Overview For many years, the extent of snow cover in the Scottish Highlands has been recorded and documented by groups of ground-based observers from a volunteer community of ‘citizen scientists’. This winter snow cover melts in the spring and summer months, leaving behind remnant snowpatches, some of which have shown themselves to be ‘perennial’, lasting… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Mountains & hills
GIS MSc – part two
The three-year part-time remote learning UNIGIS UK MSc course I recently finished had two very different components – the first two years consisted of teaching modules of learning materials and assessed assignments (see my earlier blog posting about this here), and the third year involved the planning, development and writing of a dissertation, which is… Read more »
GIS MSc – part one
I haven’t written anything in my blog for the last three years, and that is partly due to the fact that during that time I have been directing a lot of my energies to a postgraduate course, a Master of Science (MSc) degree in Geographic Information Science or Systems (GIS). I have now finished the… Read more »
Were there glaciers in the mountains of Scotland as recently as the mid-19th century?
New research Two academic papers have been published recently in the journal ‘The Holocene‘: Harrison S, Rowan A V, Glasser N F, Knight J, Plummer M A, Mills S C. 2014. Little Ice Age glaciers in Britain: Glacier-climate modelling in the Cairngorm mountains. The Holocene 24. 135-140. Abstract: http://hol.sagepub.com/content/24/2/135. Full text of paper (PDF; access… Read more »
A Zoologist on Baffin Island, 1953
I have been interested in the Canadian island of Baffin Island since ‘Frozen Fire: a Tale of Courage‘ by James Houston was a set text when I went to school. Baffin Island, which straddles the Arctic Circle in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago is in many ways the archetypal ‘Arctic’ location – it has sea ice,… Read more »
Garbh Choire Mòr
For several years now, there has been a secretive and remote location in the Scottish mountains that I have been trying to get to. This location is Garbh Choire Mòr, a corrie at the western end of the larger An Garbh Choire in the Cairngorm mountains, between Braeriach and Cairn Toul, and it is notable… Read more »
Cranstackie and the wreck of a Second World War Mosquito
Three weeks ago whilst staying for a week in nearby Kinlochbervie, I climbed the 801m Corbett summit of Cranstackie in Sutherland. Cranstackie (along with its neighbouring Corbett summit of Beinn Spionnaidh) is the most northerly mountain (if you count a mountain as being above the Corbett height of 762m) in the British Isles, and Sutherland… Read more »
Cycle routes in the Borders and Perthshire
At the end of March I did a 30km cycle route in the Scottish Borders. This route was a loop that started and finished at Longyester, and used 4×4 tracks to ascend to the 527m summit of Lammer Law and cross the high moorland of the Lammermuir Hills to the east of Lammer Law, along… Read more »
Ben Nevis
Last week I climbed Ben Nevis with Lesley’s sister, Kate. Kate had had an ambition to climb the highest mountain in the British Isles, and asked me to guide her as she is not an experienced hillwalker. Because the aim of the trip was simply to attain the summit, and not take Kate anywhere dangerous… Read more »
Expedition from Blair Atholl to Aviemore via Glen Tilt and the Cairngorms
Five weeks ago I undertook an expedition from Blair Atholl to Aviemore. This was a long walk, 66km in total that took me three days with two nights of wild camping. This was a route that I had wanted to walk for a long time as it’s one of the longest largely linear walking routes… Read more »
I am a software engineer / database administrator / web developer living in Edinburgh, Scotland. In my spare time I like to travel and take photographs (especially of mountains). See my main website here: Eddie's Photo Archive