Читать книгу Walking in the Southern Uplands. 44 best hill days in southern Scotland онлайн

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The Southern Uplands under snow are as big and blank as the screen before an outdoor movie show. What sort of story is going to unfold across the empty whiteness? A romance of the lonesome explorer high in the cold blue air; a grim epic of thigh-deep struggles in the white-out; or perhaps some frivolous bit of fun involving snowballs and an evening mince pie at the Tibbie Shiels Inn.

Rolling – but also rocky

Basalt on the Girvan shoreline, looking over to the volcanic plug of Ailsa Craig (Walk 2)

Like Yosemite’s granite or Snowdonia’s volcanics, the main range of the Southern Uplands is made of one sort of stone. It’s the deep-ocean sludge called greywacke that gives the chunky dry-stone walls, the occasional blocky outcrops, the scaurs (slopes stripped to scree and bare rock) and the cleuchs (deep-cut little stream valleys).

These hills have their rocky moments, but moments only – small stream gullies, broken slopes of stone and scree. But in between the long, rambling days across the grassy tops, short but strenuous half days lead up the small rocky outliers with the big views – Eildon and North Berwick Law; pink Tinto, whose stones colour the roads of Lanarkshire; and seaside Screel, looking across the Solway to England’s Lake District.