The Herald - The Herald Magazine
The walk Crags, corries and mind-blowing views
Location: Beinn Dearg, Wester Ross Grade: Serious mountain walk Distance: 15 miles/25km Time: 8-9 hours
SCOTLAND has a stack of Beinn Deargs, two of them Munros. The “red hill” is a common enough description, especially for any north-west facing hill which catches the last light of the dying sun, but Beinn Dearg above Inverlael Forest, just north of the Dirrie More near Ullapool, is a wee bit special. This is “the Beinn Dearg that looks to the sea”, as Hamish Brown once described it. The other Munro is in Atholl and lacks the special qualities of its northern namesake – crags, corries, high-level lochans and mind-blowing views.
You’ll see the rocky bulk of Beinn Dearg as you drive over the A835 Ullapool road from Garve. It rears a lofty head beyond the foot of Loch Glascarnoch and all but dwarfs its finely shaped neighbour Cona’ Mheall, well named the enchanted hill. You can climb these two hills from this end of Loch Glascarnoch – there’s a parking area beside Loch Droma – and if time and energy allow, you could add Am Faochagach, another Munro, to your tally. But beware. If you do head in from this direction choose a day of hard frost – hard enough to freeze the ground solid. The bogs and the peat hereabouts would make a grown man cry with frustration.
A better route, and certainly an easier one, is from further down the A835 near the head of Loch Broom a few hundred metres north of Inverlael House. On the north side of the road a private forestry track runs up through the Lael Forest into the lower part of Gleann na Squaib. A mountain bike could be put to good use on this initial section of forest track.
This is a much more comfortable approach than the Glascarnoch bogtrot, a gentler and more gradual climb up a good stalkers’ path. Gleann na Squaib is pleasant, with some spectacular waterfalls and good pools for bathing when the weather is warm enough. Higher up the glen, the stalkers’ path begins to zig-zag up the steeper inclines, a superbly engineered path which carries you close to the mighty crags that are formed by the long north-west ridge of Beinn Dearg, the Diollaid a’ Mhill Bhric. These crags are split by half a dozen steep gullies, most of them holding good winter climbs. The cliff-line eventually terminates in an imposing corner line, a magnificently steep tower which boasts a classic rock climb called the Tower of Babel, first climbed by the late Dr Tom Patey, Ullapool’s GP, back in 1962. The path now lifts you onto a high and broad pass, a stony place scattered with shallow lochans. To climb Beinn Dearg, which is on your right, all you have to do is follow the line of a massive drystone wall that runs up the hill’s north-east shoulder almost all the way to the summit. Near the top, where the dyke bears west, there is a gap in the wall. Go through it and follow a south-south-west bearing for about 300 metres across the bald dome of the summit slopes to the