Scottish Mountains

I have been fascinated by the Scottish Mountains since I first went to Kintail with the scouts in 1961. This journal reports some of my most memorable trips. I have always cherry-picked which mountains to climb, and they cover some of the most exciting and challenging mountains. Not all of them are Munros, but they are all fine expeditions. My earlier trips were with university climbing clubs. I climbed with people from the Manchester University Climbing Club (MUMC) in the sixties and with the Cambridge University Climbing Club (CUMC) in the late seventies and early eighties. From 1990, I climbed with Scharlie, my wife, or went alone. Eight areas organise the trips. This means that the dates of trips jump around, and I go from old to young and back again. I begin with the Fisherfield Forest in the Northwest of Scotland, nicknamed the Great Wildness because it is remote and uninhabited and is considered one of the last true wildernesses in the United Kingdom. I also went even further north, to Assynt, and to Knoydart, both equally rugged and remote. Some of the trips were walks, rather than climbs, although most of them involved some scrambling and are graded "5 booters" by www.walkhighlands.co.uk, as being arduous and/or with tricky scrambling. Some, however, on Carnmore, Ben Nevis and Lochnagar involved rock climbing or snow and ice. I am indebted to Richard Gilbert's excellent book, 200 Challenging Walks in Britain and Ireland, for inspiring some of these trips and for the use of his maps, and to Ken Wilson's books, Wild Walks and Hard Rock. Unlike some of my other journals, I didn't make notes at the time. To relive the trips and jog my memory, I made extensive use of the many videos now available on YouTube.