Does anyone have information about the painted rocks which have disfigured Dumyat this past while? From midsummer until very recently (when most of the bright yellow paint had either worn off or, more likely, been scrubbed off by some altruistic soul), a long straggle of splodges marked the way to the summit via the Yellowcraig Woods path, from a start-point of either Logie Kirk or the university. It's hard to think of a more glaring and mindless example of vandalism in the Ochils in recent years: pathside cairns or marker ribbons tied to trees are bad enough (whatever happened to encouraging navigational skills?), but paint on rocks is a far more substantial intrusion. The splodges weren't even sporadic: out on the open hill they occurred every 20 metres or so.
They appeared sometime before 19 July, when a Glasgow-based walker named Colin Crawford spotted them (it was hard not to) on what he described as "a nostalgic ascent of Dumyat ... the first since my student days at Stirling back in the eighties", and they had largely vanished by 7 October. But they were very obvious during the intervening period and possibly for a month or two before mid-July. As to who took it upon themselves to graffiti the hill in this way, one guess is the misguided organiser of some charity-walk event - Dumyat tends to attract these. Other than that, it's hard to see who might have done this, as anyone with any hill nous would do nothing of the sort.
At risk of sounding like Crimewatch, surely someone must have seen someone hauling a large pot of yellow paint about Dumyat in the early summer. FotO would be keen to learn more - if only to have a quiet word with the perpetrator and ask them not to think about doing the same thing again next year...