Ben Nevis and Glen Coe - A Walking Guidebook

The area from Ben Nevis southwards towards Glen Coe offers some of the finest mountain walking in the UK. This guide not only covers Lochaber's spectacular summits but also describes mid-level walks and gentle strolls, great through routes along empty glens, and tent or bothy treks - serious in terms of remoteness and scenery.

The mapping used on lower walks in this book is from the Ordnance Survey’s Landranger series at 1:50,000 (enlarged in Routes 49 and 58). For high mountain walks, too, these maps were for about 40 years the only ones available, and are perfectly satisfactory: sheet 41 is Ben Nevis and Glen Coe with part of Black Mount and Glen Etive; the rest of Black Mount and Glen Etive, southwards to Ben Cruachan, are on sheet 50 (Glen Orchy) – annoyingly, the two sheets don’t overlap.

For detailed exploration of crags and corries and pathless boulder slopes, you will be helped by the extra contour detail at 1:25,000 scale. For the ground they cover, the two Harveys Superwalker maps ‘Ben Nevis’ and ‘Glen Coe’ score very highly. They are beautifully clear and legible, mark paths where they actually exist on the ground, and do not disintegrate when damp. They overlap conveniently, so that Kinlochleven is on both. However, about ten of the routes here (notably, Cruachan) aren’t on them.

Also at 1:25,000 is the Explorer series of the Ordnance Survey. They have excellent contour detail on the lower ground, but many of the summits are so obscured with crag-marks that the contour detail is almost illegible. Sheet 392 (Ben Nevis and Fort William) and Sheet 384 (Glen Coe and Glen Etive) overlap usefully at Kinlochleven. The southern half of the Black Mount, along with Ben Cruachan, is on double-sided Sheet 377 (Loch Etive and Glen Orchy), with a really inconvenient overlap along the Etive ridge.

Harveys also offer an A4-sized Ben Nevis summit map at 12,500. This is equivalent to the summit enlargement on the back of their 1:25,000 map but with the very useful addition of 100m grid lines for GPS users.

I’d suggest the Landranger series for its completeness and clarity. For mountain explorations, the Harvey maps are a very valuable add-on.