The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Unsung giant Often overlooked but has ‘a
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IT might be called the ‘fairy hill’ but there was nothing soft and fluffy about Ben Hee on a dark day of scudding clouds and intermittent wind-driven rain. We’d spent the night beside Loch Merkland, a place that’s haunted by the eerie call of the beautiful black-throated diver, but dawn broke in uncompromising fashion and the day threw down its watery gauntlet – either pack up and go home or get swathed in Gore-Tex and go for it. We went for it…
Ben Hee is one of the unsung giants of Sutherland and is rarely mentioned in the same breath as the north’s iconic mountains such as Foinaven or Suilven. At 873m/2863ft it doesn’t have the necessary height to make Munro status, and so tends to be overshadowed by higher neighbours like Ben Hope, Ben Klibreck and the Inchnadamph pair of Ben More Assynt and Conival.
That said, veteran hillwalker and author Hamish Brown once wrote: “Ben Hee may be a schisty dome compared to some of the other giants but it shares a special, spacious splendour.” It most certainly does, rising fortress-like above the western fringes of that bog-splattered region that eases its way east towards Strath Naver and the Flow Country of Caithness.
While the mountain presents its best face in this direction, where it rises on corrie-bitten, steeplytiered flanks, access is long and tedious over a waterlogged mattress of bleak moorland.
For the determined, there is a footpath accessed by the Altnaharra to Strath More road. It crosses the Meadie Burn and then straggles its way up to
Loch Coire na Saidhe Duibhe which shimmers in the northeast corrie of the mountain.
From the northern shores of the loch you can climb onto the long north ridge of Ben Hee, traversing the hill’s 851m top to the actual summit. The summit