Pap of Glencoe, Sgorr nam Fiannaidh (+ bonus Glencoe Lochan)

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The Pap of Glencoe is intensely visually pleasing. It looks very mountainous despite not being very high. Panoramas abound atop its conical dome. Sgorr nam Fiannaidh is more commonly climbed from the other side as part of the difficult Aonach Eagach ridge walk. Probably it has amazing views. I don’t know; we could see nothing at all from the top except cloud. Glencoe Lochan is remarkably beautiful and well worth a short visit even for more dedicated walkers.

The Pap from Glencoe

We got to Fort William by N44 bus. Unlike the regular, coherent, clearly-documented bus services in the Lakes or Snowdonia, we found piecing together the fragmented bus info a little tricky here. We arrived at what we thought might be a bus stop, where some sources informed us it was broadly plausible our desired bus might opt to stop. It was unclear to us if it was just going to be a school bus, leaving us perched incongruously amidst a gaggle of gossiping teens. In the event, the bus was fine.

Along the main street through Glencoe, past the Lochan (we’d return later), and hugging the road along the forest’s perimeter. After a well-built-looking white house, the path to the Pap veers steep up the hillside.

In route guides this path is much-maligned as being boggy and heavily eroded, so we were wary what we’d encounter. We found the path fair enough going. In some parts the path is shallow standing water, in others soil and rock gullies, in others vertiginously steep; that makes this walk harder than it looks given the short distance and low height, but the route is easy to follow, and we felt the warnings a little overstated. Probably you shouldn’t take your granny up this route, unless she was caprinely sure-footed and up for a steep 700m climb.

After about 1.5 hours of hard climbing, the path veers to the left, with the rocky route to Sgorr nam Fiannaidh cutting off to the right. We continued left, reaching the saddle in short order and then onto the Pap itself. This was a little more hairy. While not quite a scramble, any notion of a convincing path dwindled rapidly into sheets of scree and rough rocky steps.

Rocky route to the Pap's summit

We followed a scantly cairn-strewn route curving off to the right of the summit, to reach the top from the north. Crowded cloud was falling fast, but the Pap hunched just below it.

View over Loch Leven

Back down to the saddle was tricky and slow. We dropped down to the point where the route to Sgorr nam Fiannaidh arcs away to the right; the top of the peak was thickly shrouded. Hardly seems worth getting the bus to Glencoe for a 3 hour walk, though – so up we went.

On our OS Explorer the path for this route is not marked; WalkHighlands has by far the truer map. It’s a steep haul from the knee of the Pap path, with many false summits along the way. At first the loose rocky path is clear to follow; higher up it marks faint umber across grey scree. Cloud dulls both sound and colour. Pole on rock clattered flatly across pale rock and pale grass.

Off to our left, the Pap reared its barnacle bulk, intermittent in the mist. This route is a short distance for the crow, perhaps, but 500m of climb for us from the Pap path, and took us a long hour. At the top, 2 small cairns loomed suddenly from the mist; a third, larger cairn – initially misidentified as a sheep – marks the true summit. No views of any sort, and easy to lose the route back after getting turned around in the mist. At the summit another walker – the first we’d seen since leaving the Pap path – appeared, passed and vanished in silence. The return to the Pap path starts steep and continues steeper; at least we were out of the cloud after a few minutes of descent, with impressive views over Loch Leven.

Back at valley level and with an hour to spare, we paid a quick visit to the Lochan. This was an unexpected gem, though we felt out of place with packs and poles. There are 3 colored routes clearly marked by wooden poles, one circumnavigating the lake and the other 2 the Canadian forest and the hill. The Lochan is stunning below the Pap’s peak. The other two paths are marked as “strenuous”; we laughed at the boldness of this classification before hauling sweatily and slowly up the short but strikingly steep route to the lookout point from Stac a’ Chlamhain. We fitted most of the three routes into our brief hour-long trip here, but were going at some pace and missed a full circumnavigation of the lake; you could easily spend 2 hours or more enjoying the routes through the forest.

The Pap from the Lochan