Merrick

When I was working, the shift pattern was one of six days on and four days off. Notwithstanding the fact that the first of those days off may well have been spent sleeping off a couple of night shifts, such a shift pattern did afford us quite a few days at leisure. Quite a large number of my colleagues used the time to indulge in the pastime of hill walking. It is quite a popular pastime in Scotland, probably something to do with the abundance of hills in the country. Whatever the reason, it is seen as virtuous and healthy over that other favourite Scottish pastime of getting completely shitfaced. Some of my colleagues managed both though not usually at the same time. Those hilly types would think nothing of getting up at some God unearthly hour in the morning, piling into the car and driving several hours to the back of beyond, cooking up a hearty breakfast on a Primus stove before bagging a couple of Munros before a lunch of beer and crumpets at a nearby hostelry. In the rain. And, once above a thousand feet, almost certainly the fog. Munros I hear you ask? These are Scottish mountains that rise 3000ft or more above sea level. Scotland is so lumpy that there’s loads of them. Some bloke called Munro catalogued them all, hence the name. Some other bloke called Corbett then went and listed all the hills between 2500 and 3000ft high. There’s quite a lot of Corbetts too.

So why all the extensive and possibly inaccurate information on Scottish hills and those who ascend, and hopefully descend them? Well I like a walk. Elaine likes a walk too and completed the 1000 mile challenge for 2019 by mid July. When we go for a walk, however, we have tended to stick to the level. Some undulations on the way are perfectly acceptable but serious, knee busting hill walks have by and large been off the agenda. Earlier this year we did venture up Conic Hill on the banks of Loch Lomond and it made a nice change to our hoofs through Fullerton Woods and around Troon. We even went the long way round but, apart from the short climb up an eroded path to the summit, it wasn’t particularly challenging. The views from the top were very nice though, even if the summit was rammed with other folk deciding that a sunny summer Saturday was not only nicely alliterate but also ideal for hiking up to the 1184ft summit of Conic Hill. We have, however, had the intention of scaling a proper hill such as Goat Fell on Arran or even Ben Lomond, a hill that just creeps into the Munro category by a few inches and will probably lose that status soon thanks to the cumulative erosion of the thousands of hardy folk that walk to the top every year. The thing is, good intentions are one thing, doing it is another. Unlike your serious hill walker, shit weather is a bit off putting to us and the Scottish hills are particularly good at shit weather. Then there’s the logistics of getting there and all sorts of other excuses that have put us off. Then came today. The forecast was for a perfect Autumn day. We decided to take the plunge. We were going to bag our first Corbett.

We decided that Goat Fell and Ben Lomond would require an early start and the cat had kept us awake overnight so maybe another day for them. We chose The Merrick. The Merrick lays claim to be the highest hill in the Southern Uplands. With many towering Munros up north this may be a very lame claim to fame but it does rise 2766ft above sea level and to walk up it from the car park at the foot of the trail utilises pretty much all of those feet. The hill is part of The Range of the Awful Hand, a series of five hills that look a bit like fingers, though perhaps a few drams of whisky had been drunk by those responsible for its rather splendid name. To get to the summit you have to first reach the summit of one of the other ‘fingers’, Benyellary, and traverse a broad ridge on to the Merrick before a last climb to the top. It’s a little over four miles up and, assuming there’s no navigational errors, the same on the way down. Armed with our finest walking shoes – yes, boots would be better but I’m not getting skinned ankles whilst braking them in for anyone – and a rucksack full of extra layers and sandwiches from the local Co-Op, we headed down the scenic road to Loch Trool and bought an OS Map from the visitor centre just to show we were taking things seriously. The weather was gorgeous, not a cloud in the sky and visibility as far as the eye can see. Yes, I know visibility is always as far as the eye can see but you know what I mean. In the car park we changed into our walking shoes and off we set. Almost immediately we were rewarded with stunning views. The autumnal colours combined with the waters of Loch Trool and the Buchan Burn, which we shadowed for the first three quarters of a mile or so, were stunning. The path was, shall we say, a bit on the aquatic side. In places it was part bog, part burn and we soon became reasonably adept at leaping from stone to stone to prevent the depressing feeling of mud getting over the top of our shoes and inside. Gore tex is great but there’s got to be a gap somewhere to get your foot in. There was one steep section which was something akin to a rock staircase only with more mud and less stability than is normally the case. However, we navigated the frequent swampy bits and made it to the bothy. For those of you that don’t know what a bothy is, it is basically an old house that has been made more or less watertight for hill walkers to seek refuge in if required. It was a bit bleak but it was shelter of sorts for those who needed it. Not that we did of course, we’d only just got going.

Passing the bothy we entered a forested area where the path became steeper and a bit more precarious. Just how precarious it was I’d discover on the way down. Emerging from the wood we passed a stone that announced we were leaving the Forest Zone and entering Montane Zone. Montane apparently means mountainous but I guess there was limited space on the stone for the extra letters. Here the path went up Benyellary above the tree line at quite a steep gradient. On the way up we made many stops, some of which were to admire the spectacular views, others to prevent us keeling over and dying, such was the effort required. We pushed on though, eventually reaching the summit of Benyellary where a bitterly cold wind, almost completely absent on the climb up the leeward side of the hll, suddenly appeared and had us delving around our rucksacks for the jackets we had removed as we built up a sweat on the way up. We pondered whether we had come far enough. The summit of the Merrick seemed a fair way away and the cafe at the visitor centre, which had a nice selection of cakes, was due to close at four o’clock. However, by a unanimous vote of one to nil we ventured out towards The Merrick.

To get there we had to cross a ridge called Neive of the Spit for reasons that are lost in time. It was quite broad so despite the stiff crosswind there was little chance of being blown over the edge. It was a quite boggy in places but once traversed there was a bit more up involved to make it to the summit. On that last push we encountered a few patches of snow. We knew it was cold but not that cold. Eventually we made it to the cairn and trig point that marked the summit of The Merrick. We took the necessary selfie, ate our Co-Op sarnies whilst sat on some frosty rocks, briefly surveyed the glorious 360 degree vista before deciding it was too bloody cold to hang around and setting off back down. It had taken us 2 hours and 16 minutes to get there. It would take us exactly the same length of time to get back down again.

Just a word about going down. According to the physics of potential and kinetic energy, going down should be a damn sight easier than going up. That is, indeed, true in terms of expending energy, especially when you are lugging the sort of mass I have to carry about with me. Consequently, the heart attack inducing steep section that took us to the top of Benyellary did not bother our tickers on the descent. Simple physics does not take other factors into consideration though. You can’t just curl up in a ball and let gravity do all the work. You’d end up with broken bones and everything. You are in fact fighting gravity’s inexorable desire to get you to the bottom of the hill quickly rather than alive. Feet, knees and thighs take the brunt of the strain of trying to keep you upright, a task made all the more harder by a terrain that has scant regard for the safety of less than sure footed humans. The bit in the woods was particularly treacherous. With an inevitability that was just a little annoying, I lost my footing on a particularly evil rock and fell forward, pirouetted round and fell in a rather pathetic heap onto the ground, most of which was other rocks and therefore rather unforgiving. I wasn’t badly hurt which was a bit disappointing as a mere grazed knee does not warrant being helicoptered off the hill which would have made for a better story but I was less than impressed with the situation. We made it back to the car, carefully and without further incident and headed for the visitor centre for celebratory cake. It was a minute past four. It had just shut.

Apart from the worryingly high heart rates and of course my inglorious fall, we really enjoyed our trek up the mighty Merrick. So, is hill walking for us? Yes and no. Yes, we will definitely do some more hills, even though we are both physically in pain at the moment and my injured knee has blown up like a football. No as in I don’t think we will ever class ourselves as serious hill walkers. We passed one going up the hill as we were on the way down. He had a rucksack the size of an office block on his back. He explained that he was going to spend the night on the hill. Other than seeing the universe in a true, dark sky, I can see absolutely no benefit in doing something like that. It will be icy cold, pitch black from five o’clock, exceptionally uncomfortable, a bit spooky and that’s all before the serious question of what to do when you want a poo. I like hills. I don’t love them that much though.