I’ve been intrigued by the lost community of Smithton since I climbed Smithton Hill this time last year, and then read David Dorward’s description of its namesake—“Former farm-toun W of Lundie village, deserted, abandoned and demolished within the past half-century.”

This was living memory for Dorward, writing in 2004, because he used to visit Smithton with his father when he was a child. Dorward senior was a keen apiarist, and would move his hives to Smithton in the summer months so that his bees could exploit the heather bloom in the hills. Dorward wrote:

[I]t was almost completely obliterated shortly after its last inhabited cottage was vacated in the 1960s.
The Smithton was a crofting community at the top of a track leading west from what is now the village hall in Lundie […] The track was passable for a car when I was young, but is now not used even by tractors, since the upper gate is locked and fenced against rabbits; the alternative access, from Lochindores, once the main access and still marked by a line of trees along the hillside, is now equally impassible. […] I was told that the old croft at Smithton was bulldozed by order of the laird; the result is that a once pleasant spot is now derelict.

In Angus or Forfarshire: The Land And People, Descriptive And Historical (1880), Alex J. Warden rendered the name Smistoun, and claimed it was so-called “because mists lie long upon it”. (But one wonders why it wouldn’t have been called plain old Mistoun, in that case.)

More likely, then, is Dorward’s derivation, from Smith’s toun—referring to either the personal name or the trade of blacksmith. Although he writes “[t]here is no known smiddy that could have occasioned the name”, the Ordnance Survey one-inch map (revised 1895) shows a cluster of buildings beside the track between Lundie and Smithton, labelled “Smithy”. Interestingly, by the 1900 survey for the six-inch and twenty-five-inch maps, those buildings have disappeared, and the label “Smithy” is attached to what is now Lundie village hall. (The previous smithy site is now occupied by what may well be the muddiest farmyard in the Scottish Lowlands.) So it seems reasonably likely that Smithton was the blacksmith’s toun, and we don’t need to invoke any of the ubiquitous Smith family.

Smithton sat on top of a low rise called Smithton Knowe, above a pair of springs called Horse Well and Craig Well, and despite the lack of access along the old tracks, I wanted to take a look at the site. I started from Tullybaccart and walked up through Pitcur Wood, then along the eastern shore of Ledcrieff Loch.

Behind the the fishery building at the head of the loch, a path strikes northeast to reach the edge of the forestry at a gate (NO 272372). From here, a path runs below Lundie Craigs, coming out at the place where I had a close encounter with a herd of Highland cattle during a previous walk. So I combined my trip to Smithton with reascents of Lundie Craigs, Ardgarth Hill and Smithton Hill, but I won’t bore you with the details.

It’s possible to get directly to the site of Smithton from the forestry gate, if you turn immediately right up the hillside, following a path that runs alongside the fence. At NO 274369, this brings you to a gate, which gives access to a tractor track that runs across the boggy ground below Smithton Loch, then skirts around the north side of Smithton Hill and descends directly towards Smithton Knowe. There’s a maze of new barbed wire lower down, which occasionally cuts across the original line of the track, but the way ahead is always obvious.

The Knowe itself is a lumpy diamond of open woodland, 300 metres long by 100 metres wide, floating 50 metres above the lower farmland to the east. Very little evidence of the old buildings remains, but there is still a deep, rectangular, turf-covered depression at the site of the Old Mill Dam—once there must have been a pool here, providing a head of water for the buildings a short distance below.

I could see no sign of the original terrace of cottages, or the larger building beyond, but on the south side I came across the low remains of terraced walls, and a couple of gateposts mysteriously left standing.

These gateposts cause me a little excitement, because I had seen them before—in Colin Gibson’s pen-and-ink drawing of Smithton in its heyday, reproduced in Dorward’s book. I won’t infringe Gibson’s copyright by reproducing the whole thing here, but I’ll just show you a relevant sliver:

You can see that the small trees Gibson recorded within the wall are now fully grown. Messing around with the National Library of Scotland’s georeferenced maps of the area, and adjusting the transparency to fade back and forth between the twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey sheet and aerial photographs, I could also make out that the group of trees at the east end of the Knowe trace the original line of the walls of the larger building in that position. They seem too large to have sprung up from seedlings rooted in the ruined wall—I think, like the ones in Gibson’s drawing, they must have been planted as a windbreak within the walls when Smithton was still thriving.

Of Horse Well I could find no sign, but Craig Well is still there—a little brick structure isolated in the middle of a broad, muddy seepage from the hillside.

And that’s it. As Dorward says, the old routes from Lundie and Lochindores are essentially impassable—overgrown slots between two boundary fences, showing occasional remnants of the old stone walling; a line of new electric fencing cuts across the south side of the Knowe.

It’s still a pleasant spot, although it has a melancholy feel when you know its history. I wonder why anyone took the trouble to bulldoze the buildings?

 

Balshando Hill (NO 278355, 266m)

6.7 kilometres
140 metres of ascent

So, Balshando Hill was a bit of a puzzle to me. It’s a bald-topped mound surrounded by a ring of forestry with the charming name of Naiad Wood—a Greek mythological reference that’s unusual hereabouts. And around Naiad Wood there’s a ring of farmland. But the Ordnance Survey 1:25000 map shows a path marching in from the east and then zigzagging and looping its way through the trees to the summit, like this:

So it looked like all I needed to do was park at the trout fishery at Ledyatt Loch, find the start of the marked path, and stroll up the hill. Well, the first problem was finding the start of the path, which involved pushing through a young grove of trees across boggy ground, with not much evidence that many people came that way. And when I got to the start of the path, I found out why not many people go that way—access to the open fields was blocked by a stonking great metal gate in a stonking great deer fence, padlocked from the Ledyatt Loch side (which seemed odd). So that was a non-starter.

A few weeks later, I was at Tullybaccart with the intention of taking a look at the various Lochindores lochs. Lochindores, according to David Dorward, is likely from Gaelic lochan dobhar, “little loch of the waters”—and that low triangle dotted with lochans is certainly a watery place. I hopped over a sagging bit of fence where the Kettins Burn leaves the boggy ground around the lochs and flows under the road towards the Glen of Pitcur. The two eastern lochans marked on the map showed no visible water at all—just walls of reeds surrounded by squelching tussocks.

The two western lochs were open water, dotted with mute swans and mallards. The westernmost loch sported a row of wildfowling hides along its shore, and a genuine quaking bog to its south—the sensation was like walking across a large, springy mattress or a very soft trampoline. A couple of fences cut across the area, but they’re easily crossed at convenient gates.

So, there I was, looking up at Balshando Hill from the west. Could I get up it from this side? After climbing Whinny Knowe (not much whin, thank goodness), I arrived at the big imposing deer fence that surrounds Naiad Wood.

Reasoning that there had to be a gate somewhere, and it was most likely to be on the east side where the alleged path marked on the map entered the forest, I followed the fence around to the north across empty grazing land, through a gate into another empty field, and duly arrived at a big metal gate, the twin of the padlocked one at Ledyatt Loch—but this one was simply closed with a loop of chain and a hook-and-eye fastening.

On the inside of the gate, I could see a large interpretive noticeboard—but the gate itself was so overgrown with vegetation I had to throw my full weight against it a couple of times to tug it open.

So it turns out Naiad Wood is a “Trafalgar Wood”—planted on the bicentenary of the naval Battle of Trafalgar, and named after the frigate HMS Naiad, which was present at the battle. The thirty-three Trafalgar Woods planted in the UK in 2005 all feature trees that were used in shipbuilding in the days of sail. Isn’t that a lovely idea?

But beyond the sign there is a tangled wilderness that gives the impression that the gate was closed in 2006 and never opened again. The long spiral up the hill is choked with chest-high grass. At one point I found a little wooden bench protruding from the undergrowth.

There had obviously been some intention for this to be a public place of enjoyment, but the locked gate at Ledyatt seems to have put paid to any chance of that. Which is a shame, because the bare summit gives pleasant views over the main ridge of the Sidlaws.

So, apart from my bog-trotting approach from the west, is there a sensible way to get to Balshando Hill? I walked over to the Ledyatt Loch trout fishery and found the locked gate that had stymied me previously. From the outside, I could read the CCTV warning sign next to it—so I’m guessing the gate is locked to stop poachers getting in, rather than walkers getting out.

Then I wandered around Ledyatt’s boundary fence, which is everywhere formidable, and blocks off a couple of gates and a stile that would at some time also have given access to the hill. Eventually I arrived at the gate of the field, which opens on to the access road to Ledyatt, just outside their gates at NO 283357. So that’s the only way in from the east, now—hop over the gate and walk around the high Ledyatt fences. But there isn’t a signpost anywhere suggesting that Naiad Wood even exists, let alone that it’s intended to be accessible.

On the way back, I went south around the woods, and took a couple of exploratory forays down to the fence that runs alongside Piperdam Burn—but it’s an unbroken barbed wire barrier, cutting off what might have been pleasant access from the woodlands at Little Ballo.

And so back to boggy Lochindores. To return to the car, I found a gate in the fence at the foot of the road embankment, at NO 268357. It’s invisible from the road, and allows you to pop up out of nowhere to startle motorists on the A923. Which is a bit of a mixed blessing, of course.

So that’s the story of Naiad Wood. Unlike my other Sidlaws explorations, this one makes me feel very slightly sad.

Another two-parter. These two outliers sit either side of the A923 just east of the point where it passes through the main ridge of the Sidlaws at Tullybaccart.

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Blacklaw Hill (NO 288344, 284m)

7.4 kilometres
200 metres of ascent

Well, this first one is a fine example of what happens if you just look at a map and choose what looks like the obvious route.

I parked at the trout fishery at Ledyatt Loch (a recently constructed body of water, absent from twentieth-century maps), and set off south through the trees. From the map, it looked as if a track and a firebreak would get me down to the Piperdam Burn. Google Earth showed a swirl of strangely pointless-looking tracks on the Blacklaw hill side just beyond the south-east corner of the plantation, so I thought I’d pretty easily find my way out at that corner and on to the hill.

Didn’t happen. The track going south petered out at a little turning point surrounded by fairly dense undergrowth—I made a couple of little sallies into the trees but soon got turned back. The transverse firebreak on the map at that point didn’t seem to exist. So I walked back to the line of the electricity pylons and used the open ground beneath them to take me to the east side of the plantation. There’s a little gate into a farmer’s field there, which probably provides a better line down to the burn, but I went steeply down through tussocky stuff and long grass at the edge of the plantation to wind up at a fence beside the burn.

The fence was easily climbed at its corner post, and then I had to cast about for a way across the steep-sided cut of the burn. One of the swirls of grassy vehicle track took me up to the  face of the hill, and then I went direttissima through very steep heather to reach the ridge. Turning east to head for the trig point, I found myself crossing what amounted to a dual carriageway of well-graded but very muddy tracks coming up the hill from the direction of Piperdam Loch—in fact, the whole summit area was defaced by a branching trackway. There was even a turning circle beside the trig point. Although there were some big 4×4 tyre tracks here and there, much of this racecourse looks like it is being used by quad bikes.

Predictably, the Ordnance Survey map provided no hint of any of this stuff. There’s a trace of it on Google Earth, but someone has evidently been very busy up there since 2009, when the Google photos were taken.

From the summit, the views down to the Tay estuary and Dundee are beautiful, so I stood for a while admiring the view, and then decided I’d follow a grassy track that descended eastwards towards Piperdam Loch, to see where it came out.

After turning very muddy on its way through the trees at the foot of the hill, the path deposited me, disorientatingly, on a golf course. I wandered up the side of the deserted fairways, picked my way across a little patch of rough ground between two houses, and stepped out on to pavement. Suddenly I was on Osprey Road, in the Golf and Leisure Resort of Piperdam—curiously reminiscent of the community of Stepford, Connecticut, in the film The Stepford Wives. Slightly muddy and dishevelled as I was, I was surprised I managed to get down to the end of the road without someone calling the police.

Then it was just a matter of walking back up the verge of the A923 to get back to my car. As my map shows, what started out as a simple there-and-back jaunt evolved into a pretty stupid zig-zag route. So I’m thinking of it more as an exploratory mission than a proper walk.

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West Mains Hill (NO 315376, 290m)
Bowhouse Hill (NO 306374, 265m)

4.8 kilometres
180 metres of ascent

For this one, I parked on the grass verge of the B945, on a little one-car flat patch at NO 321383, having spotted what I thought looked like a promising line on to a hill surrounded by farmland.

The route took me in through an open field gate and up the broad unploughed margin of the field. Above that, I stepped over a wooden fence and into some sort of main drag for cattle—they are presumably transferred back and forth between the hillside and lower grazing through this narrow slot between two patches of forestry. So the whole area was a churned mass of mud. Fortunately I was there after a frost that still hadn’t thawed in this shady spot, so I was able to levitate my way across what would have otherwise been a fairly slaistery experience.

Above the forestry, I was able to cross on to the open hillside near the corner of the fence at NO 315380, at a section where the top strand of barbed wire had been stapled low to create an easy step-over. Another strand of barbed wire just beyond that  had a long slack run to it at this point—again, an easy step-over.

Up the hill over tussocky stuff, and the curious pointed cairn was soon in view. It’s quite eye-catching from the road below, and I’d always been curious about its construction. I turns out to be close to four metres tall, cemented together, and crowned with a sort of acorn finial that presumably started life on top of a more conventional building. The Canmore archaeological website tells me that the whole summit area consists of a Bronze Age burial cairn 20m across, and suggests that the current pointy cairn was constructed using spoil from the 1897 excavation of the Bronze Age burial. I’m prepared to bet that fancy finial isn’t Bronze Age, though.

The summit afforded fine views of the central Sidlaws, as well as southwards towards the Tay estuary.

From there, I crossed the dip to reach Bowhouse Hill (that’s bow as in “taking a bow”, not “bow and arrow”). There’s a gate in the fence at NO 309375—it doesn’t open, but you can climb over alongside it. Bowhouse’s empty summit provides a nice vantage point from which to appreciate the steepness of Lundie Craigs.

So, back the way I came, except for a detour to take in the little unnamed 279m hump southwest of West Mains. On the way across to West Mains Hill proper, I crossed a muddy vehicle track coming up from the south, marked with boot prints. So it seems I’d managed to come up with another off-the-beaten track route up another hill.

Wildlife? The only wildlife of the whole day was the brown two-second blur of a wren, whizzing across my path as I dropped back down towards Cow Alley.

Round Law (NO 232337, 257m)
King’s Seat (NO 230330, 377m)
Buttergask Hill (NO 230340, 307m)

9 kilometres
330 metres ascent

This was a couple of hours of exploration, looking for a route to King’s Seat and Buttergask Hill that doesn’t involve traversing this section of ridge from either the Dunsinane end or the Gask end (a route I’ve previously described in one of my first posts about the Sidlaws).

As I wrote then, there’s a prominent vehicle track crossing between these two hills, but it peters out in brambles and barbed wire to the west, making it rather … um … challenging to get down to Legertlaw. The map makes access from Glenbran to the east look easy, and David Dorward describes that route in The Sidlaw Hills (which I’m going to keep recommending to you until you buy it). It’s a fine walk, but it does take you up someone’s driveway and then over their back fence. Writing in 2004, Dorward described the house at Whirly Law as “empty”, but I can only report that earlier this year there was paraphernalia laid out on the front grass that suggested the presence of a child and a horse. So I thought I’d take a look at the road up by Stockmuir, instead, to see if that blurred the boundaries between “right to roam” and “trespass” a little less.

I parked in a little roadside nook opposite the “tower” marked on the map at NO 249323. I’ve driven past this thing umpteen times, but never looked at it properly. It’s constructed of concrete, slightly ruined, and has the appearance of an agricultural silo with a decorative crenellation around its domed roof. Very odd. Canmore, my usual source of information about the mysterious buildings I encounter, has nothing to say about it.

Beyond the buildings at Stockmuir, the track marked on the map turns into an overgrown gap between fields—at one point I was pushing along a narrow trod through dead nettles and the tall woody stalks of some kind of umbilifer. It might not be the easiest walk in the spring and summer. The route can be circumvented a little by taking a parallel track along the edge of a field near the wind turbine.

Access to the open hillside comes at an electric rope fence. I’d never heard of electric rope until I did an internet search when I got home from this walk—I was a little bemused to encounter what looked exactly like a standard length of twine strung from electrical insulators. The line was dead as a doornail when I passed through, with a long stretch lying on the ground. But there’s a spring-and-hook gated section that makes it easily passable even if in good repair.

The track then transformed itself into a proper vehicle track again, running below King’s Seat, which took me up to a dilapidated gate at NO 231336. This is a good gate to know about, if you’re planning on linking King’s Seat with Buttergask, because it’s the only way between the two hills that doesn’t involve climbing over barbed wire.

I made a little side jaunt up Round Law, which gives nice views down Glenbran. On the east slope of the hill, beneath a lone tree, there’s an oddly shaped cast-iron memorial marker for one Iain Mallet of Glenbran. It’s a lovely spot—requiescat in pace, as Dorward wrote after visiting it.

From Round Law, I picked my way up through the heather on King’s Seat, along stream beds and deer tracks. For a hallucinatory moment I crested a rise to be confronted by what looked like two yellow spheres bouncing gently up and down in the middle distance. A long moment of incredulous staring revealed that these were the rumps of two deer, retreating at my approach, and otherwise perfectly camouflaged against the autumnal heather.

Back to the gate, then, and up an easy-angled track on to the round summit of Buttergask Hill. The name “Buttergask” always seems to have an English feel to it, to me, as if it has been imported from the Lakes or the Yorkshire Moors, but it’s Gaelic. Dorward derives  it from bothar, “road”, and gasg, “wedge of high ground”—a ridgeway, in other words, and if you follow the ridge beyond Buttergask you’ll eventually arrive fairly easily at Gask Hill.

Back at the gate again, I noticed a rather purposeful-looking slot track heading off downhill on the Round Law side of the fence (that is, the other side from the vehicle track I’d followed up). I thought I’d follow it down to the forestry, to see if it offered an alternative route back to the car. But it was full of hoofprints and round animal droppings, and soon faded out on the open hill above the forest fence. Presumably deer habitually follow the same line through the  narrow gap between the slopes of Round Law and the boundary fence.

So it was back the way I came. Not a perfect direct route to these hills, but I think the best available.

Creach Bheinn (NN 023422, 810m)

13 kilometres
980 metres of ascent

The last time I climbed Creach Bheinn, it was in a sleet-storm that I imagined was going to pass over to reveal the fabled westward view from the summit. Instead, it clamped down and increased in intensity. When I finally dropped below the clouds on the way down and got a view of Loch Creran below, I heaved a sigh, turned off my GPS receiver and dropped it into the outside pocket of my cagoule. There was a splashing sound. I reached into the pocket, and found my GPS unit lying in two inches of chilly rainwater. This did it precisely as little good as you might imagine.

Anyway, this time I woke to see blue sky over the hills of Morvern to the west, and decided that the summit mists lingering to the east in Lorn would soon clear, revealing the fabled view westward … You already know where this is going, don’t you?

There’s a little nook of a layby at the head of Loch Creran, just north of the estate buildings of Druimavuic (I presume from druim a’ bhuic, “ridge of the buck”). This gives easy access to a gate at the start of the vehicle track that runs up the north side of the Allt Buidhe between Ben Sgulaird and Creach Bheinn.

Two guys I met on the track peeled off almost immediately to cross the Allt Buidhe low down, aiming to get up Creach Bheinn via its northwest extension, Meall nan Caorach (“hill of the sheep”—no sheep to be seen). There had been heavy rain overnight and the river was a white torrent, so I kept taking anxious backward glances until I saw them think better of it and head back to the track.

It’s a nice track, with fine views over Loch Creran to the Firth of Lorn and the hills of Morvern. Overhead, the cloud was still swirling around the crags of Creach Bheinn, but it seemed to be lifting.

If you follow the track all the way to the col, you can make a ridge walk over Creag na Cathaig (“crag of the snowdrift”), but instead I cut off the path at NN 035441 and contoured around the soggy head of Coire Buidhe until I could climb up into the notch between Creag na Cathaig and the bulk of Creach Bheinn. Deer watched me from the ridge as I ascended, the stag keeping station on the skyline until all his hinds were safely out of sight on the far side.

Mist was blowing through the col when I got there, but the sun was making an occasional watery appearance, too. Above was the craggy stuff that protects Creach Bheinn’s lumpy summit ridge—not hard to deal with in good visibility, but potentially dangerous during a descent in mist on wet grass. Last time, in grim visibility and with water pouring down the hillside beneath my feet, I’d baled off the summit northwestwards to avoid getting involved in a steep, slippery and craggy descent.

I pressed on up a stream-bed—after a steep little section to begin with, it lay back into a nice easy channel up the hillside. It also took me into cloud.

And then a wall of sleet blew through, causing a scramble to get into waterproofs, and a wave of despondency—this was too much like last time. But the sleet stopped just as soon as I had finished donning the waterproofs (don’t you just hate it when that happens?) and then the cloud opened in a long tunnel to afford a glimpse of Beinn Eunaich across Loch Etive. Encouraging.

By the time I got up to the 804m northeast top (NN 030429) of Creach Bheinn, Ben Sgulaird was emerging from the mist into dappled sunlight.

I trotted across to a rocky outcrop slightly to the west, and was rewarded with a fine view along the length of Strath Appin to the unmistakable shape of Castle Stalker, perched on its little island.

But to the southwest there was still a wall of cloud—orographic stuff being pushed in from the Atlantic on the prevailing wind. Creach Bheinn’s trig point and cairn sat steadfastly in this clag and, though I hung about for half an hour, there was no sign of it thinning out—so Creach Bheinn, the “hill of plunder”, had robbed me of its famous view for a second time.

Ah well. I retraced my steps to the Coire Buidhe track, which was still enjoying splendid autumnal vistas.

On the way down, I dropped off the main track, passing a ruined pair of enclosures, to take a look at the little dam on the river. I wondered if it might afford a safe way across the river when it was in spate. It certainly spans the river, but the central concrete is barely a boot wide, and the drop into the outflow pool is more than a little disconcerting. I wouldn’t try it, myself.

And so back to the car, where it started to rain just as I opened the boot. (Don’t you just love it when you beat the rain back to the car?)

Scotston Hill (NO 346400, 373m)
Balkello Hill (NO 361394, 397m)

9.5 kilometres
370 metres of ascent

This little circuit was an effort to connect together various paths I’d used in three previous, longer walks in this area.

I parked at the Balkello Community Woodland and headed northwest, to pick up a path that runs westwards below Auchterhouse Hill. Just after the line of electricity pylons turns north, a vehicle track heads uphill between Auchterhouse Hill and Scotston Hill.

I followed this almost to its highest point, and then cut off westwards through the heather towards Scotston. There are some small lochs marked on the map here, but they’re little more than boggy ground.

A deer track took me to the top of Scotston, which sits back a little off the main curve of the ridge, affording good views towards Kinpurney Hill and Craigowl, as well as south to the Firth of Tay and Fife.

There’s a stonking great vehicle track, churned by tractor tyres, crossing Scotston just west of its gently rounded summit.

I was pretty sure this would take me north to the unnamed, forested lump between Henderston Hill and Auchterhouse Hill, and it did. A path, not marked on the map, runs east-west alongside the trees here, connecting at its east end (NO 352404) to a vehicle track that rises out of Denoon Glen and crosses the Sidlaws west of Auchterhouse Hill, turning into the track I’d climbed at the start of this walk.

But before I got as far as this thoroughfare, I happened upon a rather elaborate brushwood shelter tucked into the trees alongside the path—it even had a little low windbreak to shelter a log fire (now dead and cold) outside its entrance. I gave a hoot and a holler, but no-one was home. A fair bit of time has been spent building it, and I didn’t want to pry inside—I wonder what it’s used for?

On, then, to the head of the Denoon Glen—a remote-feeling patch of woodland behind Auchterhouse Hill, once the haunt of smugglers, which had been a riot of primroses the last time I passed through.

Then up and across to the head of Glen Ogilvie, below Craigowl, encountering a rather puzzling notice on the way—warning German walkers not to bother cows with calves. It’s a fairly out-of-the-way spot, and I found myself wondering why someone had travelled a few miles over rough ground specifically to post a warning to Germans about cows. Are Germans particularly known for their cow-bothering predilections? It’s certainly not on my extensive list of national stereotypes.

I dropped down to a boundary fence and path that run up to the pass between Craigowl and Balkello Hill. The marked path is intermittent, and not much more than a trod in the long grass between fence and heather, but it was easy enough going.

At the pass, I decided to avoid the muddy return via Linn of Balluderon, and so turned right up Balkello Hill. Although I’ve looked at the Syd Scroggie memorial cairn on the summit several times, I had never actually read the text before. The memorial uses Balkello’s “other name”, Balluderon Hill. This is part of the old problem, alluded to in previous posts, of Sidlaw hill-slopes taking their names from the farms below, so that sometimes a summit ends up associated with multiple names. South of Balkello Hill are the farms of Balkello, Old Balkello and North Balkello. Just a little farther east are North Balluderon and South Balluderon, and the Ordnance Survey attaches the name of Balluderon Hill to  the slope directly above those farms, which is actually the western shoulder of Craigowl.

The memorial inscription features a fine, ringing Scots phrase, a tribute both to a blind hillwalker and to the companions who helped him in his wanderings, over the years:

He gae’d his ain gait a’ his life but whiles wi’ ithers’ een

(He went his own way all his life, but sometimes with the eyes of others.)

Down through Windy Gates, then, and a zig-zag below the steep face of Balkello, which turned up the only notable wildlife encounters of the day—a flock of long-tailed tits blowing through, looking like animated lollipops with their round bodies and long tails; and then a deer crashed away through the broom, unseen except for the agitated vegetation in its wake.

What was remarkable about this little wander was that I didn’t see a single person all morning. Admittedly, it was a mid-week day in October, but the weather was fine and I was only a few miles from the city. If the same route was in the Lake District, it would be waymarked and guidebooked and chock-full of serious-faced ramblers, madly over-dressed for the prevailing weather conditions.

So that’s all good.

Kinpurney Hill (345m, NO 322417)
Back Drum (287m, NO 336430)
Castleward (273m, NO 343438)

14 kilometres
500 metres of ascent (with detours)

Two glens penetrate the north side of the Sidlaw Hills—Glen Ogilvie and the Denoon Glen. Between them, they create three ridges that point northwards from the central bulk of the Sidlaws. I’ve walked two of those ridges so far—on the east side of Glen Ogilvie, from Broom Hill to Ironside Hill; and between Ogilvie and Denoon, from Berry Hillock to Ark Hill. So this outing was to walk the last of the ridges, the one west of Denoon Glen.

I started with an old friend, Kinpurney Hill above Newtyle. I parked in Newtyle, walked a short distance along the road to the farm at Denend, and then up the Newtyle Path Network track that follows the Denend Burn through the trees and then out on to the open hillside.

There’s a nice little bench beside the path, half-way up the hill, which offers a chance to contemplate the Strathmore scenery, as well as giving the first glimpse, during the climb, of the eighteenth-century observatory-cum-folly on the summit, which I described when I posted about my last visit to the top of this hill.

Two things had changed since my last visit here, in January—the gate had fallen off the mysterious high-security fence around the view indicator, and the eccentric blue trig point had been repainted in a more regulation white. The view indicator was still unusable, though—not because it was coated in ice, this time, but because the Grampian hills to the north were shrouded in rather threatening dark cloud.

I carried on over Kinpurney, and as I descended to the east I had a good look at the ridge running out to Castleward. There seemed to be a vehicle track running around the north shoulder of Henderston Hill which looked like it would eventually bring me out on to the ridge. I quite like following vehicle tracks in the Sidlaws, because they often bring me to gates in otherwise awkward fence-lines. So I dropped down to a remembered pair of stiles at NO 326417, which take you over the barbed-wire-and-electric-fence combo that otherwise separates Kinpurney from Henderston. From there, I struck off to the left looking for my “vehicle track”—this turned out to be the line of a very old wall, marked as a boundary on the OS 1:25,000 map, but actually reduced to a foot-high ridge that had been colonized by heather, turning it into a sort of long, thin rockery.

It was rather tussocky walking, so I soon struck off uphill through open trees to where I could see a fence running along the ridge-line. This whole area is marked, rather vaguely, by the Ordnance Survey as Nevay Park Hill. Like many minor hill names in the Sidlaws, it seems to apply more to a slope than a summit—named by people looking up from the glen rather than walking the ridgeline, presumably. It takes its name from the old parish of Nevay, at the foot of the slope to the northwest. Below me at this point was the ruined Nevay Church with Kirkton of Nevay nearby, a North Nevay, East Nevay, West Nevay and Gateside of Nevay, as well as a mansion at Nevay Park which gives its name to the hillside. It’s an ancient name, coming to us from Gaelic neimhidh, which is related to the old Gaulish nemeton—the word for a sacred place among pre-Christian Celts.

I followed the ridge fence until I got to a gate at NO 336425. On my side of the fence (the west side) there was some fairly dense forest up ahead; on the other side there was a farm track and a succession of gates, which looked like easier going.  So I climbed over the gate.

That worked out well. The track took me easily out on to the hillside of Back Drum. Drum is a Scots word, from Gaelic druim, meaning “ridge”—so Back Drum is the “back ridge” for the farms in the Denoon Glen, which occupy the ground between the river and the ridge.

The highest point on Back Drum is the 287m point at NO 336430, which I’ve chosen to label Back Drum after its associated ridge, rather than Nevay Park Hill after its western slopes. I passed through an open gate and then climbed up towards it, to find myself cut off from the highest point by about three horizontal metres, one vertical metre, and two aggressively prohibitive fences—one electric and one barbed wire. I temporarily invoked Hewitt‘s Pragmatic Rule of Hillwalking, which is that one may be deemed to have climbed to the top of a hill if one has walked close enough to the highest point to look down on it. (While this deals with the obvious problem of a flat summit littered with rocky outcrops of approximately equal height, I did have an uneasy sense that I might be violating the spirit of the rule in this instance.)

Anyway, I moved on along the ridge of Back Drum, which is a fine viewpoint, suspended between the open farmland of the Strath and the enclosed domesticity of the Denoon Glen. On the other side of the summit fence, a herd of bemused cattle watched me pass by.

Castleward (emphasis on the final syllable) involves another Scots word—ward, meaning “meadow”. (In Dundee, we have a Ward Road that runs straight into another street called Meadowside, both of them on the site of long-vanished grazing land.) So Castleward is the “castle meadow”. According to David Dorward, it was once the site of Denoon Castle, which must have had a commanding view out over the approach to Denoon Glen. The Ordnance Survey attaches two other names to the slopes of this hill—East Nevay Hill and Balkeerie Hill, both relating to farms of the same name lying to the northwest. Another label, Ingliston Hill, seems to apply to the low, gentle 190m shoulder that extends north from Castleward towards Ingliston Farm, crowned by Ingliston Wood.

There’s no evidence of a castle now. I wandered around the 271m top, admiring the views, and then went across to the slightly higher summit at 273m. This point is enclose on three sides by various kinds of wall and fencing, and is probably only sensibly accessible via a track that comes up from Easter Denoon farm, livestock management permitting. I cast around for a while (you can make out my exploratory wanderings on the map above) and then hopped over a wall, slipped under an electric fence, and walked across rough grazing land to the summit. The view is essentially the same as the one from the easily accessible 271m top.

What my wanderings did turn up, though, was something of a mystery. Lying flat on the ground, tucked into the corner of a field at NO 342436, essentially invisible until you step on it, is an engraved stone slab, about half a metre high, marked with the initials GI inside the outline of a shield, and the date 1685. It’s easily legible, so I doubt it has lain in that exposed position for four hundred years—the location makes it look like it has been picked up and dumped out of the way by a farmer at some time. I’m wishing now I’d tried to turn it over to see what was on the other side, since it has the feel of a boundary marker of some kind. *

Back the way I came, then, with the sun coming out and the birds starting to sing. I made a little exploratory foray to the forestry fence at NO 337428, and found it lying on the ground for a fair part of its length. So it was easy to step over, push through the deep gloom of the close-planted trees, and then climb steeply up tussocky grass on to the true summit of Back Drum, thereby assuaging my earlier guilt about having abused Hewitt’s Rule, and creating the knotted tangle you can see in my GPS track on the map.

When I got back to my gate at NO 336425, I decided to stay on the east side of the fence, to see where the farm track I was following came out. This was a bad idea, since it “came out” at a sturdy corner in the forestry fencing at NO 334420. A little to the left, there was a step-over that took me into a gap between another forestry fence and a run of electric fencing, heading back towards Kinpurney. This would normally have been a dispiriting option, but I realized that I knew where these two fences were heading. They were running along the north side of Henderston Hill, and they had to connect to the neat gate-and-stile combination I’d encountered at the bottom of a firebreak on a previous outing.

And so it turned out—a couple of hundred metres of slightly heathery walking, trapped between the two fence-lines, and then I was over the stile and out on the hillside, connecting to my outward route from Kinpurney.

So: I think this one needs an executive summary:
1) There’s a nice stroll to Castleward along the Back Drum ridge, if you stay west initially, cross the ridgeline at the NO 336425 gate, and then follow the track on the east side of the fence.
2) If you’re so inclined, you can access the true summit of Back Drum through a gap in the forestry fence at NO 337428, at least until someone repairs it.
3) The true summit of Castleward is cordoned off from the rest of the ridge by fences and walls, and really only sensibly accessible from the glen below.

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* Update: A nice lady from the McManus Museum just got back to about my mystery stone, which does turn out to be a boundary marker—and one that already has its own entry on the Canmore archeology site. The “GI” of the inscription probably refers to a George Innes, who owned the farm at Easter Denoon in the late 17th century.

Another Sidlaws day of two halves—the morning at the west end of the ridge, the afternoon at the east end.

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Bandirran Hill (NO 203314, 275m)

3 kilometres
130 metres of ascent

Bandirran is as far west as you can go on the Sidlaws ridge and stay above 250m altitude. To stay high and go farther to the west, you need to cross the B953 and climb into the Braes of the Carse, which run from Abernyte to Perth. The Sidlaws and the Braes overlap for three or four kilometres, so as you drive along the B953 from Abernyte to the village of Bandirran you have the eastern end of the Braes to your south, and the western end of the Sidlaws to your north.

I climbed Bandirran from its north side—the little village of Kirkton of Collace. I parked at the school there, and walked a short distance up the road to the Kirkton farm. There’s a signpost there, pointing out the path that runs over the shoulder of Bandirran Hill to Bandirran on the B953. It’s called the School Road. I wondered if any of the kids in the playground at the school had actually walked over the School Road to get there, or if they’d all been loaded into SUVs and driven three miles around by road instead. (When my father was growing up in New Zealand in the 1920s, he used to swim across a river to get to school, his books tied on top of his head. I imagine that would trigger newspaper headlines and an immediate Social Work intervention if it happened today.)

The School Road is marked on my OS 1:50,000 map but not on the 1:25,000. I soon found out why. It starts as a farm track, but terminates at a phone mast and an overgrown wooden bench halfway up the hill. From there it is simply the border between two fields, and then a vague slot in the long grass at the top of the hill. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t see the regular patter of tiny feet these days.

There’s a little fenced area of tree plantation up there, and I followed the fence as the most direct route to the trig point. But the space beside the fence is being colonized by spiky gorse bushes, and it’ll be impassible in a few years. A better route (the way I came down) would be to stay low until open grass appears to the left, which provides much easier access. The trig point is almost completely overgrown—jaggy gorse to the south, gentler broom to the north, so I looped around to come at it from the north side.

Then I wandered over to take a look down at Collace Quarry, which is rapidly removing the side of Dunsinane Hill. Some day Macbeth’s apocryphal castle (actually the remains of an Iron-Age fort) will be quarried away entirely.

I took a loopy route back—exploring the long grass for butterflies, and briefly pursuing a pair of buzzards who were flitting around the treetops.

At the edge of the trees, I noticed an interesting little structure. Someone had taken the plastic seats out of a couple of office chairs and bolted them to a sort of metal tower arrangement at the edge of the trees. The seats even have a couple of holes drilled in them, to let rainwater drain away. It looks like some kind of fire lookout, except it’s turned away from most of the surrounding trees, and aimed out towards the view over Strathmore instead.

Then back down the way I came, and off to Forfar for a bite to eat.

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Fothringham Hill (NO 465456, 254m)
Hill of Lour (NO 472462,  232m)

10 kilometres
390 metres of ascent
(including various detours!)

Two hills belonging to two estates. The Fothringhams were originally the Fotheringhays. They arrived in Scotland in the thirteenth century, according to David Dorward, and Fothringham Hill House, on the south side of the hill, is the current family mansion. The Lour mansion is east of the two hills, the centre of a large estate belonging to the descendants of Sir John Carnegie, who bought the land in 1643. Those dates indicate how old the land use is on these hills, and I would find evidence of that later in the day.

Fothringham Hill is as far east as you can go in the Sidlaws and get above the 250m contour, so it was a suitable bookend to the morning’s trip up Bandirran.

I parked in the car park next to Inverarity church, and walked around almost as far as Fothringham Home Farm. A very pleasant track strikes north from there, through a little strip of woodland. My first destination was a location intriguingly labelled on the map as “The Henroost”. The ScotlandsPlaces database has a description dating from around 1860 which describes this as, “A small ornamental plantation with walks and seats on the home farm of Fotheringham,” and the 1865 Ordnance Survey six-inch map does show a little maze of paths in this area. Now it seems to be just a weed-choked wasteland, sadly.

I retraced my steps to the main path up the hill, and soon came across an interesting little folly, not marked on current maps, but which the OS described as a “Summer Ho.” in 1865. It sits on a little patch of grass at NO 465450, and looks out to the south. There a semicircular bench inside, and the date “1803” on the gable.

A little farther up the hill from the summer-house, I’d noticed that Google Earth showed a broad track through the trees, striking straight up towards the radio aerial on top of the hill, along a line where the OS 1:25,000 map was showing no more than a fence. And so it proved to be—it was a service road for the aerial, which took me almost straight to the top of the hill.

The top of the hill proved to be a surprise. Google Earth and the current OS map have it covered in forestry, and I’d expected to follow a firebreak from the aerial to the true summit. But some time in the last five years, pretty much everything above the 245m contour has been felled, leaving only a few dead trees standing, as if the hill had hosted its own little Tunguska event.

So I was able to wander over to look at the moss-covered trig point, which sits a little lower than the summit, and then across logging debris to the summit itself, which turned out to be served by the same forestry road I’d been following at the summer-house.

From here I had another little project in mind, which was to dive down along a clear fence-line marked on the map, to see if I could reach “Meathie Church (remains of)” on the north side of the hill. Things started off well enough, with only a little bracken and a few fallen trees to negotiate, and then I was into a lovely little grassy space between a field wall and a forestry fence, with views over the Wester Meathie farmland. But this soon turned into a ditch choked with bushes, and I eventually threw up my hands in surrender and turned back up the hill—Meathie Church is for another day and a different approach.

Back on the summit, I had another bit of forestry-diving in mind. At NO 468457, the map shows a triple line of fences descending the hill through the trees, with what looked like a clear space between them. It’s requires a bit of peering around to actually find the starting point, but once discovered this proved to be a quadruple boundary, with pretty easy walking down its midline—on my left I had a new forest fence and an old wall. On my right I had a very old wall (no more than a foot-high ridge of moss), and a slightly rickety forest fence. I was on the centuries-old boundary between the Fothringham and Lour estates. At NO 468458 another ancient wall headed off northeastwards, accompanied by an open grassy strip on its downhill side. This easy walking took me past a little fire-watchers’ tower, and then to a gate and the open cow-pasture of Hill of Lour.

Lour (pronounce it “loor”) is crowned by an object the OS calls a “Temple”. It has a central crenellated tower and an imposing circular boundary wall with a padlocked iron gate. It’s marked on the 1865 map of the area, which indicates that the area inside the wall contained trees at that time. Nowadays there’s a little precinct on the west side, containing graves of the Carnegy family dating from the middle of last century. All around are airy views of Strathmore—as last resting places go, it takes some beating.

I retraced my steps for a while, and then struck up a grassy firebreak that took be directly towards the  “Wireless Station” marked on the map at NO 470456. This proved to be a dilapidated brick structure next to the stump of a radio mast.

From there, I strode back down the forestry road to the foot of the hill, and decided to vary my route back to the car by walking out to the road past the farm at South Bottymyre (which hosts the Angus Riding for the Disabled centre).  Bottymyre was Bottomire on the Ordnance Survey’s 1865 map, and then Bottomyre in 1927—there’s apparently beeen a strange, creeping enthusiasm for the letter y.

The Bottymyre route is not entirely welcoming—I found this sign on my way out.

The “shooting” warning is permanently fixed in place, which seems both implausible and dangerous on a track with active forestry at its top end. Given that the southern approach I used has no posted warnings of any kind, it’s probably a less contentious route up the hill.

Martins and swallows were feeding over the fields as I walked back to the car. Some posed for a photograph.

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* Since I took the photograph of Bandirran Hill from the School Road in 2016, much has changed. The western shoulder of the hill was clear-felled in the summer of 2018, leaving it with a distinctly lopsided appearance.

Lorns Hill (NO 443399, 243m)
Dodd Hill (NO 452396, 255m)
Carrot Hill (NO 458401, 259m)
Labothie Hill (NO 472416, 232m)

10 kilometres
190 metres of ascent

This low ridge is an outlier of the main Sidlaws range, and pretty much its eastern last gasp. It stands out on Google Earth as a little curved strip of moorland poking into the farmland east of the A90. I parked at the Carrot Hill viewpoint (NO 463408). When I was a child, Carrot Hill was an exotic, almost mythical place. My father would point it out as we drove past, and promise that some day we would climb it. I actually couldn’t see it, because I was looking for something more pointy, like … well, like a carrot, I suppose. The derivation of the name seems to be uncertain, and it is probably, like so many hills in the area, named after the farm that lies below it, rather than having earned a name for itself.

There’s a nice viewpoint indicator near the car park, identifying hills in the Sidlaws and the Angus glens beyond. There’s a bare 45m of ascent to the trig point on Carrot Hill, along a good path that runs alongside ugly felled woodland, and which seems to be a favourite place for dog-walkers to let their pets run free. (I have the footprints of a black labrador on my shoulders to prove it.) The summit also boasts a massive shelter cairn that wouldn’t be out of place above 1000m.

Beyond Carrot Hill, I began to shake off the dog walkers. There’s a broad track along the ridge to Dodd Hill (above Dodd Farm), with fine views over farmland all around, bordered by the Grampians to the north and the Tay estuary to the south. Dodd Hill has an eccentric conical cairn, which might have been better suited to Carrot.

Beyond Dodd, I was into the wilds—no path, no dogs. The heather was knee-deep in places, and stepping over a couple of low fences seemed like a brief respite from the otherwise tough going. A deer bounded up the hill ahead of me, and a flock of wheatears settled briefly around me as I stood on Lorns’ empty, rounded summit. This hill gives the best impression of having a connection to the main Sidlaws ridge, looking across the A90 at Petterden towards Lumley Den, flanked by hills I’ve climbed before: Ironside and Finlarg.

Back the way I came, then, and across the car park and the road to look for access to Labothie Hill. (It’s above Labothie Farm—you see how this works?) Although there’s a track marked on the Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 map, it’s no more than a pair of deep ruts left by some forestry vehicle, now heavily overgrown with thistles and gorse. In a few years it will be unfindable and impassable*. But it takes you to a gate that lets out on to a pretty area of tree-dotted grassland, Bractullo Muir (breac tulach, “speckled hillock”, which pretty much sums up the appearance).

There were martins and swallows here, and more wheatears, and then a very large pair of wings and a forked tail overhead—a red kite! I had no idea that they’d made it this far east from their reintroduction site near Stirling. A red kite! I stood and smiled up at it, and it deigned to hang around overhead for a while, presumably accepting my admiration as no more than its due.

The ridge of Labothie Hill is an odd place, littered with the pits and mounds of prehistoric burial cairns (you can look through a list of them, starting from the entry for Hatton Cairn, on the Canmore website), punctuated by the stumps of sizeable felled trees.

I set off towards the east end of the ridge to take a look at another burial cairn there. But as I approached, I began to make out something large and concrete that wasn’t on my map. At first I thought it would be either the base of some decommissioned radio mast, or a water tank serving the buildings at the foot of the hill. But it wasn’t.

Canmore has this to say about it:

Pillbox (20th Century)
NO 47776 41885
A possible type 27 pillbox situated about 25m W of the remains of a prehistoric cairn.

A pillbox. A World War II anti-invasion defence, of the kind to be found mouldering at the back of various beaches around Britain. But this one is on top of a hill in rural Angus. That seemed odd.

There were a couple of sheep inside, and the floor was an inch-deep mire of mud and sheep droppings. Since I didn’t fancy being in a filthy enclosed space with two panicky horned animals, I decided not to go inside. But through the windows I could see a shaft of daylight in the middle of the dark internal space. So I climbed on to the roof (as you do under these circumstances) and peered down into a central well that contained what I thought was the mounting for a flagpole, but which turns out to be for a light antiaircraft gun.

Now that makes more sense than the “coastal defence” scenario I’d been running with. Further investigation suggests this was part of the antiaircraft defence that surrounded the World War II radar station at RAF Douglas Wood, the remains of which still lie just downhill from my pillbox.

And then I headed back to the car, arriving just as the rain started. An unexpected red kite, a very unexpected military installation, and a bit of snatched clear weather. What could be more satisfying?

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* When access to Labothie Hill becomes impossible from the car park at Carrot Hill, it will still be easily accessible via the farm track that runs up from the B978, past the old RAF Douglas Wood buildings (which are now used by the Scouts). It’s a very dull and muddy walk up, unfortunately.