The project of a happy lifetime begins: Ben Lomond
Put Snowdon in Scotland and it would only be the 57th highest mountain in the country; Scafell Pike joint 175th. But that doesn’t put Scotland’s most magnificent mountains beyond your reach – as our crash course in the Munros reveals.
“…let me say that I look back upon the days I have spent in pursuing this quest as among the best life.” spent days of my REV. ROBERTSON, THE FIRST PERSON TO COMPLEAT THE MUNROS, SMC JOURNAL 1901
THE BIGGEST IS Ben Nevis; the smallest is Beinn Teallach. The toughest involves a roped-up jitter to the Inaccessible Pinnacle; the easiest a half-hour stroll beside a ski-tow to Carn Aosda. One was used in an experiment to measure the mass of the Earth (Schiehallion), Prince Charles wrote a children’s book about one (Lochnagar), and one is linked with angels (Sgòr an Lochain Uaine) whiles its neighbour flirts with Satan (The Devil’s Point). Climbing to the top of one is known as bagging it, while bagging them all is known as compleating (yes, with that spelling). These are the Munros, the Scottish peaks over 3000 feet tall. There are 282 in total, making the biggest collection of high and wild walks in Britain. And nearly everyone starts with Ben Lomond.
This is the first Munro you bump into as you head north. In fact, the ‘beacon hill’ is fondly known as Glasgow’s Munro as it’s little more than an hour from City Chambers, and anyone who has driven the A82 along the shore of Loch Lomond will know it as the wall of mountain across the water that you just can’t take your eyes off. It looms large – 3196 feet large to be precise – but there’s an excellent path all the way up with nothing hands-on or tricksy about it, and some thrilling surprises when you get near the top.
I didn’t know any of that the first time I climbed it. I arrived at Rowardennan on the east side of the loch with butterflies in my stomach. I’d rarely climbed so high before, and rarely started so low. The first contour by the water lies just 10m above sea-level, which left a whole lot of uphill between me and the top. I looked up, but the summit wasn’t to be seen. I took a deep breath and started walking.
My initial impression was green. Ben Lomond’s lower slopes are patched with forest and the path tunnelled up past oaks and birches, ferns and common-spotted orchids on that July day over a decade ago. Ongoing regeneration work means it’s got even lusher since. One project to fence 55 hectares off from the grinding molars of grazing deer is just reaching completion, and soon downy birches, rowans, hawthorns and willows will spike the contours, while heather, blaeberry and bog myrtle will quilt the understorey.
Before long I broke out above the treeline and onto the open hillside. The path steepened slightly to the shoulder of Sron Aonaich and the view spilled far across the loch below, the watery centrepiece of the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park. Standing there, it was very easy to see why climbing high has such a pull. The appetite for Munro bagging can trace its roots back to 1891, when
Sir Hugh Munro published his ‘Tables giving all the Scottish mountains exceeding 3,000 feet in height’ in the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal.
The list was quite a surprise. Before then it was widely thought that maybe 30 Scottish mountains topped 3000 feet (or the less catchy metric of 914.4 metres), but Munro had found 283. And it had taken some hard graft. Munro began his project with oneinch Ordnance Survey maps but they only marked a contour line every 250 feet. The six-inch sheets had summit spot heights on them, but neither scale was entirely accurate or complete. He ended up surveying some mountains himself, measuring the change in air pressure with a pocket-sized aneroid barometer to calculate the height. Some of those ascents were made by night, and in winter: this was long before Scotland’s Land Reform Act granted the right to roam and many landowners didn’t want people climbing ‘their’ mountains. And Munro even included a column – ‘Best ascended from’
– which detailed the best inn or hotel nearby for the visiting hillwalker.
Now, the eagle-eyed may have noticed
the number Sir Hugh arrived at and the number in the current list are very slightly different. In fact, there’s been a fair bit of swapping in and out with major revisions of the list in 1921, 1953, 1981 and 1997. That’s partly a result of improved measuring: some peaks have been found taller than expected and promoted to Munro status, while others have fallen short and been demoted, and at least one – Beinn a’ Chlaidheimh – has been pushed up and then back down, which means the remote group of Munros known as the Fisherfield Six is once again the Fisherfield Five.
But it’s also down to do with whether a mountain stands alone. As well as his 283 Munros, Sir Hugh listed 255 tops – summits that push above the magical 3000 feet but he considered subsidiary to another peak, rather than a distinct ▶
mountain. He never precisely defined his idea of ‘sufficient separation’ though, and it has been much argued over ever since. There’s a tale that when Munro visited Sir Colin Phillip on Arran ‘“hills and tops ” were discussed for three days and three nights with but little intermission.’
It’s not something Ben Lomond has to worry about. The next nearest bit of land as high is six miles away on the other side of the loch, at Beinn Narnain in the Arrochar Alps: you might be able to see it just to the right of the distinctive crab-claw ridgeline of The Cobbler. Lomond’s isolation means the summit panorama pulls far before bumping into anything that blocks it, and I’d even heard rumours of 100-mile views. On a fine day that is. As comedian and Munro-bagger Ed Byrne points out, ‘3000 feet is the exact height at which Scottish cloud likes to sit’. Venture higher and you’re quite likely to be looking at the inside of a cumulus.
It was even lower on the day I climbed. I was clagged in from around 1500 feet, as the path passed close to something called the Halfway Well on the map. I couldn’t see it; later research at Canmore, the National Record of the Historic Environment, listed it simply as a hollow, with one report saying there is ‘no visible evidence’.
I was secretly glad to know I hadn’t missed much.
Despite the mizzle, the path ahead was clear. The National Trust for Scotland owns much of the mountain and has put a lot of work into building this route, popularly known as the Tourist Path. Before repairs started the path stretched 25 metres across and could be spotted from Glasgow; now it’s a thread of grit and rock, with drainage gullies to stop it turning into a fast-flowing burn. And I found the gradient here, working up the long southern shoulder of Ben Lomond, steady rather than daunting. It felt like a big walk, but not a scary one.
You don’t have to be a flint-nerved mountaineer to tackle the Munros. In 1923, Reverend Archibald Ronnie Graham Burn became the first person to bag every peak on the list and all the tops, yet according to Elizabeth Allan in the biography Burn on the Hill, he was none too skilled: ‘His navigation was pathetic. He never carried more than a sandwich, and often not even that...It was commonplace for him to be completely lost on the hill...He took really silly risks in dangerous situations. He fell down places.’ Crucially though, she goes on to say ‘he enjoyed every minute of it’.
Even in the murk I found it was all curiously enjoyable. I liked the stretch I could feel in my lungs. I assumed the pain in my thigh muscles meant ▶
As lockdown eased in 2020, this very popular hill became even more popular. The NTS welcomes visitors but ask walkers to stick to the paths; step off for a moment when needed to socially distance, but try to avoid walking along the soft verges, and keep the rubber tips on your poles.
I was burning fast through the Tunnock’s teacake I’d scoffed and would soon be justified in unwrapping another. Then I felt the path steepen underfoot, and chart a couple of zig-zags, while an increasing breeziness suggested things were getting pretty high, and airy. To this point, the route had tracked along a generously plump slab of hill but I could see from the map that I was approaching Coire a’ Bhathaich, where a glacier had taken an almighty bite out of Ben Lomond’s north face. It left behind a rough cliff of black and green, where rock and grass battle for dominance. The path wandered towards its edge in a couple of spots, but never scarily so, before a final pull brought me to the triangulation point atop its pleasingly conical summit. I hugged that concrete pillar in the clouds. I had bagged my first Munro and I was elated.
Under blue skies the view is a varied one. Ben Lomond sits right by the Highland Boundary Fault, a fracture in the Earth’s crust that slashes across Scotland from Arran to Stonehaven, splitting the lowlands from the highlands. To the south the contours of softer, sedimentary rock round gently; to the north the tougher metamorphic rocks crease stoically against the elements into raft after raft of mountains, including those 281 other Munros. This peak also marks an east-west divide, standing on the nation’s watershed where drops falling just a few feet apart are destined for opposite coasts.
Of course, I see none of that but I remember something Muriel Gray said about hilltops. After presenting The Munro Show in the 1980s, she published a very funny book called The First Fifty: Munro-Bagging without a Beard. ‘To the sofa-bound layperson,’ she wrote, ‘it may just be a wind-blown cairn, grey and dismal except for its decorative orange peel, but to you it’s nirvana. It remains constantly awe-inspiring that your feet, and a flask of tomato soup, can take you to the remotest and most primevally beautiful parts of our country.’
When the Rev. Burn arrived at the top of Ben Lomond on his Munro quest he was so disappointed it didn’t have a cairn he spent an hour building one, and had to run on the way down to catch the ferry. His efforts were part of a long history of adding heaps of rocks to mountains, often in an effort to make them taller. After Ben Nevis was declared the highest peak in Britain in 1847, fans of Ben Macdui – the mountain long thought to be the king pin –
planned a huge cairn to lift it back into first place. On Ben Lawers, a peak you can see in the view north from here, local man Malcolm Ferguson paid for a 20-foot cairn to nudge the top through the 4000 foot barrier. The Ordnance Survey was having none of it; its height was confirmed at 3983 feet.
Most people who scale Ben Lomond descend the same way, as I did that day. But there is another way off. The Ptarmigan ridge is named for the masterof-camouflage bird whose rock-speckle feathers turn snow-white for winter, living here at the southern limit of its range in Britain. The route along its crest is much quieter than the main one and there’s a reason for that. It’s tougher. The very top section, as you drop off the summit to the north is particularly steep and you’ll need hands, and maybe bum, on rock to scoot down safely (if, like ▶
“...sometimes
when i find myself all alone amidst scenery so grand and profoundly inspiring that it sweetly forces me to examine my life and values, love is almost an inadequate word. ” MURIEL GRAY, THE FIRST FIFTY: MUNRO-BAGGING WITHOUT A BEARD
me, you’re wary of sharp descents, you may like this loop better in reverse). The going eases as you reach the Bealach Buidhe to curve south past a rosary of bead-like lochans and on down the ridge, parallelling the one you climbed earlier.
Both descents drip with glorious views, and as I walked back down the clouds started to break and the world below started to shimmer. Loch Lomond has the largest surface area of any lake in Britain (27.5 square miles) and I could see across its southern expanse, widening as it crossed the boundary fault. It was freckled with trees sprouting from 27 islets and 22 islands, including the largest one on freshwater in Britain. Inchmurrin’s 0.46 square miles have been home to a monastery, a deer park, an asylum, a place for unmarried mothers to give birth, and for over 20 years the haggis-hurling record. It was also raided by the famous outlaw Rob Roy. Everywhere you turn in these parts lies a tale of the MacGregor clan; Rob’s son Robert kidnapped an heiress and brought her to the inn (now a hotel) down in Rowardennan, forcing her into marriage to claim her fortune. He was later hanged for it.
All too soon I arrived back in Rowardennan, ready for a drink to celebrate completing, or compleating, my first Munro. Walking them all is an incredible feat, but climbing just one was a red letter day for me. And as I sipped my beer and pored over the list wondering which one might be next (it was Ben Lawers and Bheinn Ghlas
– two in one walk!) I knew it could very easily turn to obsession. Reverend
Archibald Robertson was the first person to bag all of Munro’s original list of
283 peaks, and when he finished at Meall Dearg on the Aonach Eagach in 1901, he kissed the cairn first, and then he kissed his wife.