Over The Hill

Contrasting weather for the weekend, Saturday a rather wet, windy and cool day, whereas, Sunday was forecast to be dry, excellent visibility although staying windy and cool, and so we decided to revisit The Brack on Sunday to make the best of the promised fine visibility, as our previous visit in September last year was done under very poor visibility and we were not happy with our final approach to the summit, which because of the visibility we had steered clear of the summit crags and contoured the grassier west slope, a rather boring route. This time we were hopeful of taking on the crags and finding a slightly more direct route to the summit.

We dropped two cars at Ardgartan and took a single vehicle to the events car park at the entrance to Coilessan Glen, negating the 4 kilometre trudge from Ardgartan to Coilessen Glen and set off directly up the fine forest track on the section of The Cowel Way that gradually climbs up through the forest that lines the glen. A few kilometres up the glen, The Cowal Way leaves the main track and takes a lesser path through, what had always been a fairly heavily tree lined section, so it was quite a surprise to find that in the short period since our last visit, the hillsides all around the upper glen had been heavily felled, leaving the path clear and so much easier to negotiate, and, offering extensive views all around which had been denied until now by the encroaching forest. Reaching the top of the track, we crossed the fenceline marking the forest boundary and climbed a little further before breaking north away from The Cowal Way and skirting east around the crags of the southern ridge of The Brack taking the same line as we had in September and followed the same faint and barely distinct grassy path towards the small un-named lochan just beyond the 577m top. In the drier conditions and good visibility, the path eventual becomes more distinct and easier to follow up the hillside ahead, and through some minor crags until it reaches the 670m height. It was at this point in September, in poor visibility we had opted to continue just slightly east of north along the grassier slopes before eventually turning almost south east for a steep climb up grassy slopes to the summit.

Today, however, in excellent visibility and as we approached the main crags we could see yet another faint track heading east to a point directly under the crags about a hundred metres away. This we had to investigate, as it looked like it would give access to a broad grassy rake to the left of the crags and onto the top of the crags. We eyeballed a prominent boulder at the base of the crags and headed towards it with the intention of turning left towards the grassy rake once we reached the boulder. However, on reaching the boulder, “Hawkeye McCall” spotted an even fainter track leading to the right away from the boulder towards the centre of the main crag. This again called for some investigation and just as well we did, for on reaching the crags we were presented with a very short step or two up a narrow split in the crag, onto a point where the crag dipped down and from where it was an easy few steps up to the high point of the crags. What from a distance had looked a difficult crag to tackle directly turned out to be a fairly easy ascent, much more satisfying and certainly more direct than the long contour and climb on the grassier west side of the summit.

Once above the crags, two minor uphill plods brought us directly onto the summit cairn. Brilliant, the wind, which at times was considerable, and the chill factor which made it cool were all forgotten as we congratulated ourselves on completing a fine ascent route.

The views from the summit were just amazing, no matter how many times we had been there before, we just hunkered down out of the wind and had a very leisurely lunch with the sun beating down on us; wonderful.

The descent from the summit down the northwest ridge is a fairly straight forward affair on a nice grassy hillside with a few wet areas towards Bealach Dubh-lic and a rough path from there to the forest boundary, but generally an easy descent. We did however, still have one obstacle to tackle in the way of a couple of fallen trees which lay across the forest path just a few metres before we joined the main track for the walk back to Ardgartan.

An excellent day, brilliant weather, a recce completed, and a beer in The Village Inn – Wonderful. Thanks Ian & Mike.