Torridon - A Walker's Guidebook

The region of Torridon offers a great deal of potential for the walker. Expeditions ranging from low-level and fairly easy walks to ascent routes of Torridon’s best 32 summits, including nine Munros. 52 walks, many free-ranging over heather, grass, rock and marsh. Sketch maps show the route, plus stalker's and the other paths.

I first started hill walking in the Lake District in my early fifties, and came to live in Shieldaig on Loch Torridon in 1983. These notes, describing the easiest and safest ways to reach the tops of the Torridon mountains, were originally intended for friends using our cottage. It seemed that they might be useful to other visitors with hillwalking enthusiasm and experience, visiting Torridon for the first time; the sort of folk who are properly equipped and able to use a map and compass, who may, for example, have enjoyed climbing Great Gable, Tryfan or The Cobbler by the easier routes, but prefer not to risk their lives or frighten themselves by exposure in precipitous places and narrow ridges.

Poucher’s excellent guide The Scottish Peaks deals with only six of the thirty-one mountains over two thousand feet in the Torridon region which, for this purpose, I have interpreted widely to include the two hundred square miles south west of Loch Maree and north of the Achnasheen-Achnashellach-Lochcarron road, but including Slioch and its environs.

I am upset by steep scree and exposed mountain routes that others find merely ‘interesting’. In the Wainwright tradition I have explored these mountains alone, looking for the easiest, and not necessarily the shortest, routes to the summits. Unlike most of the Cumbrian and Welsh peaks, the majority of these mountains do not have paths or walker’s tracks up them, but the many excellent stalker’s paths take one deep into wild country and often give a flying start to an ascent. But walkers in Torridon have to accustom themselves to free-ranging over heather, grass, rock and marsh. A lot of the lower ground is wet, but in my experience, perfectly safe to cross as long as one looks at where one is putting one’s feet, as mountain walkers should always do. Occasionally black peak bogs, with miniature cliffs and sullen countenance, can look menacing, but they are easily circumvented, and, in fact, are often quite hard. In wet places just tread on the grass or heather (but not on moss) and you will not sink more than a few inches. Generally when free-ranging, the going is much better over 1000 feet and the higher the better, where there is little heather and the grass is shorter and rock comes to predominate. However, heather is excellent non-slip stuff for descending steep muddy slopes.