Schiehallion

Schiehallion - going to the Dark Side.


Schie walks in beauty like the night,

and glitters with sequins of stars,

(to paraphrase Byron).


Schiehallion is much associated with myth and science in a subtle mixture.


It is the fairy mountain of the Caledonians with real caves and potholes in the Dalradian Limestone, which slowly dissolves in water. Near Braes of Foss there is a ‘Swallow Hole’ where a burn disappears into the earth and comes out on the other side of the road. There are ‘Dolines’, which are sunken areas where the land has collapsed into holes as the limestone has been dissolved.


It’s easy to imagine fairies living in all these tunnels, caves (like the ‘Giant’s Cave’ on the south side of the mountain) springs and crevices. It’s not that the mountain is made of limestone, most of the mountain is quartzite and the limestone exists as patches and bands.


This being acknowledged, there may be less space for fairies inside Schiehallion than you might think, unless, of course, they were very industrious diggers because quartzite is very hard (they may have cheated and used magic! ).


Quartzite, the rock, is made of quartz, the mineral, which is 7 on Mohs scale of hardness. This scale of mineral hardness goes from 1 (talc, which is very soft) to 10 (diamond, which is very hard) and so you can see that quartz and therefore quartzite is very hard. It can scratch glass, not that you would want to probably.


Quartzite started life as sand deposited on the sea bed. It got compressed by the weight of sediment above to form sandstone and then along came the Caledonian Orogeny (Mountain building process), which subjected it to enormous heat and pressure. The quartz crystals partially melted and recrystallised in a very compact and hard form. Now the rock had become a metamorphic rock. An interesting aspect to the quartzite on Schiehallion is that some of it is pink - what’s known as rose quartz and this is the result of iron impurities, or just maybe the blood of fairies, but let’s not go there.


Which side of Schiehallion is the dark side? It does depend on the time of day and on the time of year, but on average it is the north side. The north side does not have easy access for the walker - it is steep with scree slopes and some pretty deep erosion channels. The best and most usual way to go up Schiehallion is on the John Muir path from Braes of Foss, which is the east side and where there is adequate parking for the visitor.


Nevertheless there is a west ridge and it can be accessed by walking up the East Tempar track. This route is generally shaded by Schiehallion itself and by other hills and so is likely to be colder and darker than the usual route. In addition it has no clearly defined path and there is no parking available. All in all it is not to be recommended unless your house happens to be at the bottom of it and your car stays in your drive. I know someone to whom these criteria apply.


East Tempar is a place where the Dalradian Limestone outcrops, and in the past there were small quarries to extract limestone for the Limekiln that can be found at the bottom of the track. It is now disused and derelict. It has been reclaimed by nature and has a Bird Cherry tree growing out of it. The depression where the quarries used to be and the tracks down which the rock was transported are still visible although grown over by grass.

There is a spring in which, when the the sun shines, as it does occasionally, small flakes of mica twist and turn to glitter and shimmer under the water. It is one of nature’s fascinating art shows.


Further along the track the walker might encounter some Schiehallion Boulder Bed, which is a curious rock with a fine matrix containing lumps of pink granite. The latter are thought to have been delivered to this area from Greenland by floating ice which melted and dropped the granite on the sea bed. The original source rock has all been eroded away.


Schiehallion was shaped by flowing glaciers in the last ice age and the ice may have risen to at least 2000 feet up the mountain. The top of Schiehallion is very strewn with boulders and theory has it that if the glaciers had flowed right over the summit these boulders would have been carried away - so it didn’t quite get that high.


Picture the scene 12,000 years ago - the glens were full of ice, but the summit of Schiehallion was poking out into the sky - a defiant island of rock in a sea of ice. Back then Schiehallion was a ‘Nunatak’, a rather nice Inuit word meaning a mountain or pyramidal peak projecting from an ice field. They exist today in the arctic.


The west ridge can be pretty windy with the prevailing wind coming from the west and yet oddly when you get to the summit the wind may drop and there are places to shelter no matter which direction the wind is coming from. Sometimes you can even eat your sandwiches in warm sunshine at the summit.


En route there are the heathers - Ling, Cross-leaved Heath and Bell Heather. There are Cloudberries, Blaeberries, Cow berries and Bear berries. At a surprising height there are Wood anemones and Wood sorrel indicating that once upon a time there were trees to a great height. These would have included the ‘Wee Trees’ - Dwarf willow and Dwarf birch. Collectively these small trees are called Montane Scrub and they are found in abundance in Southern Norway in similar terrain to that of Schiehallion. Now they are only found in places on cliffs where deer and sheep cannot get at them. The John Muir Trust who own the eastern side of Schiehallion are making an effort to re-establish them. The west ridge has spruce seedlings growing at 3000 feet to prove that trees can do it - even if they are spruces.


Mountaineering moles go to a surprising height on Schiehallion unless it was the fairies that left the mole hills.


Near the summit of Schiehallion the rocks are graced by a deep red lichen. Lichens are strange organisms as they are actually two organisms in symbiosis - an alga and a fungus. Interestingly they were much studied by Beatrix Potter, when she wasn’t writing about rabbits and carrots.


At about the same level you enter ptarmigan country. Ptarmigan are a type of grouse that are incredibly hardy and stay on the mountain tops all winter. Often you hear their churring calls before you see them. In winter they exchange their grey or brownish plumage for snowy white camouflage.

If you are particularly lucky a golden eagle will float by and with a flick of a wing be gone in a fast glide. Golden eagles are the reason why Ptarmigan would rather go unnoticed.


On the north side of Schiehallion lies the famous Schiehallion limestone pavement where we can justifiably slip into the realms of myth. There are two rocks there lying on the surface of the pavement which are clearly very different from the limestone. If you haven’t read Alec Cunningham’s book, ‘Tales of Rannoch’ it is to be recommended. In this book he relates that tradition has it that these two rocks are petrified witches. In more mundane terms they could be described as erratics of biotite schist. They are pock marked, as you might expect for any self respecting witch, although that could just be the honeycomb weathering leaving holes where iron has been subjected to chemical weathering. I expect that both explanations can exist simultaneously in one brain.


High on the north side is a platform where the Astronomer Royal, Maskelyne strung up his plumb lines to weigh the earth. The northern platform is mirrored by one on the south. Schiehallion was chosen because of its regular shape, which allowed the mass of the mountain to be calculated and compared with the mass of the earth. It was then that contours were first used on land, although they had been used underwater in the Netherlands to estimate the volume of a canal.


A plaque at the entrance to the Schiehallion car park gives more detail and Wikipedia gives huge detail.


Only experienced hill walkers should go to the dark side. Whichever route you take be well equipped - Scottish mountains are not to be underestimated, in winter they are equivalent to the

Arctic and are used for Arctic training. Even in summer the weather can change in the blink of a Ptarmigan’s eye.