The days are fair stretching so Dave Hewitt says it's time to stretch your legs with an evening hill or two.
From now until early August is the time for evening outings and for those who live in or north of the Scottish central belt it's quite feasible to take in a Munro before bedtime even though you might have worked a standard nine-to-five shift. It's worth doing - several of the pleasures connected with evening hills aren't to be found throughout the rest of the year, nor are they often discussed in print (perhaps because few writers seem to go on the hill "out of hours").
One benefit, for instance, is the curious sense of having "used" an evening, of having sneaked in an extra hill or two outwith the normal weekend routine - very satisfying. Another benefit is weather-stability. Whereas morning or midday start-times for walks have a habit of beginning cloudless but ending torrential (hence the "bright too soon" saying), by evening things have often stabilised such that clear means clear and a fair amount of protective clothing can be left in the car.
This in turn allows a faster pace, while the absence of cloud stretches the gloaming by anything as much as an hour - all of which makes a big evening hill perfectly possible if you open your mind to the idea and carve a space in your busy social diary. Come on, the football on the TV can be skipped at least once a week, surely - and anyway, you can video the game but not the hills.
That very few - depressingly few - people venture out after teatime strikes me again and again on the Ochils at this time of year. Through the shorter-daylight seasons I tend to work in the mornings and then go for a quick scurry round the local tops in the afternoon if the weather's fair. From late spring onwards however there's the temptation to leave the yomp until evening - at which stage there is almost never anyone else around. The occasional hillrunner might be up there but more often than not it's possible to have a three-hour circuit of the high Ochils between 6pm and 9pm and to find the place completely deserted. It's not just that no one is met or even seen across the glen, from the main ridges it's possible to see people on summits several miles away and of an evening these people appear not to exist.
Depressing? Well, yes - not for a minute because I don't relish the solitude and the space - that's a treat. But it doesn't pay to be elitist about such matters and I wouldn't at all mind seeing a few fellow travellers up there. Yet while the Ochils must have around half of Scotland's entire population living within an hour's drive and while theyre the best set of easy-access evening hills you could ever ask for, everyone (and I mean everyone) seems to find reasons to stay down below and watch the soaps, soap the car, carry the carry-out home to the sofa. And if the Ochils are quiet, then the bigger, less handy hills further north must be even quieter. No wonder we're a nation of under-exercised overweight malcontents. I bet the hills were a whole lot busier in the evenings 50 years ago.
Anyway, the reason I mention evenings (and apologies for galloping off on a hobby-horse there) is that two weeks ago there was a less-than-standard evening outing on one of the more obscure summits in the country. As with the Ochils, it was a handy hill for central beltonians but even I wouldn't dare suggest that Cort-ma Law East Top in the Campsies is ever going to become anything more than an acquired taste. Cort-ma Law itself is quite often climbed - it marks the end-point of a tempting ridge straight across the road from the big car park on the Crow Road between Lennoxtown to Fintry. The trig on top makes a target and a goodly number of Glaswegians straggle up it on Sunday afternoons and the like.
But the east top? This is the Campsies at their campsiest - squelch and oozy tussocks and heathery bog and more squelch. If you want to see why the Campsies - apart from a scattering of drier bumps such as Dumgoyne, Meikle Bin and Tomtain - are never busy, then Cort-ma Law East Top is as good a place as any to start.
We (Alan Dawson, Mary Cox, Pete Bibby, Tessa Carroll and Bert Barnett across from Rattray) were here for a reason. It was the occasion of Phil Cooper's Scottish council tops completion, something that doesn't happen very often and an event arcane enough to have it's own peculiar (some would say perverse) appeal. Before saying something about Phil, I had better explain what council tops are, on the assumption that one or two readers of this site are, for some reason, not up to speed with such matters. Scotland has, since April 1996, been divided into 32 unitary authorities - administrative districts that replaced the old two-tier system whereby, for instance, Glasgow was controlled not just by Glasgow District Council but also by Strathclyde Region. The regions have now gone and the local government picture is considerably clearer (if not necessarily more efficient).
It follows that each of these 32 councils covers a particular part of the Scottish land surface, and so each area has its own high point, its council top. Most of these are familiar hills. Highland obviously has Ben Nevis as its top, Dumfries and Galloway has Merrick, Stirling has Ben More and so on. There is one case of duplication, with Ben Macdui straddling the Aberdeenshire/Moray administrative boundary, so there are 31 distinct points in the list. The closest pair has to be East Cairn Hill (City of Edinburgh) and West Cairn Hill (West Lothian), just a mile apart across Cauldstane Slap.
A few are tiddlers, eg Aberdeen City has 266-metre Brimmond Hill - well worth the climb on a clear day and a good place to watch the planes take off and land at Dyce (and a good bit safer than Greece). Then there are unexpected oddities, such as the top for Dundee City not being Dundee Law (174m) but 175m Gallow Hill out by Templeton Woods. A fair few people who think they have "topped out" Dundee will have done no such thing, and the same is true of City of Glasgow. Here, while it's well known that Cathkin Braes above the south side is the high point, the actual 200m summit is tucked away in some rarely-visited trees.
At least Cathkin Braes is a genuine summit, which is more than can be said for the South Ayrshire council top, an anonymous 782m point just to the north-east of the cairn on Kirriereoch Hill. The boundary fence doesn't pass through the top of Kirriereoch and so one of the more vague - and quaint - aspects of council toppery comes into play - a council top doesn't need to be a top at all.
Cort-ma Law East Top is just about a distinct bump, 527m high and with a giddy 13m dip before the bog rises to its parent peak to the west. In case you're wondering, the east top is the highest bit of ground in North Lanarkshire and Cort-ma Law itself doesn't count because that's in East Dunbartonshire (council top: Earl's Seat, 578m). All this creates an illusory quality to the task of finding the top, well shown when various members of the party trotted off to a nearby bump that may or may not have been higher than the fence junction on the east top. It didn't matter, though, even had the bump been 1000m higher it wouldn't have counted due to being in the neighbouring district.
Anyway, that's enough of the technicalities. Phil Cooper had driven up from Lancaster for the occasion, via a few days spent picking off missing points in the list. The reason he had chosen this particular evening (2 May) was that it marked 25 years to the day since he became the first person known to have visited all the council/county tops in the British Isles as defined by what were then the "new" 1974 boundaries. That round had been wrapped up with Ward Hill on Orkney, and the full set was visited within a 708-day period starting with Ben More on 26 May 1975.
Phil reckons his first ever county top was Bardon Hill in Leicestershire - a strange half-quarried/half country park affair - on 25 June 1972. This earlier round was a considerable undertaking in terms of distribution, as well as the orthodox Welsh and English counties, he took in the Isle of Man, Northern Ireland, the 26 counties in the Irish republic and the various Scottish regions. It was also the first such round to be recorded in the Guinness Book of Records (1978 edition, p342).
The remaining McWhirter twin wasn't on hand on Cort-ma Law East Top but the round was duly celebrated with Phil unearthing a remarkable array of objects from his rucksack - an enormous tripod (which he used for so many pictures that we began to worry about benightment), a couple of packets of carrot cake, and - to general acclaim - two bottles of malt whisky.
As for the hill itself, it was a fine example of how outwardly unappealing summits can provide excellent expeditions. So what if it was Squelch City, without a pinnacle, buttress or gully in sight? The sky served up a wonderful light show, threatening clouds in most directions split by great diagonal slants of last-gasp sunlight. The localised downpours missed us by some miracle and the gaps in the gloom spotlit fields and house-clusters down on the urban plains to the south. A series of airliners banked low overhead, landing lights blazing - this central stretch of the Campsies is on the Abbotsinch stacking circle - and away to the south-west, where skies were clear, the Galloway hills shone yellow while Arran and - just - Ailsa Craig jutted above the Renfrewshire moors.
We hurried back down to the Burnhead track as night finally arrived and Phil and Bert prepared for a night of malts and nattering in their campervans parked in a lay-by above Queenzieburn. The rest of us headed back home to Stirling, Glasgow and Muckhart. It had been a good way to spend an evening, certainly better than the sofa and the TV.
Dave Hewitt
16/5/2002
Dave can be contacted at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
