This is the stirring account of my attempts to climb the Munros - the 284 Scottish hills with a height of 3000 ft or more.
When I climbed Ben Nevis way back in 1988 I hadn't even heard of Munros, but after I'd climbed a couple of hills, and then a couple more, I became aware of the existence of a list, detailing all of the Scottish mountains above 3000 feet.
I also learnt that hordes of folk of a certain compulsive-obsessive nature were actually out there putting boot on sod, fighting off the midges and trying to climb them all.
'Sounds like fun,' I thought, but it was to be a few more years yet before I started to think seriously about doing them myself.
Anyway, eventually I did start thinking about it and after working out that at my existing rate of progress I'd be 143 years old when I finished I decided to buckle down to it and have made better progress since - I might even finish by the time I retire now.
Throughout all my early trips I was accompanied by my stalwart pal, Andy, but alas he wasn't fired by the same burning need to cop the lot as me, and now just joins me for the odd few while I bash on with the rest on solo trips or on holidays with the missus, Trisha, who happily dumps me at the foot of some awesome, primeval, challenging mass before roaring off to ferret out the local craft shops.
Unfortunately I didn't make notes when I first started hill climbing so the early trips are a bit bereft of detail and pictures. I got the dates from Andy, who's a keen diarist, so maybe I'll be able to borrow his notes some time and fill in the blanks later.
To make up for the early sparseness, however, the later trips are covered in more (probably too much) detail and also have a few more pics. There are photos for some of the earlier trips too but these were pre-digital days and I need to get my finger out and scan them in - I'll get there eventually.
At the moment the pictures mostly start with the year 2002, although I've added a few pre-2002 ones recently.
For the technically minded the blue, granulated background to this page is actually a patch of Scottish cloud taken from one of my photos and repetitively cloned across the screen. I thought it came out quite well :-)
The trips pages, on the other hand, show as a background a ghostly yet strikingly handsome figure (me) just cresting the ridge of Buchaille Etive Mor.
MAPS:
There were links to maps for all of the trips, courtesy of Multimap, but rather annoyingly they keep changing their system and the links don't always work any more. If a blank map appears try refreshing it. I'll try to set up a better system some time.
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