In which the author continues the attempt to lose his remaining readership by writing again about hills, between the feeble treatment of consumed fiction and the energetic but ultimately incomprehensible accounts of matters tangentially related to his area of study.

I took the opportunity of Easter weekend to go away for a couple of days of hillwalking. Of course this is an opportunity which is not so easy to take, being that finding somewhere to stay on this particular weekend is relatively difficult. However, I persevered, and booked myself a bed at Loch Ossian youth hostel for the Friday night. The plan was to go up on the train on Friday, get some walking in, stay the night, and walk some more on Saturday before getting the train home. The plan succeeded.

An excellent weekend was had. Perhaps the only thing that I would have changed would be to walk the length of the loch fewer times. The hostel is at the railway-end of the loch; on Friday I went from the station up the side of the loch, and back over Sgor Gaibhre and Carn Dearg. Nice walk, bit cloudy but the summits were often clear. Was chased along the ridge by a cloud though.

The hostel's in a lovely location by the way, would recommend it to anyone. On Saturday morning I left the hostel, up the loch again, and up Beinn Eibhinn. It was a beautiful sunny morning, I spent a while sitting around a lochan near the top, and sunning myself on rocks! Unfortunately my elated mood meant I did not realise that I had not in fact gone to the top of Aonach Beag as planned until I was back down by the lochside, but this did not ruin a lovely long walk. In any case, I shall hopefully visit that hill from the other side sometime this summer.

It's nice to have the time to not rush, to muck about rock-hopping down the stream down the hill, and stop to take lots of photos. The massive number of photos snapped means I actually got some decent ones: