The Lowther Hills - A Walker's Guidebook

Beautiful landscapes, accessible but quiet, offering some of the best walking in Southern Scotland’s hills. Covers the Lowther hills, Nithsdale, Carsphairn Hills and the hills of the Solway coast, Cairnsmore of Fleet, Tinto and Cauldcleuch Head.

Drive off the top end of the M6 on your way to the Highlands and you pass a place called Beattock Summit. On either hand lie some rather flat, rather low hills. Green forest embellishes their lower slopes, yellow grass their gentle summits.

This is a trick, perpetrated in the interest of road safety. You already terrified your passengers driving up the Lune Valley while looking over your shoulder at the Howgills. They’re only just recovering, and it wouldn’t do to terrify them again just 50 miles up the road. So the interesting hills are carefully concealed behind yellow grass and gentle slopes.

So take the next pass west, the A702 through Dalveen, and see something rather reminiscent of those Howgills. Steep grass rises on either side, neatly cut by stream cleuchs. Here and there a rock peeps through the velvety green covering: these hills have bones to them. Forgotten drove roads slant up the valley side. West again is the Mennock Pass, where you see the same thing done in heather mixture.

So while these hills offer grassy ridgewalking, they also offer a little bit more in the exploration of the stream hollows, the holes in the hill where the wild goats hang out and where you may find yourself involved with a small waterfall and a couple of feet of rock-climbing. I like to combine these two sorts of ground into a day or half-day’s walking.

Along the Galloway coast are hills of a different sort: smaller, but fiercer. These granite lumps look across the Solway to the Lake District, and have a touch of Lakeland wildness themselves, with boulders everywhere, little bits of black bog and heather. They culminate in Cairnsmore of Fleet: a high-altitude, high-rainfall small wilderness of international importance. Its peat bog, granite slab and black heather combine to make one of Britain’s top small mountains.

The Galloway Highlands are not part of the territory of this guide. The Merrick and Rhinns of Kells are covered in the publisher’s companion volume, Walking the Galloway Hills by Paddy Dillon. Hills to the east of the M74 (soon to be M6) are in Alan Hall’s two books Walks in the Lammermuir Hills and The Border Country. However, two fine two-thousanders managed to slip through the net, and so Tinto Hill in Lanarkshire and Cauldcleuch Head in Roxburghshire are scooped into this, the best of the rest of the Southern Uplands.

This is a book of hills, not mountains: but hills with rather more to them than grass, sheep and solitude. I hope you will enjoy, as I have done, getting into the hidden stream valleys, discovering the odd small crag, and wandering in mist, rain or cool sunlight over these wide and empty lands.