Ronald Turnbull hits some remote hilltops
IN THIS FIRST POST-Covid summer, the hill photos in The Great Outdoors got even more tempting and the busy hills have been even busier than before. Scafell Pike, it’s you I’m looking at. And Cat Bells: yes, you as well. Which is great. People on hills has t o be better than people pointlessly hanging around the UK’s boring flat bits.
But sometimes, it’s nice if all those busy hillwalkers are walking about their hilly business on Scafell Pike whilst I’m at it elsewhere.
Which brings to mind my walk last summer, in the UK’s must under-walked hill range, the Southern Uplands. In one of its least visited valleys, the long dead end of Ettrick, you can walk all day, over high grassy ridgelines,
and not meet anybody else at all.
Well, apart from other readers of this page of TGO.
The landscape around
Ettrick is carved by vigorous stream erosion, and also by landslips. On the first main summit, Bell Craig, the Moffat Water valley to the north has been over-steepened by a landslip, giving a lively, jagged feel to the slope top. It also gives 3km of great, grassy ridgewalking, with views across the deep hollow to the combes of Hart Fell opposite. It’s hard to see why this fine high line never got included in the Southern Upland Way, plodding along the tarmac 300m below.
But the Southern Uplands do also have boggy bits. The harsher ground south of Bodesbeck Law gets some proper peaty mud onto my trouser legs, before the ridgeline rises again to some more grassy striding.
Capel Fell makes an excellent sandwich stop. I wander a few steps down from the summit fence for a bit more shelter, and also to enjoy the stream-carved, landslipped slopes to west and south. Grassy slopes and a fence lead down to cross the Southern Upland Way at its high point of Ettrick Head.
As any philosopher will tell us, life can’t be entirely on the high grassy ridges. Another half hour of harshness is the high grass and heather across the saddle, and the peat-slop summit of Wind Fell. A few old fence posts form the dismal summit cairn on this most nondescript of Donald Tops.
But a few steps off the plateau the ridgeline continues, with its grassy quad bike track, and views now eastwards over great forests to a far glimpse of the Cheviots. Tall but pointless cairns decorate the sides of this excellent bit of ridge. Sadly, there’s only 2km of it left, before the final summit. Ettrick Pen with its ancient cairn, makes the ninth designated Donald Top of the day.
The west slopes of the hill have been planted with broadleaf trees more recently than my map. Aiming for the sheepfold beside Entertrona Burn brings me down to the top of a plantation track, and smoothly down to
Over Phawhope.
Looking at the bothy book, someone else has passed this way, just two days before. This counts as a busy time – by Southern Upland standards.