Two weekend days, two local, only-just Grahams and still no-one else on the hill, bringing my current run of completely solitary outings to eight. But perhaps not too surprising when I’ve lived here for twenty-six years, been visiting the hills for considerably longer and never done either of these before! (more…)
27 September 2015
24 September 2015
AJG Parcels wheelie bin drop!
Last Thursday AJG Parcels ‘delivered’ a large, well-packed, wooden elephant in a box marked ‘fragile’. Dumped end-on into my rubbish bin with a card through the door to say so, despite this clearly contravening the terms stated on the card as well as (not for the first time!) ignoring the note I’ve had fixed by my doorbell for years. And, perhaps not surprisingly when I had to extract the green (rubbish) bin from behind the blue (recycling) and lay it on its side to coax the box out, with a broken tusk and more serious injury to its tail clearly caused by their careless — nay, cavalier — handling! (more…)
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16 September 2015
Calloping Corbetts
We all make mistakes. On Sunday, I made two: firstly (pretty minor) not realising that you can now park above the bridge at the bottom of the Callop track, and secondly (gruesomely major) getting the forest completely wrong! (more…)
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12 September 2015
6-0-2?
So a ‘new’ Munro Top just makes the height and an ‘old’ one gets demoted by four (?) inches, meaning 6-0-1 becomes 6-0-2 because I’d already done them both! And the news really shouldn’t affect many folk when you’d have to be trying pretty hard not to do Mullach Coire nan Cisteachan (aka Carn na Caim South Top) if ascending Carn na Caim by the track from Drumochter Pass, but could perhaps have been more interesting the other way round when Creag na Caillich might just have been omitted as a (now) ‘mere’ Corbett Top by someone going for a minimal ‘tick’ of the Tarmachan Ridge. Now of course any logical traverse of said ridge continues to the end, but imagine that… having to go back and reascend to 3,000ft for those four inches! Narrow margins, and to some extent a mug’s game, but you have to draw the line somewhere… rules are rules if you’re going to play it and it’s not the mountains that have changed but our perceptions of them. The moral (if there is one) perhaps being that you get what you deserve if ticking ‘just enough’!
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6 September 2015
Heart of Ardgour
This was a much-anticipated outing, delving into the very heart of some fantastic Munro-free mountain country I’ve barely touched beyond repeated visits to the great Garbh Bheinn. While ‘built’ round the reigning peak of Sgurr Dhomhnuill (one of these classic cones like Sgurr na Ciche and Binnein Beag that just looks great from everywhere), it was also fuelled by ‘greed’ in realising that that whole central group was up for grabs in a hefty day’s round accessed by bike up Glen Scaddle… (more…)
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