Christine's walking & birds blog

How we managed to gain another Munro tick without going anywhere! Greger showed me a really nice YouTube video yesterday, taken by a walker of his day's outing on Liathach - walking from east to west. He had beautiful weather for it, and Greger was particularly struck by the lower path he took to avoid the rocky pinnacles - because that's the path we took back in 1993. The weather we had was shocking, with hardly any visibility - so we weren't really aware of just how exposed the path was in places; in fact, going over the tops of the pinnacles might have been easier! Of course, it's probably become more eroded over the intervening years - but Greger says he can remember thinking it was a bit hairy even then. There are two tops on the ridge that count as Munros, and towards the end the video showed the second one (Mullach an Rathain) before the man began his descent.

Something about that summit shot made me sit up. I asked Greger to go back to it; yes, there it was, a smallish cairn - and nothing else. "Where's the trig point?" I said. Where indeed?

For our 1993 walk we took with us just the larger scale map with the yellow cover. It shows no trig point symbol on the western Munro, so we weren't looking for one - just a cairn. Happy that we'd reached the top - even though we could see nothing in the cloud and the drizzle - we immediately started down the steep, leg-testing slopes to the road. 

All well and good. But that evening, back at the hostel, I glanced at the smaller scale map (middle one in the picture) and was dismayed to see a trig point symbol on the top we thought we'd reached.

I've never found cause to doubt the Landranger maps, so I assumed this one was right and the other one wrong - meaning that there was a trig point on the summit, and because we didn't see it then we hadn't reached the summit but had instead encountered some subsidiary cairn on the way up. We must have been pretty close, we agreed, but I'm strict about such things so we counted just one Munro for the walk and even, over the years, discussed bashing up the flank at the western end just to bag the second top properly.