been on my last visit, so I skirted around them. The tussocky marshland I’d found frozen previously was actually not too bad for walking, and now it was full of lapwings and snipe.

The direct route back to Tullybaccart would take me over the deer fence using a stile at NO 261354, but the upper part of the path through the forest had been a nightmare of overgrown gorse previously. So I decided to see what joy I could have by walking down the open hillside towards the Littleton road at Lochindores. There was bound to be a gate letting out on to the road.

And there was, just inconveniently placed at the wrong end of the field for my purposes—NO 267352, opposite the entrance to Thrawparts. But I was happier making the detour than trying to get through thick gorse and over barbed wire at the side of the road.

A short stroll along tarmac got me back to Tullybaccart, which is the link to the next part of the ridge.

So … proof of concept that Gask Hill can be painlessly linked across the Ballo hills to Lundie Craigs. The next problem was at the next road crossing eastwards—Newtyle.

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Auchtertyre Hill (NO 293398,  278m)
Newtyle Hill (NO 296399, 270m)
Hatton Hill (NO 311407, 265m)

10 kilometres
440 metres ascent

After a bite to eat in Newtyle, I set off for an afternoon exploring potential walker-friendly routes across the Glack of Newtyle.

You can get on and off the north side of the Sidlaws ridge at Auchtertyre Hill, using  a firebreak in the forestry. And you can get on and off Kinpurney Hill using the Newtyle Path Network route up The Den from Denend. But connecting the two hills that way would involve a bit of a round-about route through Newtyle town, albeit with the chance of nice cream tea at the Commercial Hotel. So I wanted to see if I could find a way down off Newtyle Hill (through the forestry), and a way up Hatton Hill (across the farmland).

I got up  on to Auchtertyre Hill via the aforementioned firebreak. The Newtyle Path Network provides a link through Kirkton to a little bridge over the old railway cutting. The route goes right through a farmer’s field, and in the late summer you walk along a slot trodden through the crops. In the spring, with the field recently ploughed, the line of the path was marked by no more than a faint little chain of footprints across the turned soil. Once across the bridge, I skirted a field and headed up to the firebreak.

In the late summer, when I was here last, the firebreak had been bucolically overgrown with grass, and alive with butterflies. Now there were just the churned tracks of some huge machine right up the middle of it, and a new barbed wire fence up the east side (albeit with a couple of stiles to allow access to the paths through The Birks). I was having a bit of a disappointing day.

A couple of young calves were gazing at me in astonishment from among the trees. So I made vague encouraging noises, and they started to approach, hesitantly. But at that moment I caught sight of their parents, gave vent to an involuntary shriek, and teleported over one of the stiles to put the fence between me and them. Gad, those English Longhorns are scary-looking things.

Once on top of Auchtertyre Hill I walked over Newtyle Hill and then down towards Burnside Plantation and its sturdy, double-stranded, barbed-wire fence. I wandered along it, and eventually came to a stile, tucked into the corner of the fence between Burnside and High Bannatyne Plantations (NO 302403). Beyond the stile, an odd little gate took be through the next fence, and I was home free, letting down the steep hillside towards the old railway cutting.

There’s a wooden stair here, connecting the railway cutting path to a forest path (not properly marked on the map) that eventually comes out at those stiles on the firebreak, next to where I met the Hellish Cattle.

I could have dropped straight down to the road at this point, but instead I walked along the cutting for a short distance to a farm track that took me down to the road exactly opposite the entrance to Hatton Castle. Then I walked up through Hatton farm, where I could see a track on the map that looked good to take me farther up the hill. Up the track, then two gates in two fences (NO 308411, NO 310409), and I was out on the rough pastureland and then the top of Hatton Hill. Yay. First new top of the day.

From here, I just needed to make the link to Kinpurney and my survey work was over. There was a gate in the north-east corner of my pastureland (NO 312409) that took me through to another field, and then down to another gate (NO 315410) that got me to the Denend Burn. From here I’d cracked it, because I could see a track on the hillside above me that the map linked up to the Newtyle Path Network route up Kinpurney. But the direttissima still beckoned, so I walked up across the field to see if there was a way out at the top end. Glad I did that, because I scared up my first pair of deer of the day—they bounded away downhill, cheerfully on the wrong side of the stonking great deer fence on the hillside above me. And there was a gate—or rather two gates, one in the field fence and one in the deer fence (NO 318413). Mission accomplished.  Two grey wagtails hopped along the fence to see me off their territory, but wouldn’t sit still for a photo.

I dropped back to the track, and followed it down The Den to Denend and the road. A short walk on tarmac and I was back to Newtyle, with a clear picture in my head of how to get from Dunsinane Hill in the west to Craigowl in the east. And, you’ll notice, not a single picture of the actual scenery along my routes. Sigh.

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Note: The variety of access to the west side of the Ballo hills is a little complicated, and difficult to make out on my rather winding GPS route map. Here they are, marked up more clearly:

Update: The paths going uphill from the north car-park are now (June) both deeply eroded by mountain bikes. Here’s what’s going on:

You really don’t want to meet that coming the other way, do you?