Great Mountain Days in Scotland. Dan Bailey

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      Backpacking on Beinn Dearg Beag (Walk 9) – hard work, but worth the effort

      The author makes no apologies for the emphasis on difficulty and distance, but the desire to challenge should not be confused with exclusivity or elitism. With a little determination and a following wind these routes are achievable by any reasonably experienced and averagely robust hillwalker, and there’s no imperative to run around them with your head down, ignoring the scenery. If it ever looks a bit much, most routes can be shortened or broken into separate smaller chunks, and there are suggestions for short cuts in the walk chapters.

      The rewards of going the extra kilometre are many. A quick there-and-back summit dash may fill a spare afternoon, but why climb one peak when you can do several? If the half-day quickie is a three-minute pop song – over before you’ve got stuck in – then the epic slog is more like a symphony – daunting, hard work, but richly complex and of deeper, longer-lasting significance. The cares of daily life tend to diminish when considered from a great height and distance, so the further we travel and the longer we go for the better.

      The route to a truly great mountain day is through extended effort, with mud, sweat and maybe even a few tears along the way. The more improbable something may look on paper, the greater the satisfaction on completion; the harder and more prolonged the exercise, the bigger the buzz. Scotland’s mountaineering and hillwalking pioneers understood all this. The distances casually covered by doughty Victorians and Edwardians such as Naismith (of Naismith’s rule fame) might dwarf a typical 21st-century hill day – and all without the benefit of lightweight gear and nutritionally balanced (if barely edible) energy gels. It’s amazing how far a little grit will go.

      Following a cross-country through-route is a fulfilling way to travel among mountains, but it’s not what this book is about. These routes are hill walks, wedded to the high ground and mostly circular (with one or two exceptions); they are not extended journeys from A to B. Any of the walks described in this book can be knocked off in a single (if in some cases rather stretching) day, but they might equally be spread over two or three – a change in pace, weight and emphasis that brings its own rewards. The divide between day trips and overnight backpacking routes is porous, and can be passed through at will. The information box at the start of each walk includes notes on wild camping and bothies.

      Bigger might be better in some cases, but a key premise of this book is that the pleasure that a hill can offer is not proportional to its altitude, and that neither Munros (peaks over 3000ft) nor Corbetts (2500ft–2999ft) have cornered the market in quality. Among the chosen 50 walks, worthwhile trips at lesser elevations include the edge-of-the-world Uig hills of Lewis (Walk 50) and Skye’s uniquely eccentric Trotternish Ridge (Walk 48), both in a different league from any number of duller Munros.

      The Scottish guidebook canon is already well loaded with tomes on the popular hill lists. This guide is not another to add to the pile. Although you would accrue many Munro scalps (and Corbetts, and the rest) working through this book, scores of them are omitted too. The aim is not to tick through lists, but rather to present coherent and satisfying walks on the ‘best’ mountain groups, letting topography call the shots and adding a minimum of contrived wiggles. In some cases the neatest big route on a massif will just happen to miss a couple of peripheral Munros; those who feel obliged to climb every mountain can then choose to follow the relevant detours.

      Writing a selective guidebook means making hard choices, distilling the finest quality of hills and routes out of the baffling number of possible candidates to produce a blend with a fair flavour of the country as a whole. The collection is a personal ‘best of’. Not everyone will agree with all the choices, and inevitably some fantastic and popular hills have been omitted. For instance, neither Stac Pollaidh nor Schiehallion are overlooked through any fault of their own, but simply because they aren’t ideally incorporated into a round of sufficient scale. A collection of big walks needs a bottom line, however arbitrary, and in this book it’s roughly 20km. There is no particular upper limit placed on distance, although things have been kept within the bounds of challenging-but-achievable in one day.