Lundie Craigs (NO 281378, 353m)
Keillor Hill (NO 281385, 334m)
Donald’s Brae (NO 293396, c280m)
Auchtertyre Hill (NO 293398,  278m)
Newtyle Hill (NO 296399, 270m)
Ardgarth Hill (NO 277372, 320m)
Smithton Hill (NO 276366, 324m)

15 kilometres
460 metres ascent

In my continuing campaign of Sidlaw-bagging, this walk fills in a missing chunk of the main ridge between two previously explored sections.

I parked again at Tullybaccart on the A923, but this time headed northwards past the farm and into Pitcur Wood, which seemed to be hosting some sort of dog-walking frenzy at 10:00 am. The path takes anglers to Ledcrieff Loch, but I turned left just short of the loch, to take a sweep westwards and then northeast through lovely open woodland haunted by buzzards and kestrels, along a track that eventually services the radio mast on Lundie Craigs.

The 353m trig point at the east end of Lundie Craigs may or may not be called Westerkeith Hill—the OS 1:25,000 map labels the shoulder rather than the summit. A grassy path leads northeast from the summit, looping around the shoulder of the hill and then descending safely below the crags to come out near Ardgarth, if you want to make a short loop that connects the outgoing and return legs of this walk.

But I struck off along the path that heads northeast along the edge of the steep ground, which soon produces a fine view out over Long Loch towards the tower on distant Kinpurney Hill.Then there was a bit of bundu-bashing northwards to get to the heathery summit of Keillor Hill, which is crossed by a fence. Following this fence downhill gets you to a handy gate at NO 281386, which allows you to switch to the west side of the fence, for easy access to the unlikely pleasures of the Mackenzie Meridian. The Meridian, at NO 285391, is marked as a monument by the Ordnance Survey, but it isn’t really.It resembles a factory chimney, but has an interesting finial on the top. There’s no memorial plate or explanatory text. It’s another effort from James Stuart-Mackenzie, the amateur astronomer we last met in connection with the building of the observatory tower on the summit of Kinpurney Hill.

The Meridian tower is on the same line of longitude as Mackenzie’s residence at Belmont Castle, just outside Meigle, so it would have marked a precise southerly direction for any observations he made from home—a sort of elaborate, expensive and not very satisfactory sundial. In reference to his role as Keeper of the Privy Seal of Scotland, the tower is also called Privy’s Prap. I was pretty sure this would turn out to be an obscene reference, but my Scots dictionary tells me that a prap is “an object or objects set up as a marker”. So that all makes sense.

The track descends the long curve of the ridge to arrive at the undistinguished hump of Donald’s Brae. From there, I crossed a short distance north to Auchtertyre Hill and then walked on through the heather to Newtyle Hill. Both afford nice views down on to Newtyle village and across to Kinpurney Hill and Mackenzie’s other tower. (These might have been eventful hills, though. A sign on a gate warns “Beware of the Bull”. But, like the similar sign on Dunsinane Hill, no bull was in evidence. Your experience may differ.)Then back the way I came, until I reached Keillor Hill and descended down the side of a burn draining into Long Loch. There’s a nice path on the east side of the burn (it pretty much goes without saying that it’s not marked on the map), that gives good views of the loch and surrounding hills.I walked down to the lochside to take a look at the Mute Swans and some very nervous ducks that took off before I had a chance to identify them. This got me into a sort of awkward corner with farmland between me and my route back, but I lucked my way through empty fields and unlocked gates. (Keeping higher on the hill would get you past the fenced areas if there are animals grazing.)

Eventually I was out on the open hillside again, but immediately amongst some long-horned Highland cattle. The apparently inexplicable jink in my route on the map at this point is me trudging up the hill to circumvent their rather baleful presence.

Ardgarth Hill next, crowned by a prominent little knob, with nice views of Lundie Craigs, and also of Dundee and the Tay estuary.

Across a little dip below the almost nonexistent Smith Loch to get to Smithton Hill. David Dorward’s book The Sidlaw Hills tells me that there was a settlement called Smithton in this dip, “deserted, abandoned and demolished within the past half-century”. I certainly saw no trace. [Note: I was wrong about the location of Smithon. See the Note at the foot of this post for a correction, and my post More About Smithton for a description of a visit to the real settlement site.]

Smithton Hill gives views westwards towards territory previously explored.

A decent track runs southwest from close to the top of Smithton Hill, and took me all the way to what seemed like a dead-end against the boundary fence above Tullybaccart. But the path turns hard right and runs alongside the fence, down towards a corner of the forestry, where there’s a gap in the barbed wire and an easy step-over. [Note added in 2020: there’s now a prominent stile over the fence.] Then down the hill, around the old quarry, and back to my starting point. All the dog-walkers cars were gone.

That’s the main ridge explored, from Dunsinane Hill to Craigowl. But there are still a lot of outliers that might be worth a visit.

Note: Ah-ha. The 1898 inch-to-the-mile of the area shows that the abandoned and demolished settlement of Smithton actually lay south of Smithton Knowe, so I was nowhere near it. It was at NO 281366, just where Horse Well is marked on the current 1:25,000 OS map.
Dorward wrote “There is no known smiddy that could have occasioned the name …” but there was a smithy on the track between Lundie and Smithton:

Ballo Hill (NO 263351, 301m)
Southballo Hill (NO 256348, 303m)
Northballo Hill (NO 251352, 319m)
Hill of Dores (NO 257360, 268m)

7 kilometres
270m ascent

A shorter excursion this time—four hills tucked into the space between the roads at Ballo Glack and Tullybaccart. Mainly chosen because it was the first outing for a new pair of boots:

Emerald and pewter, apparently. And there was me thinking they were green and grey.

I parked at Tullybaccart, at the entrance to the Hallyburton Community Woodlands, and then struck off along the track that the map shows climbing to the ridge connecting Ballo Hill and Southballo Hill. The map promises a vehicle track, but it turns out to be a footpath almost obliterated by gorse, so I was glad to find a ladder over the deer fence at NO 261354, which let me out of the jungle and on to the marshy hillside. This would have been pretty boggy going, if it hadn’t been frozen solid. Below, Strathmore was full of morning mist:

Ballo Hill’s radio mast was besieged by cows with calves, who seemed quite keen to see me on my way, so I jogged once around the fence and then headed off towards Southballo.A robust wall crosses the ridge, but there’s a gap at NO 258349 that lets you slide under the barbed wire. Beyond that a track (not on the map) took me to a lock-up just below Southballo’s conical wee summit. There was a nice view of Dundee and the Tay Bridge, as well as a glimpse of previously climbed hills:

Northballo Hill is heavily forested on the map, but Google Earth showed me a relatively clear area running east from close to its summit, down to the forest track that terminates in the dip between its two tops. From Southballo, I could now see a promising looking gap in the trees with a burn in the middle of it, which looked like it might take me up to join the track at just the right spot:

The burn creates a gap in the boundary wall at NO 254350, which got me easily into the network of forestry tracks on Northballo. After the gorse and the icy marshes, the broad, flat track seemed so inviting that, instead of bundu-bashing up the aforementioned gap in the hope of connecting to the track above, I decided to circumnavigate the hill, which would give me a chance to peer down into Ballo Glack and across to Gask Hill, on which I finished a previous Sidlaw traverse.

But on the west side of the hill I encountered a lovely path (as usual, unmarked on the map) coming up from the Glack, crossing the forestry track, and continuing on up the hill. Someone had recently hung a spade on a tree, apparently marking the uphill side of the path. It seemed a waste of a spade—I presume they were planning on coming back for it. Anyway, up I went.

It all went cheerily enough until close to the top, when the path vanished under a leg-breaking assault course of wind-toppled trees:By the time I’d circumvented that, I found myself in the original clear area on the east side of the hill that I’d been aiming for all along. And the fallen trees were all pointing downhill on this bit of the slope, so it was easy enough to work my way up to the deeply boring summit of Northballo. In the unlikely event you ever want to climb this hill (for a bet, perhaps), the forestry tracks and that eastern clearing are definitely the way to come at it.*

More forestry tracks down to the Ballo Glen, then east towards Laird’s Loch. From just west of the loch there’s a firebreak next to a fence that takes you straight up Hill of Dores. The summit has been clear-felled, so you can now walk around the embankment of the Iron Age fort. Two other firebreaks connect to the summit, from the north and the east, but they both looked choked with windfall and undergrowth, so I went back the way I came.

A brief diversion to look at Laird’s Loch turned up a disconsolate family of Mute Swans, paddling around in the only patch of clear water in the middle of an expanse of ice.And from there, back to the car.

Next up, I think, is the ridge on the other side of the road, which reaches over as far as Newtyle, and so links me up with my previous excursion to Kinpurney Hill.

Oh, and the new boots were very well behaved.

* Note added, February 2020: I revisited Northballo Hill as part of a path-mapping project, and found that the summit tangle has been cleared, with windfallen trees removed and many standing trees felled, so it’s now quite an airy and open place. It’s also now reasonably accessible (admittedly over very uneven ground clogged with forestry debris), by following the deep ruts left by forestry machinery, which now ascend all the way to the summit on the north side.

Kinpurney Hill (NO 322417, 345m)
Henderston Hill (NO 338414, 369m)
Auchterhouse Hill (NO 354397, 424m)
Balkello Hill (NO 361394, 397m)
Craigowl (NO 376399, 455m)

19 kilometres
720 metres ascent

Back in 1971, I walked this part of the Sidlaws with my late friend Brian. We got the bus to Newtyle, and hiked across to Charleston for the bus home. We were equipped with great optimism, a truly vast quantity of food, and a photocopy of a Bartholomew’s half-inch map. This was from that early generation of photocopies that were stiff and glossy, reeked of headachey chemicals, and tended to go smudgy and progressively darker with handling. But our non-map didn’t seem like a serious problem—we knew what Auchterhouse Hill looked like, and we knew what Craigowl looked like, and we knew there was a ridge west of Craigowl that pointed north and would take us to Charleston. We didn’t have a compass, but we could tell direction from the sun. I don’t remember any paths, but I do remember a lot of heather. Our parents seemed remarkably relaxed about their just-teenage sons disappearing off into the hills for a day. My father remarked to my mother that, “Only an idiot could get lost in the Sidlaws,” apparently having temporarily forgotten one of the defining characteristics of fourteen-year-old boys. And anyway, we were fine.

This time I parked at Balkello Woodland (NO 365385), planning to go out and back from one location, rather than concoct a traverse.  On to Auchterhouse Hill, first, along a nicely graded path that seems to be invisible to the Ordnance Survey mappers. (I’ve never known a range of hills to be so full of unmapped paths as the Sidlaws are.) I’d always assumed that the straggling crown of larch and Scots pine on Auchterhouse’s summit was the remnant of some more extensive forest—but David Dorward, in his marvellous book about the Sidlaws, assures me that it was previously called “White Top”, suggesting a bare rock summit.

I baled off the north side of Auchterhouse Hill, heather-surfing alongside the fence down to a gate on the track that heads northwards to the Denoon Glen. There’s no trace of it on the map, but a nice path heads westward from the bend in this track at NO 352404. It takes you along the edge of the woodland, across the ominous blank of the Scotston Quarries (actually a mere rocky dip in the terrain), and eventually deposits you (at NO 342411) on the main forestry track that wraps around Henderston Hill. Although Henderston looks like trackless forestry on the 1:50,000 OS map, it’s actually shot through with convenient firebreaks, which are accurately portrayed on the 1:25,000. I peeled off the track through a gate on the left at NO 340414, and strolled up a broad gap in the trees, herding a couple of anxious deer ahead of me. At the top of the hill, there’s a large clearing with views to the south. If you’re up-to-date with your tetanus vaccinations, you might consider hopping over the vicious barbed-wire fence at NO 338413 in order to walk a couple of yards up a narrow firebreak to the summit marked by the OS. But the view isn’t great …

Better instead to follow the main firebreak until it deposits you on the forestry track again, at NO 334415. Follow the track a bit farther, and then strike off down another firebreak, on the right, at NO 332416. There’s a narrow path, which brings you out at a nice stile (which is good, because there’s an electric fence). The route to Kinpurney Hill and its mental three-storey tower are pretty obvious from here.

The tower was actually intended to be an astronomical observatory, built in 1774 by James Stuart-Mackenzie and James Playfair, both keen amateur astronomers. Although somewhat restored, its nowadays just an imposing shell. Nearby is Kinpurney’s natty blue trig point, and a sort of high-security view indicator—once I’d struggled through the gate in the fence that pens it in, I found it unusable because of a thick rime of ice obscuring the surface. And beyond that is the single gnarled tree that used to give a sort of Zen-like ambience to Kinpurney’s summit; I was disappointed to see that some philistine has planted three more, completely buggering up the previous Japanese minimalism.

So … back the way I came, with a little sidetrack to take in the wooded and apparently unnamed 377m summit north of the path. I hoped for a decent view northwards, but was thwarted by the trees.

I skirted around Auchterhouse (using another well-worn track that the OS missed), crossing Windy Gates (no wind, three gates), to the glorious viewpoint over the Tay Estuary on top of Balkello Hill. (Sometimes called Balluderon Hill—the Ordnance Survey are a little noncommittal.)

Then on to Craigowl, by more bleedin’ obvious unmapped paths. Craigowl summit looks increasingly like the headquarters of a James Bond villain, dotted with masts and security fences. The poor trig point looks as if it’s in jail when you first approach, but it’s actually easily accessible from the roadhead on the north side.

Then back to the dip between Craigowl and Balkello, down a path (west side of the fence) that had an actual burn flowing down the middle of it, and through a lot of mud and dog-walkers to the car.

This Sidlaws lark is good fun—I think I’ll see if I can concoct a succession of walks to take in all the major summits.

Dunsinane Hill (NO 214316, 310m)
Black Hill (NO 219319, 360m)
King’s Seat (NO 230330, 377m)
Buttergask Hill (NO 230340, 307m)
Lintrose Hill (NO 234343, 325m)
Gask Hill (NO 238344, 358m)

16 kilometres
610 metres ascent

So, I found myself uncommitted this morning, and decided to have a wander through the Sidlaw Hills. I was undaunted by the forecast of morning fog—I figured it would burn off later, and I’d get nice views of a mist-filled Tay estuary and Strathmore.

Yeah, right.

So I climbed up on to Dunsinane in thick mist, walked the ridge in thick mist, and came back along the road with the hills shrouded in thick mist. Sunlight appeared when I was approximately four steps from the car. But the hills were still covered in thick mist.

There’s a wee patch of roadside parking on the bend in the road just south of Collace (NO 207321). It’s only about 150 metres of ascent to get to the hill fort on the summit of Dunsinane, spuriously associated with Macbeth, and (according to one story) where the real Stone of Destiny was dug up in the nineteenth century.

There are crags on the direct line from Dunsinane to Black Hill, so you need to go a little SE, towards the plantation, and then zig back again into the rather steep-side cleft between the two hills. A path takes you up and over Black Hill, but then I always seem to mislay it on the way down to the little lochan where the Den Burn starts. There’s a broch marked on the map, below Little Dunsinane, but nothing to see on the ground apart from an oddly symmetrical hummock. I’ve never been able to find anything written about it, or about the other two brochs reported in the Sidlaws. They do seem a very long way from the usual territory for brochs:

On a good day, you can get a nice view down the Tay from the top of the scarp slope of King’s Seat. But not today.

Then off the north slopes of King’s Seat—again, paths seem to come and go. I often scare up deer here, and today was no exception, with two white rumps disappearing into the mist at my approach.

There’s a lying path at the bottom of the cleft between King’s Seat and Buttergask Hill. A prominent 4×4 track runs through and looks like it’ll take you down to the farm access at Ledgertlaw, but it instead it disappears into a wilderness of gorse and fences. I’ve never been able to find a way down that didn’t involve barbed wire and skirting along the edge of someone’s fields.

Buttergask was new territory for me. I scaled a barbed wire fence between two posts that made a nice little stile, minimizing the damage to either myself or the fence. Buttergask seems to be enclosed by this fence (I found it again on the far side, below Lintrose), but covered in ATV tracks. There must be some gates somewhere …

ATV tracks took me almost to the top of both Buttergask and Lintrose. In the lumpy ground and rubbish visibility, I need to fish out the GPS receiver to make my way to the two “summits”, which in the mist bore a remarkable resemblance to that lethal patch of moorland in An American Werewolf in London.

The dip between Lintrose and Gask is seriously chewed up by large tyres going back and forth outside the plantation fence. There’s a padlocked gate in the fence at about NO 237342. I walked past it thinking I was going to find a fenced track through the trees a little further on, but that turned out to be no more than a double line of dilapidated fenceposts. Hopping over the gate is probably the best route through the trees, since the fence on the far side of the plantation is effectively non-existent.

A little sidetrack to the (surprisingly craggy on the south) summit of Gask Hill, and then along a vehicle track marked on the map which is at best a footpath on the ground. Then what I thought was going to be a bit of forest orienteering turned out to be a stroll through the wreckage of the plantation, which had been felled and (by the look of it) partially burned. New plantings farther down were just starting to peep up between the stumps of the old trees.

Then back along the road to Collace. It’s a narrow road, but it’s quiet and straight and traffic isn’t a worry.

Some clear day I’ll go back for another wander around Buttergask and Lintrose. I suspect there are better ways on and off than the ones I found, and I’ve no ambition to go back through the felled wasteland at the NE end of Gask.