Schiehallion Wild Walks

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Its name has the ring of a war cry

and it's one of the most mystical mountains in Scotland.

Every year, 20,000 people climb to its summit,

and I'm going to climb it today.

It's called Schiehallion.

That translates as "The Fairy Hill of the Caledonians,"

so why don't you come and join me?

All around the flanks of Schiehallion,

there's a lot of evidence of ancient settlements

and cup and ring marks which go way back to prehistoric times

but even more surprising is the link between this mountain

in Perthshire and the Holy Land - the link between Schiehallion

and the Knights Templar and Freemasonry,

and it's said that one of the very early chapters of Freemasonry

was set up on Mount Moriah in the kingdom of Judea.

And that chapter was later reconstituted

here on Schiehallion by none other than Robert the Bruce.

We've got a nice wee viewpoint here and that's Loch Tummel down there

but we've got a much better view of Loch Tummel and Loch Rannoch

from higher up the hill.

The Scottish Charity The John Muir Trust

bought Schiehallion at the end of the '90s

and one of the things they did almost immediately

was improve the footpath that climbs up to the summit.

The old path took a line of least resistance

right up the north-east flank of the hill

and it crossed great areas of peat and bog

but the John Muir Trust discovered a very old path,

which took a zigzag line up the nose of the east ridge

and they improved that, and I think they've done pretty good job,

bearing in mind this path has to sustain

about 20,000 pairs of boots every year.

So this path really does help.

Running along below us here is the old road to the Isles.

There's Loch Tummel,

Loch Rannoch and beyond at Lochaber,

although that's not a stretch of water, but an actual district.

I wonder if you remember the old song,

# By Loch Tummel and Loch Rannoch

# And Lochaber I will go

# La la la la la. #

HE CONTINUES TO HUM

Quite a nice little poem was written in 1905

by a local minister, the Rev John Sinclair,

who lived down in Kinloch Rannoch.

In this poem, he kind of hints

at this relationship between Schiehallion and the Holy Land.

"If there be on earth a paradise

"Where righteous souls in glory wait and trust

"To the sweet resurrection of the just

"Methinks that region round Schiehallion lies

"And the good angels hovering over its cone

"Impart to it that chased and heavenly tone.

"I love to view Schiehallion all aglow

"In blaze of beauty against the eastern sky

"Like a huge pyramid exalted high

"O'er woodland fringing round its base below

"The Bible tells of Hebrew mountains grand

"Where such great deeds were done in days of old

"As render them more precious far than gold

"In our conception of the Holy Land

"But every soul that seeks the heavenly road

"May in Schiehallion, too, behold a Mount of God."

SNOW CRUNCHES

A mountain like Schiehallion

is a kind of unlikely place to carry out scientific experiments,

but in 1774, the Astronomer Royal,

one Rev Nevil Maskelyne,

came to Schiehallion to try and discover

if the Earth had a dense core or a hollow core.

I think the experiments discovered that Earth had a dense core,

but what was quite interesting from a hillwalking perspective,

is that one of the surveyors on those experiments, Charles Hutton,

hit upon a way of joining up places of equal height.

He actually discovered contour lines,

those little brown lines that we hill walkers use

so much today, when we're out in the mountains.

If you take a line of latitude between the most northerly point

in Scotland and the most southerly point,

and a line of longitude connecting east and west,

where the two cross over, you have the exact centre of Scotland

and that's right here, on the summit of Schiehallion.

Oh, wow! It's wild!

There's not much in the way of views today.

I'm sorry about that.

But just in case any of you are wondering where the name

"Fairy Hill Of The Caledonians" come from, down below me here,

at the head of Glenmore, there's a little hill called Tom a Mhorair

and below that hill is a cave,

and in the recesses of that cave,

there's allegedly a door - a door that leads to fairyland.

I tell you, you'd have to be a pretty tough fairy

to live up here in these conditions.

It's too tough for me, so I'm off. See you next time!

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