The Munros Vol 1 - Southern, Central and Western Highlands

This first volume of Cicerone’s two-part series to the Munros covers the southern, central and western highlands, Glencoe, Lochaber and Mull, and details routes for these 139 exciting and challenging mountains. Volume 2 covers north of the Great Glen and the Cairngorms.

There are 284 Munros – that’s a lot of cheese sandwiches. It’s a lot of blisters, too, and sweat and tired muscles and wet socks. But think of the positive side. Doing the Munros will take you to places of quite extraordinary beauty that you would never otherwise have seen; places that inspire awe, reflection and sometimes fear. The pleasures awaiting the Munroist are many and varied. Navigating your way through the primeval wonderland of Scotland’s mountain landscapes will put the rest of your life into a new perspective. There will be moments of great satisfaction, often in the midst of adversity; moments when you have unforgettable encounters with wildlife, and moments when friendships are forged through shared experience.

Climbing the Munros can also give you a richer understanding of the forces that have shaped this great landscape, and an appreciation of the lives of those hardy creatures and plants that depend upon it for their existence. It will perhaps introduce you to some of the great stories of Scottish history that have been played out in the Highlands. If you are lucky it might even give you a greater understanding of your own inner strengths and weaknesses, a discovery of where your own limits lie and a chance to stretch yourself beyond them. There is a lot to be gained from walking the Scottish hills.

So why is there a need for this new guide to the Munros when there are other more lavishly illustrated guides on the market? The answer became clear to me when I saw walkers carrying scribbled route descriptions and crumpled photocopies with them on walks. Big, hardback guidebooks are fine for a coffee table, but they can’t be slipped into your back pocket and taken with you where they’re really needed. This guide, with its waterproof jacket, can be taken on your walk, and gives a full, clear and up-to-date route description.

Let’s be honest about it: doing the Munros is not as hard as it once was. The logistics are much easier now, for a start; within the lifetime of one generation many of the Highland roads have become wider, straighter and faster. Where once you had to wait until morning for a ferryman to arrive and take one or two cars across at a time, now there is a bridge. There are also more people walking the hills; routes are well established and danger points better understood. A good safety net is also provided by mountain rescue teams across the country in the event of things going wrong. Route-finding is also much easier than it used to be, with a network of paths on most of the major hills where thousands of others have gone before. But – and it is a big but – climbing the Munros is still an adventure; one that will grip you and give you a fund of memories to last a lifetime. And when the weather turns bad there is just the same need as ever there was for sound judgement, fortitude and navigational skill to bring you safely home.

The qualities required of the Munroist are not technically or even physically as demanding as those, say, of the rock climber or the high-altitude mountaineer (unless the routes are being done in winter conditions, in which case they can become a serious and arduous mountaineering undertaking). But a certain doggedness is nevertheless needed – the perseverance to see through a huge task – plus the skill and courage to navigate in conditions that can change all too rapidly in the Scottish hills. And this is not to mention a willingness to get wet, cold, shrouded in mist and buffeted by storms. If you only venture out when the sun is shining on the tops it may take more than one lifetime to complete the round.

The Munros

What exactly are the Munros? I don’t propose here to retell the history of this select group of hills. Suffice to say that Sir Hugh Munro’s great idea of climbing all the 3000ft mountains in Scotland has for over a century captured the imagination of everyone who loves mountains. In the popular imagination the Round of Munros includes all the hills that are over 3000ft in height. Once you start climbing them, however, you quickly realize that this is not the whole story. There are many points where the land rises above 3000ft but is not regarded as a separate hill; or where it clearly is a separate hill, but it has still not been accorded the status of a Munro.

Sir Hugh’s original list, drawn up in 1891, was rather different from the most recently updated version. Some revisions have taken place as a result of improvements in mapping. Sir Hugh, for example, rather conveniently believed that the Inaccessible Pinnacle was lower than Sgurr Dearg and so it was not originally listed as a Munro. Even today the latest satellite mapping techniques may reveal that the accepted heights of hills is wrong (usually only by the odd metre). The Munro summit of Ben a’ Chroin had to be redefined a couple of years ago because what was previously thought to be a lower Top nearly 1km away was found to be 1m higher than the classified summit. Similarly the respective heights of Beinn a’ Chaorainn’s three summits have recently been revised, and Ben Nevis itself is now officially 1m lower than it was a few years ago.

Successive revisions of the list by the Great and the Good have sought to declassify some hills and upgrade others, not just because their respective heights have been reassessed but also on the basis of their ‘character’ or ‘remoteness’, or whether it was felt that readers ought to be directed to one rather than another. There is not always an obvious logic to the hills that are in or out of the list at any moment in time, and the list has been revised so often that it is in some danger of being discredited. The last revision came in 1997, and on the current list there are 284 Munros and 227 Tops.

Despite all the argument and lack of clarity about what makes a hill a Munro, and despite the all-too-frequent revisions, there is no doubting the fact that the underlying idea of the list makes sense to most people; it always has made sense and it probably always will. The list stands for something meaningful both to the hillwalker and to the public at large, and that something involves the idea that the Munros are all the highest hills in Scotland