Munro Bagging

We have just passed day 90 and we have worked out that we have had 10 days of sunshine in that time. Mind you we did go home for 2 weeks in the middle but I don’t remember the weather being particularly nice then, either. The man on the telly yesterday said that it is because the jet stream has decided to stay south of the UK and so it’s blocking all the nice fluffy highs from coming up to warm us. Instead we are getting all these nasty cold wet lows coming in to attack from the West. I am finding the relentless grey skies and wet weather rather depressing. However the upside is we did have a rainbow yesterday!

 

Anyway, we are off sailing again tomorrow after a week here in Dunstaffnage marina. We had a few days of lovely sunny weather when my sister Deidre and her partner Steve were with us, but since they left the rain has returned. So I thought I would write a short bit about Munro Bagging and the people (and dogs) who I have met along the way who have done them.



Sir Hugh Munro
 

Munro Bagging is the sport of hill climbing. In 1891, Sir Hugh Munro, co-founder and the first president of the Scottish Mountaineering Club, published a list of all the Scottish hills with a summit over 3,000 feet and these have since become known as “Munro’s”. The idea is to “bag” as many as you can and if you manage all of them then you send your list off to the SMC and officially become a Munro Bagger. There are 282 Munro’s for bagging in Scotland, so you see it is quite a challenge to do them all. As the Lonely Planet guide states on page 36 “To the uninitiated it may seem odd that Munro baggers see venturing into mist, cloud and driving rain as time well spent, but this is part of the enjoyment, in retrospect.” I could insert “sailers” instead of “Munro baggers” into that sentence quite easily!

So have I met anyone who has done this? The answer is yes. Cast your mind back to the log cabin at Ballaculish and the conversation with the elderly gentleman and his dog Polly. He had done all 284 Munro’s in his youth. Hold on I hear you say, there are only 282! Yes but two of the Munro’s he climbed have since been taken off the list because of more accurate ways of measuring the height. We also met another lady there and her dog Hamish (everyone seems to have a dog in Scotland, or perhaps we just stop and talk to dog owners). Hamish is 17 years old and still doing Munro’s with his owner. I was in the local Dunbeg village shop and the shop keeper was sitting hunched over his laptop behind the counter watching something very intently. I apologised for interrupting the film he was watching. “Och no” he said, “I am watching this man on you tube who had climbed a Munro that I climbed so I wanted to see how he did it.” “Have you climbed many” I enquired. “Only one and I loved it. I want to do more but I am stuck in here” he replied. It is obviously a sport that gets you hooked, a bit like sailing I suppose. Perhaps I will try Munro bagging one day?

 

In the meantime we will be setting sail again tomorrow towards the Crinan Canal and on to Glasgow by the end of the week. Our friends Frank and Steff are joining us this afternoon so there will be more sailing blogs to look forward to later this week.