free to be able to rate and comment on reports (as well as access 1:25000 mapping).
The distance is just for the walk. I’d come from Bridge of Orchy station, so that’s an extra 13k cycle each way.
This was a revisit of a route that two of us found by accident about ten years ago. We’d left Forest Lodge without having decided where we were going. We reached Meall nan Eun on the east side and could only see up a couple of hundred metres below the cloud. It looked possible so we went. It was only after that we found out the Munro book says there’s no route on this side.
Last time we’d crossed the ridge from Clashgour Farm which the Munro book says is far better than stumbling along the side of Loch Dochart. In this case the book's right. I was going to try to add Stob Coir'an Albannaich so Loch Dochart seemed better. Anyway an estate worker told me they were stalking in the corrie so the Clashgour route was out (embarrassingly I’d forgotten to check before).
It was a 75 minute cycle to the loch, which seemed a bit long. It was an interminable stumble across to Meall nan Eun, made worse because I tried to contour higher to avoid the wet. I photographed some of the approach but cameras kind of intimidate me. I’d filled the memory at this point and in vaguely stabbing at delete buttons without my glasses I got rid of my pictures of the trip so far.
It doesn't look approachable from below but the trick is to climb the north bank of the gully then shift to the south and cross the corrie.
- Top of the gully
Or that’s what I remembered. In fact I missed my turn and went up over some boilerplates that I was a bit less happy reversing.
- Gully from above
I’d thought the upper half was a hanging corrie but there’s just a slightly shallower slope.
- Not really a corrie
I crossed it to get to the ease of the south east ridge.
- From the south east ridge
This ridge then leads easily to the summit.
There’s some disparaging comments on the site about it as a viewpoint. I liked it. I’d now used 4 hours of my day and I started towards Stob Coir'an Albannaich. But I reckoned that the summit was another hour and that would leave me three hours to get back to the train. I didn’t fancy an attempt to cross the bogs behind Loch Dochart at speed, so I decided to go for a pint instead.
I dropped into Coire Chaorach and then took a straight line back to the head of the loch. An animal track I followed was better than the attempt to traverse on the way in.
I took this picture as I retreated. The way up is on the far side of the obvious gully, swapping sides at the first outcrop.
It was a relief to get back to the stepping stones.
The cycle back was downhill and fast. You don’t notice the height you’re gaining on the way in, just think you’re getting slow. I was back in Bridge of Orchy with time for a plate of soup and a couple of pints.
Real ale is a good news, bad news subject around here. The good news is availability. They were selling Bitter and Twisted and a few weeks ago in Crianlarich I was served Jarl. The bad news is the cost. It was £4.50 a pint in both places which is outrageous. Most Wednesday afternoons I have a couple of pints of an excellent local real ale in Hudson’s in East Kilbride at £1.99 a pint. It looks a concrete dive but it’s a really well run shop. If you’re getting back to your roots, it’s next door to a bookie’s and a chippie. On the other hand if you’re going up a hill the nearest is the windfarm-covered Corse Hill.
But when I was young, you could walk into a pub anywhere in Scotland and know what your pint would cost. That would be 11p, though the bad news would be it was a bogging pint of Tartan Special and the pub would be a smoky hovel. So there have been improvements but neither of these hotels are particularly well-appointed, transport costs are far less than they were and that mark-up is impossible to justify. Ah, the West Highland Way. Let’s rip off the tourists.