I think that, ignoring for a moment the issue of the summit, this was the most enjoyable outing of the 9 hills thus far on this trip. I'd not invited Mick to come with me on the basis that I didn't think it would be his cup of tea, but with hindsight he would have enjoyed coming as far as the point that I left the public footpath and struck off across access land.
A zig-zagging track had taken me up to the ruins of several mining buildings, then to three abandoned farmhouses, one in ruins, the others empty but still boasting roofs and windows.
It was by the first of those farmhouses that I initially set out up the hill, but I'd not got far when I contemplated further my surroundings and read again the notes I'd made, whereupon I did an about turn to continue a little further along the right of way. A gate then took me onto the access land, and to a hole through the next wall.
That landed me in a field with the choice of a vast network of sheep trods through gorse. For a while, all went well with my choices at forks, until the trod I was on petered out. The going wasn't overly hard, just prickly with some sections of boulders thrown in.
Those boulders were, however, nothing compared to the huge heap of the things that forms the summit. My snap below doesn't do justice to the scale. Even though I had read that it was bouldery, and had put an emboldened comment on my notes not to do this one in wet conditions or low cloud, it was still something of a surprise to see what lay ahead of me.
Extreme care was taken in clambering up to the top, and even then some surprisingly large boulders moved under me.
My thought of dropping off the summit to the W was abandoned quickly, when I found how icy the boulders were on that side, and I picked my way back down the east side. There's actually a good strip of heathery earth that covers the boulders for some distance, so the amount of clambering required isn't quite as much as it looks from a distance (although there are still some surprising holes in amongst the heather).
In the latter stages of my ascent to the big jumble of rocks, I'd come across a trodden line, so I followed it on the way down. It was less direct, but smooth and largely free of gorse obstructions. It felt like it would be a matter of extreme chance to stumble upon it, and continue to follow it, on the way uphill - particularly as it joined a much more obvious and eroded trod towards the bottom end (route hint: find your way to SH 39779 46442 and it's probably pretty easy to follow heading uphill from there).
The temperature plummeted again once I got onto the shady side of the hill, with the ground still frozen solid.
For ease of logistics, I only had two hills on the agenda for today, and I did one of them yesterday, so I was all done in time to take Mick out for lunch.
Incidentally, that was my 598th Marilyn...
I don't think this snap really conveys the scale of that mound of boulders.
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