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For almost a month I'd been plotting my last big hillwalk of 2023. I was on 68 Munros overall, and eight for the year, so was desperate to climb two more to round it up neatly to 70 / 10. Work has been very busy and I kept having to postpone it, but eventually I got a day off for Tuesday 3rd October. The plan was put in place: I was going to climb the two Munros on Beinn a' Bheithir, getting the bus up to Ballachulish to save the car a bit of mileage. But first, on the Saturday morning, I had the chance to go a pretend hillwalk to the Necropolis.
A touching tribute to the 2012 X Factor champion.
Tinto Hill and Culter Fell lining up behind Celtic Park. The OS map says the summit is 61m, and my GPS was (wrongly) estimating 70m,. but either way it's a good viewpoint that's often forgotten about, right in the old heart of Glasgow.
As ever though, there was a complication. I don't have any free weekends for Munro-bagging due to having no childcare, so always have to cram in hillwalks to random Tuesdays / Wednesdays. But this weekend was also the stag do of a mate from school. I'd already said no and had almost forgotten about the whole thing, but on the Friday night he texted me from the venue (a lodge in Taynuilt) begging me to come up for at least part of the trip.
There don't seem to be any benches in the Necropolis, but I found a quiet set of steps and sat down there. I wasn't sure what to do, so eventually I phoned the stag do. The groom said it would be great if I could even make it for one night. I suddenly had an audacious idea to swap the holiday, go up to Taynuilt on the Sunday afternoon and climb Beinn a' Bheithir on the Monday. I had to be back in Glasgow for 4:30pm on Monday, but that was doable......surely?
Paesano's pizzas are comically good.
The month of fear (I'm sure it just used to be one day?) Hopefully my adapted trip won't bring any scares for me....
Half an hour later I left Morrisons to find that some of the skeletons had fallen over, along with a sign. Just a breeze from the automatic doors, or a sign of things to come...?
After my wife finished work, I dropped her at home with my daughter and hauled the car up to Glen Lochy. Sunset wasn't due until nearly 7pm and it wasn't quite 4pm yet, so there was definitely enough time to fit in one of the quickest Fionas, Beinn na Sroine.
Eh wait where's the path?
The toughest part of the day was the first couple of minutes, to be honest. This was all a bit last-minute, so I hadn't done full research on the path (a quick look at old WH reports, but I hadn't properly taken it in). An old report from m3doc mentioned leaving the lay-by and finding a gap between two trees just after the road sign, but I couldn't find two obvious trees, so just struck up the hillside into painfully steep ground and tall ferns.
Phew. I found the faint path after some brief pain, and it led me straight up towards the white boulders.
My plan was always to park at the other layby to the East and head up through the forest breaks, but I wasn't sure there was enough time for that today. And there's not a single report by that route (yet?) so I couldn't guarantee it was totally walkable. The last time I planned to go through a firebreak was Meall Dearg, and that even had a path marked on the OS maps (an "Old Military Road", no less!) It didn't go well.It wasn't a road, it was a river...
The view that grabs you on this hill is Ben Lui.
I was aiming to reach the summit within an hour, but I knew that was a tall order. The layby is at 200m, so the climb is still well over 400m, and the path seems to stop at the white boulders. The Strava heatmap suggested there's another path further up, but I just wanted to aim for the gap in the hill.
A braw view of Glen Lochy.
Aha! My 40th Fiona summit awaits.
In the end it was 1hr 5mins to the top. Didn't quite reach my "target" of an hour, but these things really are meaningless when I think about it. If I'm not running to reach a bus / train / childcare commitment / sunset, then the most important thing is just to get up and down safely.
I didn't plan on reaching 40 Fionas when I'm still only on 33 Corbetts, but if you find one right next to the road, you're gonna climb it right?
The other good thing about today was that it proved I could still climb hills with my current injury. After I climbed a Munro and a Donald in the same day at the end of August, I realised that I had injured my foot on the Donald. A visit to the doctor suggested it was an achilles tendon injury, but the cream they gave wasn't really helping. I don't know how long these things take to heal, and I knew that extra hillwalks probably wouldn't help the situation, but at least I had got up here in just over an hour. It only hurts when I keep my left leg totally straight and point my foot up, so just Don't Do That and I should be fine.
The remains of...something. There used to be a single wind turbine up here, and some sort of mast.
Loch Awe in the early evening sunshine. Try and spot Kilchurn Castle if you can?
After 10 minutes at the summit I picked up the higher path, which led to a secondary summit looking towards Bridge of Orchy. I could just make out the hotel in the distance, at the top of Glen Orchy.
The faint path led down an equally faint ridge (can you get a faint ridge?) before disappearing again, so I had to cut across to the South-West to pick up the first path at the white boulders.
Oh. Well that wasn't in the script!
I yanked the bottom of the walking stick out of the hole in the ground where it had got stuck, and re-attached it to the top. Surely it's permanently damaged now? Oh well, I can check that during the winter. Just one more push to Beinn a' Bheithir tomorrow then I'm going into hibernation.
Back at the white boulders, I picked up the lower path. The pace was surprisingly good here, since I used to be quite bad at descending hills. Could I get back down within two hours?
Aha, nearly there. And I can follow the path down to the road this time (since I'm already on it), cutting out that bad step I had at the start.
So if you're looking for the start of the path, it's somewhere here. Wish it was more obvious, but if you can't find it at the start you should stumble across it in a couple of minutes, once you get up through the ferns.
42 minutes after leaving the summit, and 1hr 57 minutes after starting out, I'm back. This was quite a surprise - from my experience, some of the toughest hills are steep Fionas without clear paths, but I guess there was more of a path than I was expecting. Maybe I'll never know if the forest to the South-East offers a clear route - has anyone ever been that way? Except the tree planters?
In the morning I had phoned the Ben Cruachan Inn in Lochawe, asking about a takeaway menu. They seemed a bit confused, telling me that
"we don't really do takeaways", but when I asked doubly nicely they offered to
"cook something from the main menu and put it in a box", which is traditionally how takeaways work in most places. I called again from the car as I approached Dalmally.
They didn't do fish and chips, even though it was front and centre of their website, because
"that's just our lunch menu" 
(I could live to 200 and never understand that policy, but ok?) Eventually they offered me some posh-sounding chicken thigh dish for £18. This is the Highlands, and it's a Sunday night out of season, so there wasn't really a Plan B. £18 chicken it is.
There used to be a pub in Taynuilt, but it...burnt down. #AccidentalPartridge
I mean, it'll do, because I'm starving... but I'll have to scrape the burnt bits off. What is it about this area - burnt pubs, burnt chicken, burnt everything?
Some sort of dessert thing (cooked by the stags, not the Ben Cruachan).
In the end I spent about five hours or so with the stags. It was after 6:30pm when I got there, and by midnight most of them were in bed. Thankfully there was a spare bed as one of them had left a day early, but it still wasn't a great night's sleep. I had to be up at 6:30am, to try and get to South Ballachulish for 8pm and rush through a six-hour hillwalk before hauling myself back to Glasgow for 4:30pm. None of this was ideal, but it was the only way of combining the stag do and Beinn a' Bheithir. And at least I had thrown in a bonus Fiona on the way up, in surprisingly good weather. It chucked it down after I arrived in Taynuilt, but there had been no rain on the hill and lots of sunshine.
On the summit of Beinn na Sroine I had taken a load of great zoom photos with my proper camera. Kilchurn Castle, Bridge of Orchy, the summit of Ben Lui. I'd have liked to share those in the report, but, well, I don't have my camera anymore. And the reason for that is......
......I'll tell you next time.
To Be Continued......
The Worst Win:
https://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=121401