The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Beinn Chuirn A climb past goldmines
Location: Grade: Distance: Time:
IF I have any ambitions left as a hillgoer/television presenter it’s to make two programmes – one about the great Scots/American environmentalist John Muir, and the other about the Yukon poet Robert W Service. Muir is fairly well known but Service less so. Born in Preston, Lancashire, in 1874 into a
Scots family he was educated at Hillhead High School in Glasgow and later worked for a bank in the city. When he was 21 he moved to Canada with dreams of becoming a cowboy.
He never did emulate Buffalo Bill, but continued his banking career, ending up at Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory, just at the time of the Klondike gold rush. Inspired by the beauty of the Yukon, and captivated by the sourdoughs, the panners and the miners, he began writing verse. His best-known poems include The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee. Both of these are from his book Songs of a Sourdough (1907), which netted him more than $100,000, a huge amount for the time.
Thoughts of this long-held ambition came to mind as I tramped through the forest from Tyndrum to Cononish, at the foot of Beinn Chuirn, Scotland’s goldmining mountain. Perhaps not quite in the same league as the “Call of the Yukon”, Tyndrum was, nevertheless, a former mining centre. The little area of Tyndrum known as Clifton still boasts the former mineworkers’ cottages and the remains of old lead mines can still be found on the hillside above the village.
Beinn Chuirn (2,887ft/880m) where the present gold mine is situated, is a Corbett and, while largely overshadowed by its Munro neighbours of
Ben Lui, Beinn Oss and Beinn Dubhcraig, is does boast one or two interesting features – its precipitous east-facing corries and the black-vegetated cliffs of the