I’d taken the week off work, thinking that surely mid-April would be a pretty safe bet for some decent weather and good opportunities to get away into the hills. Sadly, Scottish weather had different ideas: I’m all for heading out into the clag with a compass, but there’s not a lot you can do when MWIS is suggesting 40-50mph winds fairly routinely. Tuesday was looking like the best of a bad bunch, and with hills towards the east seeming to have the best odds of catching a good day, so I opted to take a leisurely start (it’s my week off after all) and a short drive to Ben Cleuch (GM/SS-059), a hill I didn’t know an awful lot about - I certainly didn’t expect to be able to break 700m asl in the Ochil Hills, but maybe I’d just not been paying enough attention to the maps.
It’s often said that the hardest part of getting up a lot of hills is actually just finding your way out of the car park and onto the hill itself, and I don’t think I’ve found a more stark example of this than getting out of the car park and onto Ben Cleuch. I’d seen various conflicting reports on the internet of how passable the path up through the middle of the Mill Glen would be, so I opted to try and take a route up the eastern shoulder up above the Glen itself, before dropping back down in higher up to pick up the path up towards the open hill. Cue three false starts up paths to… other places, before eventually picking the correct but slightly unwelcoming looking set of wooden steps up onto the shoulder.
Despite bypassing most of the narrow gorge, there was a point where I needed to drop back down, and there was a wee bit of careful footing required to negotiate some steep and slippy rocks into the Glen. Then, a wee bit of lite-scrambling on further slippy rocks to pull back up out the other side of the Glen, and catch the path heading up the spur towards The Law en route to Ben Cleuch. Thankfully, once this spur is attained, the rest of the ascent is incredibly simple (in a navigational sense at least) - it’s just a fairly steep pull up a grassy path. I managed a wee bonus chase with Denis @MW0CBC (using his MM0 alias) over on Blackcraig Hill (GM/SS-070) on my way up, which gave me a pretty perfect excuse for a breather on the steep slopes, but I was still about 400m short of the activation zone for any S2S joy.
Much puffing and panting later, I topped out on The Law - I could make some rubbish joke about fighting and winning, but it’s probably best to call it a 0-0 draw. From the Law, the route levels out dramatically, and carries on up a soft grassy path to the north, before swinging sharply to the left towards the fairly unremarkable summit of Ben Cleuch itself.
The summit area was very well equipped - there was a trig point in the middle of a rocky shelter, but the trig itself was capped, and with a few other folk out on the hills, I didn’t want to hog the shelter. There were some promising looking wee rocks that looked good for sitting on just to the west of the summit, but I reckoned the best bet would be to strap my fibreglass pole to the fence and operate a wee bit more out of folks’ ways. There was even a handy wee flat rock to perch on while activating too.
On plugging in my FT-65 and opening up the squelch, I did notice some fairly strong interference on 2m - I can only assume this would’ve been from the mast on the nearby wind farm, approx 1.5km to the north. Once again, the FT-270 came to the rescue and any rogue waves were firmly taken care of.
Radio-wise, I had a succesful time on 2m, bringing in 11 QSOs in total. I got a S2S with Alex @GM5ALX up on Meall Chuaich (GM/CS-035) early on, and then was very happy to hear Jack @GM4COX completing his list of GM/SS hills out on Windy Hill (GM/SS-265) on the Isle of Bute. See: Completion of all Scottish SS Summits
As well as picking up some familiar callsigns, I was also very happy to catch one new operator @M7WEK Max in Edinburgh, for whom I was his first contact since passing his foundation exam. Just as I was getting ready to pack up, I caught one last bonus S2S with Derek @G1ZJQ on Tosson Hill (G/SB-007), getting me unexpectedly across the border.
I did consider a slightly different descent for the sake of variation, but I was a wee bit over my planned hometime by the time I got done on the summit, so I decided instead just to retrace my steps and head back down the way I’d come up. Incidentally, I did see a couple of guys who’d passed me at the summit descending via Ben Ever, and they seemed to pop out of the Mill Glen looking pretty unscathed and unfazed, so maybe the Mill Glen path might be passable after all.
Strava route: Ben Cleuch | Strava
