This is the second in my planned series of posts dealing with the revision history of the three “classic” tables of Scottish hills—the Munros, Donalds and Corbetts, which I introduced in an earlier post. I also introduced the idea of topographic prominence, and a way of charting these hill tables in two dimensions by plotting height against prominence. If any of this is strange to you, I refer you back to the original post via my link above, for a quick tutorial.

Last time, I dealt with the Corbetts (hills between 2500 and 3000 feet in height, with a prominence of at least 500 feet), and pointed out a number of ways in which new topographic data can lead to a hill either being deleted from, or added to, a set of tables.

This time, it’s the turn of the Donalds, lowland hills higher than 2000 feet. In contrast to Corbett’s tables, which have pretty simple and strictly numerical entry criteria, Donald’s tables feature a combination of rather more complicated topographic criteria with some value judgements, sorting the tabulated summits into two major categories—“Tops” and “Hills”:

“Tops”—All elevations with a drop of 100 feet on all sides and elevations of sufficient topographic merit with a drop of between 100 feet and 50 feet on all sides.
“Hills”—Groupings of “tops” into “hills” except where inapplicable on topographical grounds, is on the basis that “tops” are not more than 17 units from the main top of the “hill” to which they belong, where a unit is either ¹/₁₂ mile measured along the connecting ridge or one 50-feet contour between the lower “top” and its connecting col.

(Donald’s “drop on all sides” is the equivalent of modern “prominence”, the term I use in my charts below.) Donald’s rules seeks to reflect something about the shape of the landscape—allowing a single high summit, the “hill”, to dominate a fairly tight cluster of lower “tops”. The criteria given above mean that the summit of a “top” can’t be more than 1⅓ miles (2.15 km) from its parent “hill”.

In modern discussions of these tables, the “hills” have come to be referred to as “Donalds”, while the “tops” are called “Donald Tops”. The tables, as originally published, contained 86 Donalds and 47 Donald Tops. Donald also listed five English hills, close to the Scottish border, which fulfilled his criteria, but he did not assign them numerical entries in the tables. And, in an appendix, he added 15 summits:

[…] not meriting inclusion as tops, but all enclosed by an isolated 2,000-feet contour. These have been included in order that the table may be a complete record of every separate area of ground reaching the 2,000-feet level.

These locations have sometimes been referred to as “Minor Tops”, and that marginal category has actually been the main focus for such revisions as have been made, the remainder of Donald’s tabulation being surprisingly resistant to major change. Indeed, the Donalds remained entirely unrevised for 45 years, through multiple editions of Munro’s Tables.

Then, in the editions of 1981 and 1984, the availability of better mapping led to a considerable expansion to the list of Minor Tops, from 15 to 28—this despite the promotion of three Minor Tops (Keoch Rig, Conscleuch Head, and the south-west top of Windlestraw Law) to full Top status. These three were presumably selected on the basis of “sufficient topographic merit”, since they all have prominences between 50 and 100 feet.

The 1980s editions also ushered in a decade of confusion on the double-humped ridge of Black Law—creating a rather dubious Top on its north-east summit in 1981, to complement the existing Donald on the south-west summit; then switching the Donald and Top around in 1984, as the north-east summit proved to be higher than the south-west … only to have the Top deleted again in 1997, on the grounds (presumably) that its 36-foot prominence falls far short of Donald’s minimum criterion. So Black Law appears twice on my Donalds chart, with one summit marked as deleted and the other appearing as an addition. (A similar, later, migration of the Donald summit of Meikle Millyea is also marked. This was long anticipated, but not confirmed to the SMC’s satisfaction until 2015.)

The 1984 edition is also responsible for the only “promotion” of a Donald Top—Carlin’s Cairn.

Donald would have counted no less than seven fifty-foot contours on the ascent of Carlin’s Cairn, shown below on the one-inch mapping of 1926.

This whopping prominence, half again higher than any of the other Donald Tops in the original tables (see my plot of the Tops, above), means that Carlin’s Cairn meets Donald’s 17-unit criterion only because it’s less than a mile from nearby (and higher) Corserine. Donald was presumably swayed towards making it a Top rather than a Donald because it’s quite evidently part of the northern ridge of Corserine; but the 1984 Tables editor presumably felt that the comparatively large re-ascent from the col made the 17-unit rule “inapplicable on topographic grounds”, and so bumped Carlin’s Cairn to full Donald status.

Two significant revisions occurred in the 1997 Munro’s Tables. The first was the abandonment of the Minor Tops—they were either promoted to full Donald Top status, if merited, or deleted. Only one, Notman Law, survived the cull. (At the same time, Donald’s unnumbered list of five English summits was also dropped.)

The second revision was altogether more dramatic—the inclusion of a whole new and previously unsuspected group of Donalds and Tops. The discovery of these “Lost Donalds” on the south side of Glen Artney was first reported in The Angry Corrie, in 1994. Although Donald never clearly described what he meant by “the Scottish Lowlands” when he published his tables, it’s clear from the lists themselves that they document the 2000-footers of the Central Belt and Southern Uplands. The northern edge of this lowland area is commonly understood to be the Highland Boundary Fault (HBF). And this fault runs along Glen Artney, placing the 2000-foot hills on its southern side squarely in the Lowlands. You can check this for yourself on the Geological Survey of Great Britain (Scotland) Sheet 39W—Artney and the HBF lie in the top left corner and the new Donalds (Uamh Bheag and Beinn nan Eun) and associated Tops (Meall Clachach and Beinn Odhar) are visible in the Ordnance Survey mapping below the geological overlay. All are labelled on my charts.

Finally, there’s the vexatious (to me, at least) matter of Auchope Cairn and Cairn Hill West Top. The first of these two Tops was introduced by Donald, and discarded in 1997. The second appeared as a numbered Top in 1981 and is still with us. As my chart above shows, both fail to meet Donald’s 50-foot threshold prominence for inclusion, scoring 30 feet and a laughable 16 feet, respectively. Both are, also, much farther than the 17-unit threshold from the nearest Donald summit, at Windy Gyle; even The Cheviot, which featured as an unnumbered summit in Donald’s original tables, is not close enough to these two hills to play “Donald” to their “Top”. A map of the current Donalds and Tops makes their bizarre status in this regard clear:

According to the 17-unit rule, the Donald Tops (open triangles) all lie within 1⅓ miles of their parent Donalds (filled triangles), forming dense clusters … except for Cairn Hill West Top, which sits in splendid isolation on the Scottish/English border. (Auchope Cairn is not marked, but lies only 700m north-west of CHWT, and would be superimposed upon it if plotted on my map.) Here’s the one-inch map of 1927, annotated with the position of Cairn Hill West Top (hereafter, CHWT):

So what’s going on? It appears that Donald was keen to include some indication of the highest point on the Scotland/England border, and Auchope Cairn was the closest named summit to that point. (There was a reluctance, in the early days of hill-tabulation, to include summits that were unnamed on Ordnance Survey maps.) The actual highest point was on the rounded shoulder of Cairn Hill, which has now been dubbed Cairn Hill West Top. This was marked by a 2422-foot spot-height on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map to which Donald would have referred; but that height had been inferred by sighting from a triangulation point about 800 feet to the south-west, with an altitude of 2419 feet.

So Donald provided Auchope Cairn with a rather gnomic footnote:

The highest point on the Union Boundary is (2,419) 2,422.

This footnote persisted until 1981, when the point was promoted to Top status under the newly minted name “Cairn Hill—West Top”. It was provided with a footnote that read:

The highest point on the Union Boundary. Not named on either O.S. or Bartholemew maps.

Auchope Cairn limped on in tandem to CHWT until it was finally deleted in 1997, presumably as surplus to requirements, leaving CHWT as an isolated anomaly—essentially a footnote with ideas above its station.

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Note: My data source for this post is the Database of British and Irish Hills v17.2, combined with “The Donalds 1953-2021” dataset (version 3), both obtained from the DoBIH downloads page.