Which is probably the most walked hill in this part of the world, up above Stirling, in a place of its own at the end of, but somehow not quite connected to, the Ochils escarpment.  In the spirit of variety, Sam and I opted to do this one as a fell run, on a glorious spring morning.  Probably not so much running on the way up, but down was fun!  Me and my mountain goat companion at the top – well done Sam!

This walk – a circuit up from the car park at the west end of Loch Achray – is the first which really prompted me to ask, when is a hill not a hill?  You see, the OS 1:50000 and 1:25000 maps are unanimous that when you get up on to the ridge on the south side of a sort of horseshoe that goes round to Ben Venue the other side of the glen, you ascend something called Beinn an Fhogharaidh.  On the 1:25000 map in a font size the same as Ben Venue itself.  The view’s very nice…

…but feeling that you were on the top of something and finding its summit, well, eventually I chose a tussock that was slightly higher than all the other tussocks for the summit selfie.  You can see the doubt in my eyes…

Then a bit further along the ridge you come across a veritable summit, named Stob an Lochain on the 1:25000 map in a tiny font, but unacknowledged on the 1:50000 map apart from the contours, which rather give the game away.  Again, terrific views (looking east over Lochs Achray and Venachar).  But was it a hill to count towards the 50?

No time to linger, as there were big black clouds rolling in from the west, quickly down to the col and up Ben Venue.  Still plenty of snow on the ground, and the first part of the climb from the col involved kicking steps into a steep drift.  Ben Venue has a couple of summits, the maps say the north-westerly one is a couple of metres higher, so that’s where I took the summit selfie…

…and the view over to the other top, which has the more official-looking trig point (and a small crowd on top).

When I got there, it was deserted – looking back to where I’d just come from, it seems we’d all crossed paths…

Well it would be dull if I just walked up them all wouldn’t it?  With two boys enthusiastic for all things mountain bikey, it looked to me on the map that we ought to be able to get quite a way up Meikle Bin, which is up in the Campsies above the Carron Valley reservoir.  The problem was, despite home having been some time completely snow-free, we’d not long left the car park when things got a wee bit icy.  We had some fun trying to negotiate a non-lethal route, getting quite expert at spotting fine gradations of slipperiness depending on how the ice looked and what it was covering.  But there came a point where even the finest mountain bike tyres (and only one of the three of us had those) could no longer move forwards.  So we left the bikes in a handy snowdrift, and Everest-expeditioned our way (a handy picnic table served as Base Camp) to the windswept and rather cloudy summit.  On another day, as it turns out, it would have been pretty straightforward to get all the way to the top on the bikes…

Check out the track conditions on the way back down…

A fairly quick late January family walk, fading daylight at the end of a grey wet windy day.  We were on our way over to friends Neil and Katie’s house in Milngavie to celebrate Burns Night.  Our joint Burns commemorations with Neil and many other lovely friends go back many years, and have seldom paid too much notice of the proper date for such occasions, January 25th.  To be celebrating it only two days later, in Scotland, was quite the novelty.  It’s not unknown for the constraints of getting the group together at a mutually convenient time to require us to be enthusiastically quaffing steaming plates of haggis neeps and tatties in high summer somewhere in continental Europe… We had a great evening of food, drink, socialising, poetry and music – but first, this wee jaunt up a very popular wee hill not so many miles north of Glasgow.  And a first appearance for the summit T-shirt!