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.

Kincaldrum Hill (NO 414436, 309m)
Unnamed Point 315 (NO 411431, c350m)
Finlarg Hill (NO 406419, 336m)

14 kilometres
370 metres of ascent

Of the whole Sidlaws ridge, there was one last little section above the 300m contour that I hadn’t visited. I’d looked north-east across Lumley Den to Finlarg Hill when I was on Ironside Hill, and wondered what the best way up would be. The approach from the Lumley Den side is short, but unfortunately would seem to involve walking up the driveway of the house there—the road is heavily fenced elsewhere. In fact, there was busy farmland all around the ridge, but also a patch of moorland on its west side that looked accessible from a road-end—that was my route in.

I turned off the A928 along the south side of the woods surrounding Glamis Den, and found a spot where I could get the car completely off the narrow road. (This transpired to be about the last such spot along my line of approach.) Someone was raising pheasants in Lera Wood, so the first part of my walk was enlivened by the juveniles milling around on the road, looking ridiculously off-balance without their long adult tails. There’s only one creature more stupid than an adult pheasant, and that’s a juvenile pheasant; and the only thing in the world more stupid than a juvenile pheasant is a group of juvenile pheasants (which the fifteenth-century Book of St Albans tells us is called a nye, by the way).

At one point I stopped walking when a couple of agitated young birds rocketed into the air out of the roadside ditch. I just stood there for a few seconds, in silence but for the quiet sound of pheasant nerves breaking all around me, and then another couple rocketed … and then three, and then another, and then another, and then two more, until the roadside vegetation had emptied itself into the air over the course of twenty seconds or so. The pheasant is not characterized by its sang-froid.

On, then, to the small group of houses and farm buildings the Ordnance Survey marks as Arniefoul, and which David Dorward unfairly characterizes as “remote and somewhat sinister looking” in his book The Sidlaw Hills. Dorward offers the alternative renderings Ardnafouil, Arnyfauld, Arnefont and Earnafoot taken from old maps, but none of those seems to suit the current residents, who have rather pointedly glued their own version over the official signage.

Beyond what I now must call Airneyfoul, a track weaves up the hillside through a little triangular plantation of trees. As I turned a blind corner in the middle of the forestry, I found myself confronted by a buzzard, flying down the path at head-height towards me. It’s difficult to know which of us was the more surprised, but the buzzard was certainly more quick-thinking—as I lurched to a halt and gawped, it did a quick, steep turn and disappeared silently up a firebreak.

Beyond the trees, I made a detour to take in a spring marked on the map as Ironharrow Well—how could I not spend some time visiting a place that sounded as if it should feature in Lord of the Rings?

There’s a rather dilapidated open-sided building next to the well, presumably serving as a shelter for ponies or cattle at some time, and the well itself is covered by an interesting little A-frame with a sliding bolt in its door. The usually reliable Dorward has no suggestions as to the origin of that striking name, Ironharrow.

From Ironharrow, it’s just a short stroll to the ridgeline, along an overgrown 4×4 track that crosses the hillside a short distance above the well. The boundary fence here is in poor repair, with sagging strands and broken staples, and it’s easy to slip through to the 309m trig point on the other side.

Quite what this summit is called is a bit of a puzzle. The OS places two names in its approximate vicinity—Hayston Hill and Kincaldrum Hill. I’m guessing that Hayston refers to the ridge that extends northwest towards Upper Hayston farm—although it doesn’t have a distinct summit, it looks very much like an independent hill from the road below. Kincaldrum labels the brow of the 291m lump north of the trig point, at NO 417442; Kincaldrum House lies below that, and a farm called East Cotton of Kincaldrum lies east of the trig. The whole area was part of the old Kincaldrum estate, which took its name from ceann caled druim, “head of the hard ridge”. On the basis of proximity alone, I’ve decided the trig is on Kincaldrum Hill.

I also walked over to the 291m point, to take a look at the view from the end of the ridge. A fence in the dip below the trig was easily stepped over.

Back to the trig point, then, and the common Sidlaws puzzle—which side of the boundary fence to walk on. I did my usual thing, and chose moorland over grazing land. This turned out to be a Bad Decision.

There’s a complicated little fence junction at NO 410432, near the top of an unnamed 315m bulge in the ridge, and I slipped through between the fence wires to find myself separated from the farmland to the east by a double fence, my side of it being electrified. I dithered for a moment, and then decided I’d follow it along the ridge and see what happened. At a point where the two-stranded electric fence spanned a dip in the terrain, I impulsively slipped under it—I was going to have to cross these fences at some point, and it made sense to get one out of the way while I had the chance. This was when I discovered that other fence now sported an electrified upper strand, too. So there I was, confined to a strip of moorland an arm-span wide, with electricity on each side.

I walked on, whistling Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue” under my breath and wondering if I was going to end up having to retrace my steps.

https://youtu.be/xCjR90ul4Fo

But just before the top of Finlarg Hill, the electric fence on my left turned away at right angles, presumably following a property line down the hill. A little beyond that, I was able to lift the rucksack over the fence and then slide between the second and third wires, to reach the less-than-impressive “cairn” on the summit.

To the south-west, I could look across to Ironside Hill and Craigowl beyond. There were a couple of nice gateposts here, without a gate—presumably I could have followed some vehicle tracks down across the sheep pasture to come out at the previously-noted house in Lumley Den.

Well, I didn’t fancy going back along Electric Avenue. On my way to Finlarg I’d seen gates in the farmland fences, and noted that all the livestock was well down the hill, away from where I’d be walking. So I slipped under the single strand of electric fence running down the east side of the ridge, and walked back across the fields. A stroll, three gates, and I was back out on the moorland at the NO 410432 fence junction. That was better!

I took a diagonal through the heather to link back to my original track, using the rusty roof of the building at Ironharrow Well as my aiming point. Stonechats scolded me from the bracken as I passed through, and below Airneyfoul a little flock of yellowhammers came to check me out from perches along the telephone wires.

Then there was some more alarm and despondency along Pheasant Alley, and I was back to the car.

Cnap Chaochan Aitinn (NJ 145099, 715m)

20 kilometres
700 metres of ascent

One of those Gaelic tongue-twisters, I’m afraid. The cnap bit (meaning “lump”) is pronounced “crap”. (No, really.) The whole thing is ˈkraʰp ˈxɯ:xən ˈaʰtʲɪn, “lump of the juniper stream”. (If the phonetics move you no farther forward, you can listen to a Gael pronouncing the name here.) Caochan Aitinn, the juniper stream itself, rises west of the hill and flows south into Glen Loin. I confess I didn’t make the journey to check it for juniper bushes.

When you stand in the car park (NJ 164176) at the starting point of the approach up Strath Avon, you’re a mere 375 metres below the summit of this little hill. Unfortunately, the estate road goes up and down quite a lot, adding an extra 150 metres of re-ascent, coming and going, so you end up climbing the thing almost as if from sea level.

It’s a fine route for striding, though—first along the well-surfaced estate road, and then on one of the many 4×4 tracks that serve the grouse moor. I actually could have got my Subaru to within a 100 metres of the cairn, if I’d been that way inclined and the estate had permitted. Turning might have been awkward, though.

A small detour up a muddy path took me to the local Queen Victoria’s Viewpoint, which is a pleasant enough view up Strath Avon, but not one of her best.

The hay meadows beside the river were marked with the interwoven trampled tracks of trespassing deer—one of which had lingered long enough for me to take a quick photo. I kept an eye on the river whenever I could, in the hope of a kingfisher, a dipper or even an otter—but no luck.

At Auchnahyle, a bridge took me across the river and up the hill towards the neat buildings of Wester Gaulrig, after which there was a descent to the ford on the Allt Bheithachan. I think the name of the stream references the birch (Gaelic beithe) trees that still fill the lower part of its valley, but I don’t know Gaelic well enough to be sure. The ford was calf-deep after heavy overnight rains, but it was easy enough to walk upstream a little to the confluence with the Caochan Deas (“south stream”), at which point I was able to jump across each burn in turn.

Beyond that, it was out on to the rolling grouse moor. It has to be said that the weird artificial duoculture of heather + grouse isn’t the most inspiring landscape to walk through, especially when it’s threaded with multiple access tracks. But I did get to see a lot of grouse, some of them even perched unsuspectingly on the grouse butts from which they will be slaughtered later in the season. The young grouse were just fledging—those lower on the hill were capable of flight, bursting up from the heather and scattering in all directions like a plump brown fireworks display. But higher up, the younger ones were still running around madly when surprised on the path, while their anxious parents shuttled back and forth, dragging a wing to create a distraction.

Near the summit, I heard a snipe drumming somewhere, and encountered a golden plover that wouldn’t quite sit still long enough for a good photo of its summer plumage. But mainly, it was wall-to-wall grouse.

The summit’s a good viewpoint for the tors of Beinn a’ Bhuird and Ben Avon to the south, and up towards the Hills of Cromdale, Ben Rinnes and Corryhabbie Hill in the north, though it’s a bit cluttered with some sort of strange wind- and sun-powered installation.

And then, I went back the way I came. More panicky grouse.