ACTIVE OUTDOORS: Highland volunteer helped check 7500km of routes featured in new Scottish Hill Tracks book
A maze of ancient routes and historic highways that criss-cross Scotland remain for adventurous souls to discover and explore.
Some of these head through the Highlands’ most mountainous scenery, offering tantalising ways through glens and over high passes in the hills.
These routes vary in terms of what is left of them, however. Some have become modern roads while others have been left to nature or the whims of landowners over the centuries.
Discovering these ancient ways for the first time can make you feel like a bit of a pioneer, despite the fact that they have been used in some cases for many hundreds of years.
It is this long-term use that turns these passages through the hills and glens into rights of way that the public can use to this day – if they have the know-how to navigate them.
A new edition of the classic Scottish Hill Tracks book, due to be published at the end of September, should help at least in pointing the way to some of these fantastic routes.
A version of the book was first published 100 years ago when the then Scottish Rights of Way Society chairman Walter A Smith penned a collection of routes from Orkney to the Borders which was published as Hill Paths in Scotland. This later became one of the charity’s flagship publications under the Scottish Hill Tracks name.
Now coming out in its sixth edition, the latest book contains 350 routes covering 7600km of rights of way throughout Scotland. It was compiled with the help of 130 volunteers, including Colin Cadden from Aviemore, who surveyed all the routes for the Cairngorms section of the book.
I met him in Glen Feshie – one of those ancient routes included in the latest edition – to talk about his role with ScotWays and how all that information is filtered into the publication.
He explained: “Mostly the routes are on decent tracks and the Hill Tracks book helps because it gives you an indication of what sort of terrain you might be facing. I do bike a lot of them when I can. Obviously it gets you over them quicker, and if it’s a long route and you need to make your way back out then the bike helps.
“In the Cairngorms, the Minigaig and the Gaick and the likes of these tracks are all pretty accessible on a bike.
“There are some others I’ve done, there’s one in particular runs from near Dalwhinnie to near Laggan and there’s the green sign and underneath it is another green sign. I’m paraphrasing but basically it says don’t expect there to be a track here, it’s a direction that you’re following – so map-reading helps and just reading the land a bit helps as well.”
Colin (65) said that the project had been delayed due to Covid, “which restricted our ability to go out and actually survey these paths”.
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“I’m lucky because I did all of section 17 and that’s all local-ish to me, but there were some tracks in the middle of nowhere that won’t see much footfall, so people are having to go out of their way,” he added.
“We were able to get an extract of what was recorded with ScotWays, so for every route I was doing I was given what’s already on record, and there’s a lot more detail there than what appears in the book, because obviously the [previous] book is out of date already, so there will have been updates.
“So you did have a record before you went and I would take that with me. Then it was a case of recording changes, editing text – sometimes it would be track conditions or there’s a bridge not there or these kind of things.”
ScotWays keeps an ongoing record of the state of these routes on its Catalogues of Rights of Way (CROW) database, which is an important resource for helping to protect access rights as well as providing information to the public.
It has also been instrumental in signposting historic rights of way by signposting them. For many, the green rights-of-way signs are their first insight into the work of the charity.
“These are the bits that have always fascinated me,” Colin said. “Even now, if I’m driving along and I see one of these my thoughts are immediately, ‘ooh, I haven’t been on that, where does that go, what is it going to be like?
“They’ve always fascinated me since before I started volunteering. It can be somewhere really remote – if it says something like 26 miles to Tomdoun, I think 26 miles, wow, what’s that going to be like?”
It’s this sense of adventure that Colin doesn’t want people to lose when they go out and discover these routes for themselves, hopefully with the help of the Scottish Hill Tracks book.
“The danger is you take some of the adventure away if it’s too detailed,” he said. “I’ve made that mistake myself if I’m going somewhere I don’t know – you look at all the guidebooks, you look at what people have written, now if you look on YouTube you’re seeing people’s videos of the route.
“It’s great if you want to prepare and there is a safety aspect in that, but you are taking away some of the fun of discovering – so the book is good and it doesn’t quite give that level of detail. It says go to here, go to there, use this grid reference, it’s not telling you much about what’s in the middle, which is great.”
With so many routes to explore all across the country, there is sure to be inspiration in bounds in this latest edition. I’m looking forward to seeing where it might take me next...
• Scottish Hill Tracks by ScotWays is published by Scottish Mountaineering Press on September 30, priced £25.
