Friends of the Ochils Newsletter 21: Autumn 2002
Dumyat and almost everything else
ANYONE REACHING the top of Dumyat around 11am on Sunday 6 October could have been forgiven for thinking they had arrived on top of a Munro. Why? Because close on 20 people were doing the things associated with the celebration that tends to accompany the completion of a round of Munros. Drinking drams of various different malts, munching hacked-off slices of a specially baked black bun, taking photographs of the assembled throng, shaking the hand of the apparent completer.
Dumyat, however, is no Munro. It isn't even half a Munro. Not only that, it isn't in any of the most commonly tackled lists of Scottish hills. Look in Munro's Tables and you'll see Munros (hills over 3000ft), Corbetts (hills between 2500ft and 2999ft), Grahams (hills between 2000ft and 2499ft) and Donalds (hills over 2000ft outwith the Highlands). Lowly, lovely Dumyat doesn't qualify for any of these categories, and you won't find mention of it in even the darkest corner of Munro's Tables.
So what was being celebrated on 6 October? A completion of the mainland Marilyns, that's what. Marilyns are hills in a massive catch-all list, defined by the surrounding drop (or separation) rather than by height. A Marilyn is a hill anywhere in Britain with at least 150 metres of drop on all sides before the ground rises to another qualifying hill. I won't bore you with the minutiae of detail, save to say that there are currently 1552 Marilyns, of which 1213 are in Scotland, five are on the Isle of Man, 179 are in England and 156 are in Wales. (Yes, I know this adds to 1553, but the summit of Black Mountain straddles the Welsh/English border and counts toward both parts of the list.)
Dumyat is a Marilyn, and easily so: think how separate it is, how wide-ranging the view on a clear day. A great many Marilyns, even the low ones, bring this feeling of being "a good hill". Ben Cleuch is the next Marilyn to the east, Carleatheran next to the west, while other local Marilyns include Dumglow in the Cleish hills and Uamh Bheag and Ben Clach over Comrie way. The Highlands are, of course, Marilyn Central.
Pictures of the group on the summit, by Ann Bowker
Dumyat was the last mainland Marilyn for Rob Woodall, a 42-year-old from Cambridgeshire - one of the flattest areas in the country. Woodall has chipped away at numerous hill lists over the past 15 years or so: Welsh 2000-footers were completed in 1985, their English counterparts in 1996, Munros in 1990, Donalds in 1992, Corbetts in 1995, Grahams in the final days of 2000 and so on. He's also put in some remarkable individual days, most notably the round of pretty much everything in the Red and Black Cuillin on 31/5/99. This involved 33 miles and 23,150 feet of ascent in 23 hours 28 minutes - see http://alastair-matthewson. freeyellow.com/page3.html, or the Scotsman 6/6/99.
For all his amazing - dare I say hyperactive? - achievements, the question of whether Woodall will complete the full list of Marilyns remains something of an imponderable. As things stand he has climbed almost all the offshore Marilyns as well as all the mainlanders - eg the remote eastern Lewis hills and awkward, ferry-free islands such as Scarba, the Shiants and the Barra Head group. But although only six of the 1552 hills remain, all six are in St Kilda, way to the west of everything else. And while the highest Kilda summit, Conachair, is little more than a steep moorland plod once you get there, the other five are difficult in all sorts of ways. Relentlessly rough seas, slimy slabby cliffs which permit few if any landings, technically hard climbing once finally ashore, bird-covered ledges, guano-coated holds, tiny weather windows for actually reaching the place (especially in autumn/winter when the birds are elsewhere) and a fraught bureaucratic situation whereby a combination of the National Trust for Scotland and Scottish Natural Heritage have made it extremely hard for climbers and islandbaggers to put ashore without submitting to draconian access restrictions. There is an increasing need for a Friends of St Kilda, an independent FotO-like group willing to tackle and unravel the administrative mess on the archipelago.
Anyway, that's all a long way from Dumyat in more ways than one. Rob Woodall might well find his way to the Kilda summits in due course, and fair play to him if so: the Marilyns are always going to be nigh on impossible to complete, but they used to say that Everest, K2 etc were nigh on impossible to climb. For now, he becomes the third person to have completed all the mainland Marilyns, after Ann Bowker (who was there on Dumyat) and Ken Whyte (who wasn't).
The gathering of friends hung around on top, nattering for an hour before adjourning to my place in Cambuskenneth for an afternoon of tea, biscuits and more nattering on the patio in the sunshine. Woodall was a ghost at the feast however: he had slipped away, driving down to Shap where he would climb another hill and complete another list, the even more obscure "Dewey 500ers". But that's another story...
TWO ASSOCIATED THOUGHTS while I'm on the subject of Dumyat. The first is this: where is the top of the hill? At first glance this is a silly question: everyone knows that the top is the large cemented cairn which carries the ornamental beacon bucket contraption. Except it might not be...
The base of the cairn is certainly higher than the benchmark on the Ordnance Survey trig pillar, but is it the actual summit? I had thought this to be the case for many years until a recent off-path ascent brought me along the nice bit of ridge immediately to the north-west. There are a couple of very small outcrops on this ridge, and I'm becoming ever more convinced that the highest of these, just 20 seconds' stroll from the cairn, is a tad higher than the base of the cairn.
The height difference - if there is one - is tiny: scarcely a foot, if that. But it could be that we have all been failing to top-out Dumyat for years. Certainly there was enough on-the-ground confidence about the "new summit" on 6 October for the main gathering to be held at the outcrop rather than at the cairn. Thoughts and observations would be of interest.
SECONDLY, while we were all up there, the usual straggle of Sunday-lunchtime tourists arrived and left. Most did the normal, sensible, civilised thing of sitting around for a while, looking at the view, then heading off "leaving nothing but footprints". One family displayed less hill sense, however. The wee boy clambered up on to the cairn, delved into the beacon brazier (aka litter bin) and started lobbing things out on to the grass. This is understandable if not commendable: boys will be boys.
The largest lobbed object was a two-litre plastic drinks bottle, which should never have been left there in the first place. When the boy's father noticed that his son was scattering stuff, he shouted at him to stop. Fair enough. But the boy (again being very boyish) completely ignored this paternal edict and ran off to do something else. Whereupon the father, rather than picking up and carrying down the bottle himself, simply left it lying where it had been flung and set off down the hill with his brood in tow.
Now at risk of sounding like a Daily Mail columnist, what kind of an example does this set? And what does it say about the state of the nation - about the adults as well as the children? Gah, I don't know...
Dave Hewitt
Rob Woodall (photo by Ann Bowker)