Lochnagar Wild Walks

It's a real blustery day of April showers and sunshine,

and I'm climbing Lochnagar,

the mountain that lords it over the forests of Royal Deeside.

Lochnagar is one of the grand mountains of Scotland,

and while it might lack the immediate presence

of a Buachaille Etive Mor or a Ben Nevis,

and it might lack the subtle lines of a Ben Alligin or even a Cairn Toul,

but it's a gritty sort of mountain

and I think that's wholly appropriate

for its position here in the northeast of Scotland.

I lived, for a few years, in Aberdeen, and my youngest son was born in Aberdeen

so I feel I'm a wee bit qualified to describe the people of the northeast as being gritty.

The people who wrote the long, 46-verse bothy ballads,

the people who worked in the farm towns all around this place.

It's a fantastic mountain, well-loved by our royalty,

by poets and artists,

and it has a real character of its own.

There's a trivia games question that asks,

"Is Lochnagar saltwater or freshwater?"

And apparently the answer is "neither" because Lochnagar is a mountain

but that's not strictly the true answer,

because behind me here, there's a small lochan.

It dribbles its way over the edge and down into the Ballochbuie forest in Upper Deeside,

and it's called Lochan na Gaire.

And this mountain is named after the small lochan

and it most definitely is freshwater.

But you know, Lochnagar is more of a range of small hills and mountains

than one single entity of a mountain.

And the highest top, where the summit cairn is, is called Cac Carn Beag.

And I have the sneaky feeling that when Queen Victoria took up residence just downhill at Balmoral,

she didn't quite like that name, because the literal translation is,

"the wee, shitty cairn,"

and somehow, I don't think she would have approved of that.

Few of our mountains have had songs written after them.

But when Lord Byron came to Ballater as a young man, he was suffering from scarlet fever

and he took to walking around this area, and he became quite infatuated with Lochnagar.

It's said that he was quite heavily influenced by the works of John Ruskin,

and Ruskin had a strange notion about wild places and wild nature.

He saw all as menacing and threatening.

Some people have described it as all sublimity and blackness.

But dispite that, Byron wrote a great song about Lochnagar.

And the chorus goes along the lines of,

"England, thy beauties are tame and domestic

"To one who has roamed o'er the mountains afar

"But oh, for the crags that are wild and majestic

"The steep frowning glories of dark Lochnagar."

You know, there's a tremendous history in these cliffs and this corrie below me.

It's good, sometimes, to come here and reflect on some of the great pioneers

who came and climbed here in the 1920s and '30s.

People like Brown, or later on, the great Dr Tom Patey.

This was very much his playground. He was an Aberdonian.

I also like to remember an old friend of mine, who died fairly recently.

The one-legged, blind poet, Syd Scroggie, from Dundee.

And before he lost his leg and his sight in the Second World War,

Syd did a lot of the pioneering work here on Eagle Ridge of Lochnagar.

That's the summit. Not very far now.

It's sometimes nice just to come here

and hear the ghosts of those early stalwarts of Scottish mountaineering,

those pioneers who have left such a rich heritage amongst the hills and mountains of Scotland.

Cac Carn Beag. I think you'll agree with me that this is anything but a wee shitty hill.

3,786 feet above sea level.

You can see Morven in Caithness which, according to this, is 88 miles away.

Ben Nevis is... Where's Ben Nevis? Across in that sort of direction, about 90 miles.

And then, to the east, according to this,

on a clear day you can see the Girdle Ness lighthouse at Aberdeen harbour.

So from Ben Nevis on one side, to Aberdeen harbour on the other, we really are in the centre of things.

I know a lot of hill-walkers who'll bag their summit and then see the rest of the day as an anticlimax.

But Lochnagar is a hill of great contrasts.

Contrasts that are sustained right to the end of the walk.

We're just about to enter the ravine of the Glassalt,

which drops down quite steeply to Glassalt Shiel via Loch Muick, and in its own way,

it's as spectacular as anything that we've seen so far.

We've taken the tourist route around Lochnagar, but there are other routes, and longer routes,

but however you climb Lochnagar, I would urge you to take it easy, take it gently.

Enjoy something of the character of the mountain.

And you, too, might begin to appreciate what Lord Byron did -

that Lochnagar really is quite wild and majestic.