Christine's walking & birds blog

Meall a' Ghiubhais

We started off hopefully up the Mountain Trail in the Beinn Eighe National Nature Reserve, as the Met Office had forecast clear weather for the tops. The trail can be used to reach two Corbetts, although one was enough for us today.  The pleasant pine woods (we thought we heard crossbills at one point) eventually peter out, and the trail, with its steps cut into the rock, takes you high into rugged country.

  
Nearing the highest point on the trail we could see our hill, and somewhere past the lochan we would leave the trail for the last pull to the summit ridge. At this point, the weather still looked promising.


But as we began the trudge up the hill, the cloud started to close in. Robbed of views, I concentrated on small things. A frog hopped out of the way and sat motionless on a stone. Thrift and moss made a mountain rockery.


A tiny flower gave me some trouble with ID, as I assumed it had four white petals. But it turns out these are bracts (a specialised leaf) and the purple centre is the actual flower. It's called Dwarf Cornel.


When we reached the top of the slope, we could see nothing; but Greger led the way unerringly along the ridge to the cairn on what we thought at the time was the lower top.


The idea is then to walk along the summit plateau to the south-west to gain the higher top (by 10 metres). So we took the map and compass out and I took a reading first, swinging round to point out the route back the way we had come.

And here is where we made our mistake. We had a preconceived idea of where we ought to be heading. We thought we should be continuing on from this cairn, and because of this I assumed I had taken the compass reading from the map wrongly. I tried again and then it seemed that the compass needle wasn't moving properly. Where was north? We started to speculate wildly about magnetic rocks. This is well-known on Skye, where a compass can be unreliable in the Cuillins; but I hadn't heard of it on the mainland. And you can have a compass swing round 180º - it's happened to us; but we'd used this one very recently and it was fine.

We continued a little way further along the ridge, and it seemed to me that there was no higher ground ahead. A cold wind had now sprung up and we decided we'd had enough. The wonderful views of the Torridon mountains and along Loch Maree to the sea were not going to be ours, and we were disappointed enough not to care about reaching the actual top. But before we started to descend, we saw movement among the rocks in the mist - a ptarmigan with three or four chicks!




Bird-wise, the ptarmigan family had "saved the hill". We sat on a steep slope and had a belated lunch, and then made our way down over an unstable boulder field carpeted in places with bright green moss that had a habit of detaching itself from the hillside without warning, taking us with it. We found it preferable to slither and slide down the ribbons of scree - and they were bad enough! It was a relief to reach more level ground, just above the rocky plateau with the lochans, and the Mountain Trail that would take us back down to the road on the southern shore of Loch Maree.


Researching the whole walk at home with the maps and his new Garmin device, Greger realised how we had got muddled on the summit ridge - and the upshot was that my original reading from map to ground was correct. Unless you know anything to the contrary - always trust your compass! (Much later: I'm convinced after much research with maps and from other walkers' accounts on the walkhighlands website, that we did reach the higher, south-western top. It makes no sense otherwise.)