Ardgour and Moidart have traditionally been regarded as areas devoid of high hills – rugged and challenging but not high. Yet grass on a lawn might be described as high if it was 20cm above soil level. The word ‘high’ has little meaning unless it is in relation to something else.
With the definition of ‘high’ set at 838m, Moidart has six high hills, Ardgour has three and Sunart and Kingairloch have one each. The hills have not changed, only the perception of them, with a little adjustment and an open mind.
The eleven hills form an impressive team. Six of them have over 500m drop, ten have over 100m drop. Few people would be able to name all eleven without consulting a map or website, or this book. Garbh Bheinn and Beinn Resipol are well known, and to some extent Rois-Bheinn. Keen walkers would know that the highest peak in Ardgour is Sgurr Dhomhnuill, but after that it becomes difficult. How many hill walkers would get four out of four for naming, spelling and pronouncing Sgurr Ghiubhsachain and knowing its height. Some would say that it is being there that matters, not the height or name of a hill. They would have a fair point, but it is also fair to point out that there has to be a reason for choosing to be there. For hill baggers, a hill list provides that reason. All the other rewards of hill walking follow on naturally.
Druim Fiaclach is one of the eleven. It had been high on my priority list for several years, but it was a long and flexible priority list. The weather had rarely been favourable when I was in the area, but the truncated spring of 2018 brought a sudden transition from winter to summer. Snow that had piled up during the long, cold winter was still accumulating in the first half of April, but by the end of the month the snowfields were receding rapidly in warm sunshine. This was the potentially wonderful window of opportunity before the midges arrived, when the land was warming up, vegetation was low, soft snow had melted and the coating of firm snow remaining on the hills was a pleasure to walk on.
Druim Fiaclach slotted into that window. Snow that was there in the morning had gone by afternoon. Not so good for photography but a great help for surveying. An unwieldy pile of loose rocks had also been on top in the morning but had gone by the time I left. It was not a cairn, not a shelter and certainly not a thing of beauty. It had no conceivable value or purpose so it had to go. The aftermath of its removal, a few square metres of mud and soil, was not a pretty sight, but it was an improvement in my opinion. The summit had a chance to breathe, recover and revegetate, and I was able to obtain an accurate measurement.
On the way up to the summit, my plan for the day had to be revised. Instead of turning west toward Sgurr na Ba Glaise, I had to head east, because an impressive new summit had arisen out of a single contour ring on the map. After puzzling over this for a while, I knew I had to give more weight to the land I could see in front of me than the OS representation of that land on sheet 40. The map had to be wrong. And so Druim Fiaclach East Top was created, the highest point of a narrow, grassy ridge with a steep drop to the south and a steeper one to the north. It was brilliant to walk along it and to discover it had a relative height of 31m. A fine find.
After I got home I found out that the new hill already had an entry on the Hill Bagging site, credited to alda, the person who discovered it. It was my own user name. Apparently, I had noticed it on a large-scale digital map the previous year. Well, there were a lot of hills up there, so even pedantic people could not remember everything all the time.
As I had forgotten about the hill, I had the pleasure of discovering it for a second time then immediately climbing and measuring it. What great fun there was to be found in the hills, even when you didn’t know where to look for it. The view wasn’t bad either. The summit was 829.3m so not strictly high enough to be mentioned here, but it was the highlight of a great day.
Beinn Odhar Bheag was easily high enough to be mentioned, but how high exactly? That was the burning issue I set out to resolve as I made my way up it the next day. According to OS maps it was 882m, the same as Rois-Bheinn further west. So which of the two was the ruler of the land of Moidart? Rois-Bheinn (also known as ROB) had been awarded that honour because it used to have a trig pillar, so its 882m was guaranteed. Beinn Odhar Bheag (also known as BOB) had no such guarantee, so it could be lower or higher. Its small cairn was much easier to deal with than the mess on Druim Fiaclach and turned out to be not quite on the highest point anyway, so I reinstated it.
Reaching the top of BOB had involved more effort than expected. I knew that I would have to go over its northern neighbour, named as Beinn Odhar Mhor (BOM) despite being 13m lower. I also knew that I would then have to descend about 110m. However, I did not expect to have to go back up BOM before climbing BOB. When I reached the col between them and unpacked my survey equipment, I found that the long pole with the pointed end was missing. It had last been seen on the top of BOM and was presumably still up there.
I pummelled and cajoled a spare short, blunt-ended pole into the firm earth, propped it against my rucksack so that the antenna on top would remain upright, set the controller to gather data and climbed back up those 110m to retrieve my pole, while trying to focus on the superb surroundings instead of cursing my carelessness. It didn’t work, but at least I had the pleasure of finding my pointed pole lying by the trig pillar where I had left it. By the time I got back down to reunite the pair of poles, I was able to laugh at my daftness. Leica cable, Leica Disto D510 laser level, Panasonic Lumix camera, Garmin Oregon 600 GPS, various gloves, hats and walking poles, all had been left behind at some summit or col in the past few years, but forgetting 90cm of hefty pole was a new development. The day before on Druim Fiaclach I had forgotten about a summit I had discovered. I could see a pattern of forgetfulness developing, but I soon forgot about it.
Another diversion was required after I had collected data from the top of BOB. It looked a long way down to Beinn a' Chaorainn, but the effort required for climbing a new hill was always more enjoyable than the effort required to retrace steps and retrieve a piece of equipment. Then finally it was time to turn around and head back toward my friends in an absurdly luxurious holiday house in Glenfinnan, with the steaming Harry Potter train running alongside the back garden. That meant climbing up BOB again, which was inevitably followed by going down and then up to the top of BOM for a third time.
I had climbed plenty of hills twice in the same day, but could not recall doing as much bobbing and bombing about before. Was this the first time I had climbed the same damned hill three times in one day? It probably was, but of course I couldn’t remember. Even my trusted lifeline for accessing vanished memories, my Access database, could not help me on that question, because I only ever recorded a hill once for any day. Still, it gave me something new to think about as I sauntered back downhill and tried to remember which way I had gone up.
It soon became known throughout most major civilisations that BOB was 883.3m and therefore presumed to be higher than 882.5m ROB. There were even far-off lands where shrines were created with scale models in the shape of King BOB, in order to worship the ruler of the land of Moidart. I thought I remembered reading that somewhere but perhaps I had made it up. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. What was certain was that by increasing the height of BOB by 1.3m to 883.3m, I had increased its relative height by 251m to 774m. If that does not make sense then I’m afraid it means you have still not fully grasped how relative height works. It is a bit like overthrowing the King of France and finding you are in charge of Reunion and Guadeloupe, as well as all the weapons and jewellery.
After such a dramatic change, I realised it would be embarrassing if I measured ROB and found it to be higher than BOB after all, so it was probably best if I did not measure it. Perhaps one day I would climb ROB again and forget to take my survey equipment. That seemed like a good idea, so to try to remember it I made a note in my notebook. A few weeks later I lost the notebook.
