80

The old Scottish Mountaineering Club's well-thumbed guide The Western Highlands, published nearly 80 years ago, may not be up to date but, between its faded red covers, it still makes good reading. I can't say the same for the maps. The scale is too small, the detail too crowded and the emphasis whimsical. Beauly is set in bigger type than Inverness, which can never have seemed right. Drumnadrochit rates notice only as Drumnadrochit Hotel and there's no mention of Cannich at all, just the Glen Affric Hotel. Loch Beinn a'Mheadhoin is spelt in the old style, as pronounced – Beneveian – which I can approve of.

This note occurs:

Mam Sodhail and Sgurr na Lapaich. On account of their commanding position in the North-West of Scotland these two mountains were made important stations for the Principal Triangulation in connection with the Ordnance Survey of the British Isles. The station on Mam Sodhail was on the highest point of the mountain, and was marked by a stone pile, 23 feet high and 60 feet in circumference . . .

That's a lot of stones.

A more recent Munro book tells more: ‘The summit has a huge circular cairn which was an important point in the Ordnance Survey's primary triangulation of Scotland in the 1840s.’

In the National Library of Scotland's map room in Edinburgh, I open a large leather-covered volume – Account of the Observations of the Principal Triangulations, being an ‘account of the Observations of the Principal Triangulation; and of the Figure, dimensions & mean specific gravity of the Earth as derived therefrom’, drawn up, as it says, by Captain Alexander Ross Clarke of the Royal Engineers.

I read that among the sites from which observations were made was ‘the mountain of Mamsuil [sic] on the borders of the counties of Ross and Inverness, about 7 miles north-west of Captain Inge's shooting lodge at Glen Affaric and 20 miles west of Inverncannich’.

On this summit, a Colour-Sergeant J Winzer and his party of soldier-surveyors lodged or camped throughout the month of August and possibly longer in 1848, scanning the surrounding high points, taking bearings, measuring angles and recording distances. Rain, hail or shine. It can be wild up there in any season but the official report makes no mention of the weather.

I shall follow in your footsteps, Sergeant Winzer.