Posted by & filed under Military/Aircraft, Mountains & hills, July 15 2008.

Last weekend I went for a walk on the Cairn Gorm – Ben Macdui plateau to locate the site of an Avro Anson that crashed near the 1309m summit of Ben Macdui in 1942. The site was fairly easy to locate, but required a bit of a detour from the main path to Ben Macdui. There were quite a lot of walkers on the path to the summit that day, but none seemed aware of this wreck site just a few hundred metres away.

This site must be the highest wreck site in the whole of the British Isles. It lies about 300 metres north-west of the summit of Ben Macdui and the wreckage is located between altitudes of about 1200m and 1250m.

There is a significant amount of wreckage dispersed quite widely. Several pieces of mangled metal, a wheel and an engine lie in the water of the Allt a’Choire Mhòir stream, which flows west from near the summit of Ben Macdui. On the north shore of the stream lies a rusted gas bottle and a piston from one of the engines.

On the south side of the Allt a’Choire Mhòir, further up the slope lie several wreckage fields and the other engine. The highest pieces of wreckage (with an astonishing view towards Braeriach) are next to a small memorial cairn to the airmen who died in the crash.

You can see photos of the site on my website here.

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