DISCOVER The Cairngorms
At 20 years old, Britain’s biggest national park is both ancient and young, vast and varied, awesome and accessible. Here are our 20 reasons you should be dazzled not daunted.
20TH BIRTHDAY
CAIRNGORMS NATIONAL PARK
KING OF THE HILLS
The granite of Ben Macdui domes up to 4295 feet (1309m), making it a Munro (Scottish peak over 3000 feet) and the highest land in the national park. For a long time it was thought the loftiest spot in all of Britain, until the Reverend George Keith climbed it in 1810, while his son simultaneously scaled Ben Nevis. Both carried barometers to measure air pressure and thus altitude and Macdui came in second – so incensing some locals they considered building a 50-foot summit cairn to boost it back to first, although recent measurement shows they would have needed a 116-foot heap of stones.
They would have had material to hand. The plateau of Ben Macdui is strewn with boulders, a rocky crown to a majestic mountain. Every approach is a big day, as if to make you viscerally appreciate the heft of this ‘hill of the black pig’. The shortest route starts from the nearest tarmac, 4½ miles north at the Cairngorm ski centre, which also gives you a 2000 feet leg up on the climb. That still leaves more than 2000 feet of hard terrain to the top, a spot Queen Victoria reached in 1859 and wrote: ‘It had a sublime and solemn effect, so wild, so solitary – no one but ourselves and our little party there… I had a little whisky and water, as the people declared pure water would be too chilling.’
More chilling would be an encounter with Am Fear Liath Mòr, the Big Grey Man said to haunt the mists of Ben Macdui, who chased climber Norman Collie down the mountain in 1891: ‘As… the eerie crunch, crunch sounded behind me, I was seized with terror and took to my heels, staggering blindly among the boulders for four or five miles nearly down to Rothiemurchus Forest.’ Aside from the 10-foot phantom, fog up here is a nightmare to navigate, so do wait for fine weather. And you can bag a second Munro by returning over Cairn Gorm (4084ft/1245m), the mountain that gives its name to the national park at your feet.
WALK HERE: Turn to Walk 24 in this issue
WH MURRAY, SCOTLAND’S MOUNTAINS
3 MORE MUNRO CHALLENGES
THE PRETTY ONE
Mountaineer WH Murray thought Cairn Toul (above, beyond loch) ‘the most
