The best day out was undoubtedly an early February round of Ben Donich and The Brack from Ardgartan. A late start meant a dark finish, however I got a spectacular cloud inversion at sunset. Almost as good was a summit camp on Ben Venue with a long day around Loch Arklet, taking in the obscure side of Ben Lomond, a short section of the West Highland Way and Beinn a'Choin.
The hardest trip in terms of distance, roughness and weather was a four-day trek with the tent from Dunoon to Arrochar, taking in the nine Grahams of Cowal, Beinn Bheula, and a couple of lower Marilyns. It rained almost the entire time and I rather pushed myself with the daily distances. A walk I was glad to have done afterwards, but did not have a great deal of fun moments at the time. Closer to home, I had a great weekend in late March visiting Oban bothy via An Stac and Meith Bheinn, returning by the two Munros behind Glenfinnan viaduct.
Another fine weekend, in late August, was camping in Knoydart and visiting the Corbetts and the remote shores of Loch Hourn by the Sound of Sleat. Passing Croulin Bay, I met an angler who lived there in surely one of the remoter habitations in the country. I finally managed to have a pint in the Old Forge for the first time.
Having chided other people for not going up Creag an Amalaidh until it was promoted to Marilyn status, I did exactly the same thing myself. I have driven past it many times thinking 'that looks like a nice hill'. It certainly is a good one and probably worth more than the 45 minutes I spent on it. In my defence, I was supposed to be at work and had stopped off on the way back from a meeting. A couple of other interesting work-related stop-offs were Seana Mheallan in Torridon and Beinn na h-Uamha in Morvern.
Island visits for walking were Arran in April, Mull in June and Lewis in November. The latter was another work visit, mostly in horrific weather (I thought I would end up being stuck there), however somehow I exploited a lull in the storms to get Mealasta. I managed to squeeze in a couple of Marilyns and it set my imagination running to consider all of the backpacking and exploring opportunities there would be on the hinterland of the Lewis/Harris border.
The last memorable day of the year was a traverse of Beinn Dubh and Beinn Mhic Chasgaig in Glen Etive, in late November. Another finish in the dark meant another classic sunset from up high, with the first snows of the year competing with the golden grass for attention.
View from The Brack (photo: Malcolm Clark)
The final edition of Marhofn will coincide fittingly with my desire to take my foot off the bagging pedal. Although I first heard of the Marilyn concept from a friend in about 2004, I paid little attention to it for some time. At the time my interest was Munro bagging, and when I finished those in 2006 I did not intend to do another hill list. However, I gradually found myself doing more and more Corbetts and soon realized that I would be trying to finish these as well. Fortunately, a friend introduced me to the Grahams and then the lower Marilyns, which made me much more aware of places I had not been before. This also made the Corbetts a more interesting prospect as I linked strings of hills from the different lists into multi-day walks. Being able to see and log these with online mapping gave me a great armchair activity. I will never get around to all the different plans I have made.
In 2016 I am hoping to have a joint Corbetts and Grahams completion on Rum. As the hills I need to do have become further away, the motivation to keep travelling the longer distances has been harder to find. I am aware that many people travel much further distances than I do in order to get to hills, but one of my motivations for moving to Inverness ten years ago was that much of the best hill country in Britain would be within a two-hour drive, much of it only half of that.
Even having been up over 160 of the lower Marilyns, I have barely made a dent in the total. Having been up the majority of the ones within an hour of home, I expect my Marilyn tally to take a nosedive in future years. There are still plenty of interesting ones to visit, as well as plenty more that will probably be climbed because they are on the line of a route I am doing or an easy-to-reach viewpoint. However, there will be no pull of a list to complete, so no real urgency. The whole thing feels quite liberating, although given the way my mind works, I will probably end up collecting something else instead. Hopefully, more time in future can be spent on the hills of the north-west Highlands and the Cairngorms, with less of an agenda.
As a relative newcomer to Marhofn in 2012 (I occasionally glanced at the newsletters online in the three or four years preceding), it has probably had less influence on me than friends and online bagging maps. However, I have tended to find it an interesting read. Although the theory is much the same as the Munro list, I find the oddball stories that are derived from the pursuit of the Marilyns much more entertaining than Munro-bagging chat.
Q: Why is a mouse when it spins?
A: Because the higher it goes, the fewer
