Innerdownie (NN 966031, 610m)
Whitewisp Hill (NN 955013 643m)
Tarmangie Hill (NN 943013 645m)
Ben Shee (NN 952039, 516m)

16 kilometres
675 metres of ascent

On my previous visit to the Ochils, when I walked in to Ben Cleuch from the north, I looked down on Glen Sherup from Ben Shee and thought that another enjoyable circuit could be made along its flanking ridges.

So this time I parked in the car park at the point where the Glensherup Burn flows into the River Devon, and took the track that heads southwest towards the Glensherup Reservoir. This track curves around Black Hill and then doubles back on itself below the splendidly named Gled’s Nose. (Gled is an old Scots name for the red kite—perhaps, under the current blanket of forestry, the ridge resembles a kite’s beak.) In the picture below, Gled’s Nose is on the right, and the track has curved around far enough to have me looking back across Glen Devon, to the prominent lump of Ben Thrush, in the distance.

There’s a short-cut up on to the ridge of Innerdownie, which leaves the track just as it curves to the left on the side of Lamb Hill. It starts almost invisibly by diving into the trees at NN 971039, runs high along the steep north bank of Back Burn, and then pops out on to the open hillside via a stile at NN 974036. It’s a real shove through forestry in places, though, and if (like me) you are significantly allergic to pine needles you may well chose to walk a slightly greater distance, following the nice open route through the trees which is marked by a pile of stones to the right of the track at NN 974040.

The top end of this path emerges at a gate, from which I followed another path uphill towards the summit of Innerdownie, seen below in the distance above the conveniently placed bench.

From the summit of Innerdownie I could look across Glen Sherup towards my final hill of the day, Ben Shee, and also along the ridge towards my next two hills, at the head of the glen—Whitewisp Hill and Tarmangie Hill. Below, Whitewisp is the round green lump at left, while Tarmangie is the conical summit in the middle, grey with cleared forestry.

Angus Watson offers Gaelic origins for the names Innerdownie and Tarmangie, both of which feel a little strained, but suggests that Whitewisp refers to either a “wisp” of late-season snow retained by the hill, or a pale patch of pasture grass high on its southern side.

As I strolled along next to the wall (and later, fence) that runs along the ridge, I was accompanied by a succession of wheatears, which fluttered just far enough ahead to make photography both tempting and nearly impossible, but which kept me occupied until I reached the gate just below the summit of Whitewisp—here seen looking back towards Innerdownie:

From Whitewisp’s undistinguished cairn, I had a view along the broad moorland ridge towards Tarmangie, seen below in the middle distance with the green lumps of Ben Cleuch, The Law, and Andrew Gannel Hill looming to its left:

The walk to Tarmangie was enlivened by skylarks. It seemed like two or three were blasting out their songs at any given time:

Just short of the summit of Tarmangie, I jinked through a conveniently placed gate, from the south to the north of the boundary fence, so that I could visit the little outlying cairn that gives a good view down Glen Sherup:

The true summit is a short distance to the southwest, at a corner in the fence-line, which is equipped with a handy stile.

I stuck to the north side of the fence, and descended westwards towards the col below Cairnmorris Hill. On the way down, I passed a man ascending on the far side of the fence, who shouted something to me that I couldn’t hear because of the wind. I looked quizzical, walked a little closer, and he repeated himself: “It’s quite windy today!” Yes, it was.

In the col, water drains either north to Glensherup Burn or south into the marvellously named Burn of Sorrow, of which I’ll write more in another walk report. There’s a gate in the col, and a grassy track rising diagonally across the slope of Cairnmorris Hill beyond:

The track rises as the ridge-line of Cairnmorris descends through Scad Hill towards Mailer’s Knowe, so that I eventually emerged on to the track running downhill towards Ben Shee:

Ben Shee is the little lump in cloud shadow in the middle distance. So now I was retracing the outward route I’d followed on my previous circuit over Ben Cleuch.

A long, slow descent followed by a short, steep ascent got me to the summit of Ben Shee, and a view down on to the Lower Glendevon Reservoir:

I followed the path that leads across the top of Ben Shee, which took me on to the track that winds down The Shank towards Glen Devon. Where I was soon surrounded by a cloud of butterflies. Eventually I found a few that were prepared to sit still long enough to be photographed and identified:

These are Ringlets, and the origin of the name is pretty evident.

The track emerges at a gate on to the open hillside, and I turned immediately right to follow a path that descends steeply to the ribbon of tarmac servicing the Glensherup dam and its associated buildings.

Rather than walk down to the road (where I’d have to brave a few hundred metres of speeding traffic before reaching my car park), I turned up towards the reservoir.

From this point, I was able to stroll across the top of the dam, climb a short (but steep and heavily eroded) zig-zag path through the trees, and emerge on to the track below Black Hill which had been my outward route, about a kilometre from the car.

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: