Mix 'n' match is all the rage this season as Dave Hewitt reveals his hillgoing habits.
Never mind carving the Christmas turkey - one of the hardest things about the festive period is trying to carve space for a hill here and there. Some people solve the problem by jetting away completely and using the period as an away-from-it-all holiday. Others - and those with ageing parents to visit are a major subgroup here - don't have absolute escapism as an option and so are faced with the usual mix 'n' match fortnight in which culinary overindulgence is only partially offset by the odd stroll over a summit or two.
This kind of messy, indeterminate break from normal routines was my lot again this year but a reasonably varied bunch of hills, conditions and companions were somehow shoehorned into the chaos. So here, by way of farewell to the festive palaver for another 12 months, is a review of one man's Christmas and New Year hillgoing.
22 December - Tinto
The Sunday before Christmas and a visit to the much-climbed Borders outlier. The route was the most obvious one - up the northern shoulder from the Fallburn car park, perhaps the easiest place in Scotland to undercut Naismith's Rule. Naismith gives just over 90 minutes for the 3 1/2km and 480m (goodness knows where the SMC guidebook's 5km comes from) and a walker would have to foot-drag considerably to take that long given the good path and ideal gradient.
The occasion was the Yule meet - pointedly not the Christmas meet - of the Desperadoes club and it proved to be exceptionally civilised. Around 20 good people and a general dispensing of pakora, gluhwein and the inevitable mince pies. Conditions-wise it was a near miss - a failed inversion - although by the end after all the sociable gluttony a view of sorts could be had by clambering on to the tumulus-cum-cairn.
Another highlight had come earlier - a quick visit to the home of Helen and Michael Mackenzie near Biggar. Helen is the niece of the late George Elliot - not the nineteenth-century novelist but the early twentieth-century climber and Munrobagger. Elliot's name stands at number seven on the published list of Munroists, immediately following that of his friend and work colleague Jimmy Robertson and Helen loaned me two wonderful photograph albums covering hill days from the period between the world wars. More on this another time - and more too on Elliot's old tent - thick canvas and varnished bamboo poles, which I've somehow come to own. It looks to be in good nick and will, once it's been test-driven in the garden, see some hill action come the spring.
25 December - Ben Cleuch
Pretty much a rerun of Christmas Day 2001 - same hill, same cast list, namely Rod, Lindsay and Janet Munro, the Aberfeldy and Pitlochry equipment shop people. The main difference came via conditions. Whereas last Christmas morning was clear, cold and breezy, this was remarkably mild and - unsurprisingly - cloudy. As before, we arranged to meet on top. Trying to arrive on time for a summit meeting is good flustered fun and there was something inordinately satisfying in reaching the cairn from the west at precisely the moment my friends arrived from the east. We couldn't have timed it better had we had been on manoeuvres with walkie-talkies.
They had Christmas cake; my contribution was mince pies. As on Tinto, it felt very civilised, even if we were huddling inside the shelter cairn. The oddest aspect came in the presence of other walkers - one before and two immediately after the summit. In the previous year's much better conditions we had the place to ourselves.
We headed for Whum Hill - the spur between the Gannel and Law ridges - and sneaked down a grassy cleuch to escape the windy smirr. If anything the cloud had dropped even lower and my ad hoc navigation saw us drift round an unseen corner and needlessly traverse the final slope above the Gannel Burn rather than immediately tackling the short climb to the main path. Now, though, the clag cleared, the summits coming clear within a minute or so - unexpected.
From there it was just a splosh down to Tilli, where the Munros went for a pint in the Woolpack while I zipped home for festive food.
28 December - King's Seat Hill, Andrew Gannel Hill, Ben Cleuch
After a couple of days spent doing nothing more strenuous than listening to new CDs (Tindersticks; McAlmont and Butler), it was time for another Ochils outing - this time in much healthier (although still snowless) conditions.
With Glasgow friend David Downey the hills were tackled from near the Tillicoultry ski slope. Up via the Kirk Burn path (almost never used but visible for miles), then over the usual tops before a fast, angled descent to the Daiglen bridge (also rarely used and not marked on Landranger 58; it's at NS907986, tucked in above a fine little gorge).
This was my 72nd and last Ben Cleuch of the year - and although I'd be disappointed were the 2003 figure to slip much below 50, an average of six per month feels a bit much even by my standards. Having moved house in December 2001 led to a year without any major away-trips, hence more local-Ochiling. As long as 20 fewer Cleuchs can be replaced by 20 extra days elsewhere, I'll be happy this time next year. New Year's resolution? Go west, young man. And north, and south, and east.
31 December - Castle Law, Dumyat
A quick solo slog up the steep side of my local crag-heap to see out the last afternoon of the year. Warroch Glen, the big gully/cleft in the Blairlogie face, is a great place, allowing unlikely access to the upper slopes 300m above. It's brutal lower down but the igneous cliffs hem the glen in Quiraing-like fashion and it doesn't take long to reach the top of Castle Law - good value if you're short on time.
After Dumyat itself I dropped east to pick up the track leading round to the car park and stepped on to the verge to let a local in a 4x4 squeeze past, signalling in greeting as one does on such occasions. All that came back was a miserable-git stare.
There were to be similar unfriendly-vibe incidents in the coming days - on a stroll round the backroads of the Carse of Stirling and after Meall Ghaordie; am I alone in thinking that the Countryside Alliance palaver has made the "real country types" markedly less friendly to those who they perceive as incomers? Certainly the us-and-them mood feels more entrenched and engrained than five years ago - but these people can't all be genuine miserable gits. Maybe it's just me they glower at.
3 January - The Law, Ben Cleuch, Ben Ever
Another Ochils outing (sorry to keep going on like this) and one prompted by the sudden arrival of snow and frosty skies. I hadn't intended going out but couldn't resist. I'll skip the details - apart from it having been excellent - and just mention two aspects of the Ochils, which while not unique, make them unusual. One is that they're the wrong way up in terms of difficulty, especially in winter, as the damp, heavily shaded Hillfoot gorges carry a lot of ice, whereas above 400m the enclosed slopes ease back to open, tussocky hillsides.
My sister has just moved into what she describes as an "upside-down house" - one with the bedrooms on the ground floor and the lounge up top. By the same token the Ochils are upside-down hills and the bulk of accidents happen in the glens.
I took an axe, something I hardly ever do here, because there might be need to chip ice from the path within the first 15 minutes. The usual troublespot is the rocky dip between the end of the Mill Glen walkway and the foot of the Law (and a minor landslip in August has made the path even more fiddly when iced, as has the crumbling of a useful foothold on the little wall beyond) but the skiddiest part proved to be a section of steps about a third of the way along. I didn't use the axe but was glad to have taken it and was sufficiently wary that, like three other blokes associated with this time of year, I later returned home by another route.
The other curious aspect of the Ochils is that they often seem busier in winter than in summer. If the variables are fixed - a sunny non-work day in winter needs to be compared with a sunny non-work day in summer - then the winter version often seems more populous.
On this occasion I was only out for three hours but met upwards of 25 people, with plenty more seen on distant skylines. This is a lot for the central Ochils and is due to at least two factors. One is "telescoping" - given that most people climb their hills in daylight, it follows that if identical numbers of people are out on winter and summer days then the winter version will appear busier because everyone is crammed into a tighter timeframe.
The Ochils are also fallback hills if the winter walker can't be bothered travelling far. The bulk of the Scottish population lives within an hour's drive and the tops are sufficiently high (compared with the Pentlands, for instance) to provide a high-hill mood rather than an above-the-fields potter.
Anyway, whatever their reasons for being out, everyone seemed full of the joys. It was good to see.
4 January - Meall Ghaordie (or Ghaordaidh, or whatever it's called)
A plod-standard half day up and then down the southeast shoulder. Nothing fancy, just an excuse to get out in the snow on another excellent day. It was my friend Ken Stewart's fourth time up but his first from Glen Lochay. I'd been here twice before. But for my old Angry Corrie mucker Warbeck it was, surprisingly, a new Munro. The snowline was higher than expected, although there was ice on the path right down. On the craggier upper section a fair amount of ice lurked under the snow but it was never more than mildly skiddy and the crampons stayed in their Tupperware boxes. (We've got all the latest kit, us.)
I had only been on four Munros last year, all repeats, a pathetic number even given my propensity for rummaging around on lower tree-covered bumps, so it was good to start towards a respectable total so soon. There was a time when 60 in the year felt thin.
What was striking this time - partly due to this Munro-drought, partly because we used the basic SMC guidebook route - was how busy a Munro can be of a weekend. One tends to forget. It might not have been the proverbial Sauchiehall Street but it was surely West Nile Street of a weekday evening. A gang from Blantyre and thereabouts shared the summit with us (including one man who sat in a large and allegedly windproof plastic bag like some kind of Turner Prize exhibit) and a good few more were plodding up as we picked our way down.
5 January - the Strathearn trig point
All the above was really just training for the big one. Regular readers will recall my extremely sporadic campaign to visit a Scottish trig point of every metric height in more or less ascending order of height.
The last progress with this came via a November 2001 visit to the 10m Balgay Farm trig near Inchture (Landrangers 53 and 59, NO271271). This had followed a big Uists/Benbecula trig-trawl in June of that year, reported on this site.
After Balgay, nothing happened for over a year - again blame the flitting - until I eased myself back in with another 10m trig at the start of December 2002 - the one tucked behind a wall on Aberlady golf course. (There are two other Scottish 10m trigs - on Burray in Orkney and on the Solway coast.)
I didn't strictly need an 11m trig, having already taken in the Balivanich pillar on Benbecula (Landranger 22, NF761544) but that was shown as 10m on early metricated maps and I fancied a "pure" 11m trig before moving on to giddier heights. That gave a choice of just two - the coastal trig just west of Machrihanish (Uisaed, 68/NR627207) or the weird trig in the floor of Strathearn southwest of Perth (58/NO066186). Quite what a trig pillar is doing here - on low ground surrounded by higher stuff - is a mystery, as there must be adequate sightlines between the various higher Strathearn trigs. But it's there, and it's fairly local to where I live, so a plan had gradually been concocted to pay it a visit.
This wasn't entirely straightforward, as Dupplin Estate on which it stands isn't the most welcoming place, while the large-scale map suggested that the trig stood in the middle of a field - usually these farmland pillars are on field boundaries, beside walls or hedges. Legally an approach could be made without difficulty, provided no crops were damaged but certain times of year were best avoided - I wasn't looking for confrontation. So a few possible dates were chosen then postponed.
In the end it worked perfectly. Tessa and I met a couple of Dunning friends and we sneaked (although not very well hidden) down the side of some trees to the east of Kildinny, then cut across a frozen field to the bridge across the railway. Beyond this lay the target field, which contained several large, mysterious crates along with - out in the centre - the trig. Had the farmer been feeling wicked he could have placed one of the crates over the trig - they were large enough - and forced us to guess, as in some magic trick. As it was, all we had to do was to crunch across and bag the thing unhindered.
We were there late in the day, and there was no one else about, so we strolled down to the riverbank (lost amid swampy shrubland) and only wandered back up the track as the light faded. This felt the right way round to have done it - using the track on approach would have run the risk of rebuttal - and overall the mini-expedition was a complete success. The pillar cannot often be visited except by ardent trigophiles and the treading of new ground, however low and inconsequential, provided a satisfaction absent from the bigger, hillier days described above.
A good start to the year. Next up, trigwise, is 12m and there's only one, Eascairt Point, facing Arran on the east Kintyre coast: 62/NR848534. This looks to be problem-free and fun and should be bagged before too long. I'll keep you posted.
Dave Hewitt
9/1/2003
Dave can be contacted at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
