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The wide earth path runs around the foot of woods, then above River Lednock. Look out for a side path down right to Little Caldron, rejoining the main path above. As the wood steepens, the path runs just below the Glen Lednock road, then drops again along a wooden walkway. Turn down right to a viewing balcony above the Deil’s Caldron waterfall.

Return up wooden steps, forking right to regain the main path. It runs up to the Glen Lednock road. Turn right alongside the road, then left at a signpost onto a steep earth path through a plantation. It zigzags through pleasanter woods above, then contours left, to level ground.

Here note a path arriving from the right, but keep ahead, with a footpath sign. The path zigzags up the final rise to Lord Melville’s Monument.

The path to the Deil’s Caldron

Lord Melville was a minister in Pitt the Younger’s government of 1791, where his skilled political fixing delayed for 15 years the abolition of the slave trade. As war minister at the start of the Napoleonic Wars, he mismanaged the Flanders Campaign and bungled the siege of Dunkirk. In 1806 he was impeached in the House of Lords for embezzling public funds, but acquitted as negligent rather than actually criminal. An even bigger monument to him stands in St Andrews Square, Edinburgh.