Posted by & filed under Mountains & hills, September 15 2009.

I’ve written before about ‘Munro-bagging’ and how little sense it makes to obsess about the heights of mountains (see my previous blog postings ‘I’m not a Munro-bagger, honest‘ and ‘What is the largest mountain in the world?‘). Now a Munro summit (Sgurr nan Ceannaichean, near Glen Carron in the North-West Highlands) has been remeasured using GPS equipment, and it has been decided that the list of Munros is to be reduced by one, from 284 to 283. See a BBC news article about this here.

I climbed this summit in 2000, so what this means is that my tally of Munros climbed has dropped from 197 to 196. Something similar happened in 1997 when the list of Munros was changed so that overnight, without me even getting out of my bed, my tally increased by two. A revison to the list was also made in 1981.

This is all just completely crazy. I used to keep a close eye on the number of Munro summits I had climbed, and my personal tally was closing in on the magic 200 mark, but I’ve decided to deliberately ignore the whole thing from now on. It seems like such an arbritrary list, and there’s no point in keeping a tally of where you are in the list if some faceless organisations (I think the Scottish Mountaineering Club and the Munro Society are behind all this but they’re not organisations I’m a member of) decide to move the goalposts every decade or so. The mountains themselves don’t change!

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