We all make mistakes. On Sunday, I made two: firstly (pretty minor) not realising that you can now park above the bridge at the bottom of the Callop track, and secondly (gruesomely major) getting the forest completely wrong! So perhaps I shouldn’t have made either when you’d think a previous sortie up that track for a run along Loch Shiel might have alerted me to the parking (which, to be fair, turns out to be marked on my GPS map but not my computer/printed ones) and the new SMC Grahams and Donalds book tells you the correct line through the forest (more or less as marked by my dashed line), but I was just vaguely remembering something I’d read online about that and belatedly discovered that the tracks spied from above just weren’t what I wanted at all. So I took an obvious opening between two posts in the obvious corner in the deer fence through to some barriers across a track I could see, found the dead end west of that, set off back east, took another branch north where the main track clearly continues east, found the dead end there too (all under construction!), persevered with a fire break west rather than retrace my steps again, lost one leg up to the thigh in bog (I was almost ‘swimming’!) heading through a gateless ‘gate’ in another fence and finally escaped north along the line of the fence for an unplanned trudge along the road to retrieve my van in torchless dark…
Apart from all that, it was another great and solitary hill day (my sixth in a row meeting no-one!) on ground I’ve missed getting to know for too many years. While Sgurr Ghiubhsachain forms the day’s literal and metaphorical high point and looks stunning from some angles (notably the north-east), it probably doesn’t quite topple Sgurr Dhomhnuill for me as Ardgour’s second peak (Garbh Bheinn remaining the clear first) when Dhomhnuill scores for both height and distant dominance as well as shape from every angle. But who needs to rank them at all when we’re talking three great peaks in this Munro-free land and they’re all free to anyone prepared to seek them out? Might also be worth mentioning the curious parallel fences traversing my loop’s south-most ridge and begging the simple question ‘why’? Some kind of territorial dispute with no man’s land between, or just two parallel fences?
