Ever since my first real mountain walking trip, to the Cairngorm plateau, I have been fascinated by the idea that in Scotland there can exist at high altitudes, even in the summer months, a small portion of the arctic. This trip was in June 1983, and the Cairngorm plateau then truly was arctic in nature,… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Mountains & hills
Maiden Scotland and Geal-charn Mor
On Saturday I went to see Maiden Scotland, an Iron Maiden tribute band with Lesley at the Studio 24 venue in Edinburgh. She has written about it on her blog here. It was a good gig with some great Iron Maiden tracks played the way they should be, and Maiden Scotland really sounded good. The… Read more »
The Ordnance Survey: evil or angelic?
Ever since I can remember, the Ordnance Survey (the OS; the National Mapping Agency of Great Britain) maps (particularly the Landranger 1:50 000 scale maps) have been the passport to many things that I do in my spare time: from cycling through cities to driving through countryside, they have been, and remain, invaluable and as… Read more »
The Australian Pink Floyd and The Whangie
Last Saturday (as well as moving flat) I went to the Glasgow SECC to see the The Australian Pink Floyd (a Pink Floyd tribute band) with Lesley. We’ve seen this band once before, and they’re probably the closest that you can get to seeing the real thing live, so closely do they recreate the sound… Read more »
Creag Uchdag
On Thursday last week, I climbed the 879m summit of Creag Uchdag with Chris, a colleague from work. Both of us have climbed all the larger and more well-known summits near Edinburgh, so we decided to climb something a bit more out of the way. The weather forecast was also not that great, and a… Read more »
Beinn Dearg
Yesterday I walked to the 1008m summit of Beinn Dearg, near Blair Atholl (photographs here). It was a very long walk, just over 30km and took me about 9 hours. A long walk like this, to reach a remote Munro summit, would normally be quite difficult this early in the year, but the weather was… Read more »
Has climate change already affected hillwalking in Scotland and further afield?
The answer to this is unquestionably yes. I’ve been walking in the Scottish mountains regularly since 1993 and in that time I have noticed a definite change in the mountain environment, specifically the conditions in the winter months. Since about the year 2000, the number of trips during the winter months where I have needed… Read more »
My macabre interest
I go walking a lot in various parts of Scotland, especially the more mountainous and hilly bits, and I have a secret about this that that I don’t tell many people; I’m fascinated by aircraft crash wreckage that you find surprisingly often in these sorts of places. I’ve written in detail about this here.
Ben Starav
Yesterday I climbed to the summit of Ben Starav, in Glen Etive, at 1078m (photographs here). The walk starts at sea level and goes straight up to the summit via a 3km rocky ridge, so is a relatively hard slog. I’d tried to get to the top of this mountain two years ago, in January… Read more »
Safety in the mountains
There’s been a lot of talk on the news recently about safety in the mountains, prompted by several deaths in the past few months in the Coire an t-Sneachda area of the Cairngorm mountains. Yes, there’s no question that people die in the Scottish mountains, especially in winter, and even if they have all the… Read more »
I am a software engineer / database administrator / web developer living in Edinburgh, Scotland. In my spare time I like to travel and take photographs (especially of mountains). See my main website here: Eddie's Photo Archive