2 October 2025
Start: Parking area at track end to W
Distance and ascent: 7.1km, 380m
Weather: Heavily overcast with low cloud base and mizzly until the last 3 minutes when it started to rain.
The straight lines at the east end of this route look suspiciously like they've been plotted rather than recorded, but that's because I was following a fence and fences do tend to run in straight lines!
A couple of days ago I thought that I would include this hill in a recce I'll be doing of a route out of Pitlochry, but I wasn't up for such a long outing today and that route would have involved a pathless yomp out of a forest and up the final 1km of this hill. Looking for something to do this morning, during our drive from Perth to Newtonmore, I saw that not only was there a good parking area to the W of the hill, but reports told me that there was a trodden line all the way up too*. Perfect!
It didn't take many powers of observation to realise that I wasn't going to see much on this outing, and I was in the cloud soon after setting out, thus I have no idea what this hill and those surrounding it look like. What I could observe was that the ATV track was through moderately deep heather in its lower reaches, before becoming less high-steppy further up.
Bellowing stags could be heard off to my left as I made my way over the two nobbles before the summit, but I could see nothing of them (or of anything really).
With visibility being as it was, there was no cause to linger on the summit. A couple of snaps were taken, a message sent to Mick to let him know I was on my way down, then I simply retraced my steps.
The cloud had lowered yet further in the time I'd been out, and with Bertie-the-Motorhome within my sights, it finally decided it could hold its water no longer. Oh to have been 3 minutes quicker or have set out 3 minutes earlier! There was no scrambling into a waterproof jacket, as it had been mizzling when I'd set out so I'd paused to put the jacket on after only about 100m.
Despite not seeing where I was walking, I'd still enjoyed my little leg-stretch, even if I would have preferred slightly more favourable conditions!
The sunglasses may have been optimistic!
(*That trodden line - curious how it's so well trodden considering that there's only one written log on hill-bagging for this year, and eight 'date only' logs.)
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