HIGHLAND WOWS
The Ring of Steall Skyrace is savagely spectacular, says Jonny Muir
I THINK BACK TO 2015, the genesis of Skyline Scotland. That weekend in August, there was a single event: the Glen Coe Skyline, a 52km mountain race that crossed five Munros on a route that included Curved Ridge (the grade III scramble on Buachaille Etive Mòr) and the fabled Aonach Eagach. Some 122 runners finished, the last returning to the start almost 14 hours after she had left. With its sonorous cow bells, marked route and a course that came with a ‘death’ warning (and still does), the event seemed experimental, ambitious and the antithesis of traditional hill racing in Scotland.
And yet, the experiment turned heads in the mountain and ultrarunning world, spawning a genre of long and extreme mountain races in the UK. Skyline Scotland did not stand still either: the race headquarters moved to Kinlochleven and the event weekend to
September. As the years went by, the Glen Coe Skyline spawned siblings: the Ring of Steall Skyrace, the Mamores VK, the Ben Nevis Ultra, and in 2021 three trail races, too, ranging from 5K to 18K.
I had come for the Ring of Steall, but I could be writing about the other three headline races. What you get – what you always get
– is something brilliant, something beautiful, something really hard and even something a little terrifying. There were bells and pipes, but soon silence, as we were spat out of Kinlochleven, along the West Highland Way, and into the southern bowels of the Mamores, the chain of 10 Munros (Scottish mountains that are more than 3,000 feet or 914 metres in height) that separate Loch Leven from Glen Nevis.
It could never be easy. There was mud and rock and a small stream to cross, unrelenting hands-on-thighs steepness and beckoning mist,