Tomorrow morning will be noteworthy for anyone with an interest in the Munros – the list of 3,000-foot Scottish hills first published in 1891 by the Scottish Mountaineering Club, courtesy of the esteemed Hugh Thomas Munro – as the makeup of the list could be about to change for the second time in two years.
Munro-climbing – or Munrobagging as it has become known – is the pastime where people work their way round all the hills in the list until they eventually qualify as a Munroist, someone who has climbed them all. This can take decades – there have been cases of people taking more than 60 years – or it can be done remarkably quickly, as with Stephen Pyke, who walked, ran, cycled and canoed his way round the full set inside 40 days last year.
Quite what constitutes that “full set” has long been a matter of debate, however – hence the significance of tomorrow’s announcement. Surveyors John Barnard and Graham Jackson, supported by fellow members of the Munro Society (TMS) and sponsored by Lord Haworth of Fisherfield (himself a Munroist – he finished with Ben More on Mull in 2001, on the exact centenary of the first-ever completion), spent several days in July measuring the heights of three hills in the remote Fisherfield area between Ullapool and Poolewe. It is the results of these surveys that will be announced on Tuesday – and while it could mean no change in terms of the list of Munros, there could be one, two or three alterations – in which case there is sure to be a certain amount of controversy and complaining.
At present, there are 283 Munros, and 220 Corbetts – these being the next category down, hills between 2,500ft and 2,999ft (or 762 metres and 914 metres – the mix of imperial and metric units has long added to the confusion and merriment of Munro measurement). The hills surveyed in July were Ruadh Stac Mor, a 918m Munro usually climbed in conjunction with the more celebrated A’Mhaighdean; Beinn a’Chlaidheimh, a ridgy, twin-topped 916m Munro at the north-eastern end of the Fisherfield range; and Beinn Dearg Mor, at 910m one of the highest Corbetts, standing across the river from the popular overnight halt of Shenavall bothy.
So, that’s the cast list. What’s the likely outcome? The first thing to say is that each of the hills has a different chance of changing status. Beinn a’Chlaidheimh is most “at risk”, simply because its present height is closest to the critical mark. A precise imperial-to-metric conversion gives 3,000ft – the Munro threshold – as 914.4m (or 914 metres 40 centimetres). Beinn a’Chlaidheimh could currently be 915.5m rounded up to 916m, which means it’s in hanging-on-by-fingernails territory in terms of its Munro status.
Ruadh Stac Mor is currently a couple of metres higher than Beinn a’Chlaidheimh – and in the resurveying game two metres counts for a lot. As for Beinn Dearg Mor, its present 910m height – even if this actually represents 910.5m – still leaves it needing to find an extra 3.9m from somewhere to become a Munro.
There are other factors in play – including, crucially, how the existing Ordnance Survey (OS) heights were obtained. Although to the casual map-glancer a height is a height is a height, the OS has long used two different methods: ground surveys and aerial surveys. Ground surveys – standing at the point in question and measuring using old-fashioned trigonometrical methods – is considerably more accurate, in margin-for-error terms, than a photographic air survey. On the large-scale 1:25,000 Explorer maps, ground-survey heights are shown in black, while aerial-survey heights are orangey-brown.
The OS height for Ruadh Stac Mor was obtained by ground survey: there is a triangulation pillar, or trig point, on or very close to the top. The other two are aerial surveys. So the current 918m for Ruadh Stac Mor looks pretty solid. While it might change by a metre or so, having four metres lopped off would be remarkable, and any significant change is likely to be an increase, courtesy of an overtopping boulder or outcrop.
As for the process whereby these things happen, until 2007 changes tended only to occur when a revised OS map showed a new summit spot-height. If such a change took a hill across the Munro/Corbett boundary, then either the OS would notify the SMC directly, or some keen-eyed map-reader or Munrobagger would mention it to the SMC, who would in turn have it verified by the OS. That, for instance, is how the Loch Laggan-side hill Beinn Teallach became a Munro in the mid-1980s: a hillgoer named Richard Webb spotted that the map height had changed from 913m to 915m, mentioned this to Hamish Brown of the SMC, and in due course Beinn Teallach found its way into the list of Munros.
In recent years, however, the OS has shown less inclination to engage in upland surveys, plus the accuracy and availability of high-grade GPS equipment has increased. This has led to Barnard and Jackson – who are very adept practitioners without being full-blown professional surveyors – obtaining new heights for a wide variety of hills in Wales, England and Scotland. Not all these hills have been high or even popular walking destinations, and quite often the survey results have merely confirmed the existing hill-list status, perhaps with a small alteration in height. On occasion, however, they have come up with results that captured wider public interest – for instance when Glyder Fawr in Snowdonia was deemed to have nudged up from 999m to 1,000m.
In these situations, Barnard and Jackson have had their results ratified by the OS, and then – in the case of Sgurr nan Ceannaichean – by the SMC. It’s a more complicated process than used to be the case, in other words. And given that Munro-related changes have knock-on effects in the guidebook, hill-guiding and B&B industries, as well as on hill-path erosion, this process needs to be subjected to close scrutiny. While there has been general acceptance of the results thus far, not everyone is entirely at ease with the claimed accuracy of a “maximum estimated error of +/-0.1m”. While there is no suggestion of lack of diligence on the part of the surveyors, nailing the height of a 900m hill to the nearest 10cm remains a bold claim.
There are also those who would feel happier were a second visit – ideally by a completely different surveying team – to be made to the hills in question, on the old scientific principle that results ought to be replicable before being really accepted. That ought to be feasible with the borderline Munros – we’re not talking about sending probes to Jupiter, after all – but it hasn’t yet happened.
And there are more people – quite a wide constituency, even among active Munrobaggers – who think that the whole thing is a bit silly, that the list should be left as it is without these outbreaks of tinkering and meddling, whether from TMS surveying teams or the SMC itself.
So much for the theory and analysis. Time for a bit of old-fashioned speculation. Tomorrow’s possible changes – with “change” taken to mean hill-list status-change rather than slight height-alteration – effectively come down to three possibilities: A – no change; B – one change; C – more than one change. At risk of ending up with egg on face, C can be almost ruled out, as it would require at least one of the two outside bets – Ruadh Stac Mor and Beinn Dearg Mor – to cross the line. Given that Ruadh Stac Mor appears to be a complete no-no, that would mean Beinn Dearg Mor and Beinn a’Chlaidheimh swapping places in status terms. Likely? Not very.
As for A, this is quite possible – except that your correspondent has put his ear to the ground and dutifully listened for online chatter and gossip over the past few weeks… and has heard several hints that a change is a-coming. In some cases the talk mentioned hills not even in the current survey – a case of Chinese whispers applied to the Munros – but there has been a consistent suggestion of a change.
Were that to be the case, then Beinn a’Chlaidheimh looks massively more likely to be demoted than Beinn Dearg Mor being given a leg-up. Not just because the current height of Beinn a’Chlaidheimh is closer to the 3,000ft mark than that of its near-neighbour, but also because it would involve a decrease in height – and hill-shrinkage, if it can be called that, has been a steady theme of all the surveys carried out by TMS.
In 2007, in conjunction with professional surveying company CMCR, TMS looked at the two highest Corbetts, Foinaven in Sutherland and Beinn Dearg in Torridon. Both started as 914m, just below the critical mark, but Foinaven ended up at 911m, while Beinn Dearg was given an ultra-precise figure of 913.675m, meaning it remained a 914m non-Munro.
The 2009 surveys – conducted by the Barnard/Jackson/TMS team – looked at four hills, of which only one showed any increase in height, and then only by a metre (Ben Vane above Loch Lomond stayed as a Munro and crept up from 915m to 916m).
There does appear to be a trend here, of resurveyed heights being the same as, or lower than, the previous ones. In 2009, your correspondent correctly predicted one demotion, but got the wrong hill (opting for Ben Vane – oops – rather than Sgurr nan Ceannaichean). This time, the CalMerc Munro-tinkering prediction is that Ruadh Stac Mor and Beinn Dearg Mor will stay as they are in status terms, but Beinn a’Chlaidheimh will henceforth have a quieter life, being deemed below the 3,000ft mark.
If so – and assuming the SMC accepts any changes, which is not guaranteed – this would leave only 282 Munros and mean that getting round them all would, for the second time in two years, become a little less strenuous.
This is all pre-match analysis, however. For the actual announcement, check in with the Munro Society at 9am tomorrow morning, where all (at least until the next set of surveys and rejiggings) will be revealed.
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