Читать книгу Walking Highland Perthshire онлайн

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Yellow boxes under the route information boxes make suggestions for extensions, shortcuts and route combinations elaborated in the route description which follows if necessary.

In old numbers, 600ft was a vertical distance, while 200yd was horizontal. I’ve used a similar convention, so that 600m is an altitude or height gain, while 600 metres (with ‘etres’) is along the ground. ‘Track’ (rather than ‘path’) is used for a way wide enough for a tractor or Landrover.

Finally, the ‘standard route’ up a hill is the convenient and well trodden one featured in guidebooks like Steve Kew’s Walking the Munros (Vol 1). It’s usually the shortest, and because it’s so well used, also the easiest. Sometimes it is also the best and most interesting. But to avoid 90 per cent of other hillgoers, simply stay off the standard route.

Perthshire’s lumpy schist is rich in brown slime and rare alpine plantlife, poor in climbing possibilities. There are only two scrambling routes in this book – and being on Ben Alder, they’re not even in Perthshire. Craig a Barns at Dunkeld is the area’s most notable climbing crag. It dries quickly but can be covered in pine needles; its schist is tricky even when clean and dry.