Not too much to report in between returning from Norway and the end of the year. I joined the list of Hall members who have gone from 0 to 100% in the Isle of Man in the space of a day or two (after too long inland, the incidental coastal walking made more of an impact than the hills themselves). On returning to Scotland, Mochrum Fell gave the expected prickly, welcome-back embrace, then I found myself the unwitting object of a search-and-rescue operation after stupidly leaving the car open overnight in Galloway Forest Park.
RSPB fieldwork in the north-east gave the opportunity to tidy up Cairn William and Coiliochbar (don't try following the mapped track from the south unless you enjoy sparring with wind-thrown lodgepole pine). Last bag of the year was Lendrick Hill; a dusk escapade in deep snow off an icy B-road on the way south for Christmas, emerging from the black-and-white calm of the Ochils to a nightmare vision of lights linking Edinburgh and Glasgow under the orange fog of Grangemouth.
Hopefully I will have more to report in twelve months time. For now, Graham Tops and an imminent fifth round of Munros take precedence. Outstanding experience of the year was not Nordkapp, nor anywhere on the way to it, but Braeriach at dawn on 8 December, after a bivvy on the Moine Mhor: cloudless sunrise over Lochnagar, projecting the shadow of the hill I was on through the Dirrie More and way out over the Minch onto a bank of murk. Visibility was of a different order to anything I've seen before: The Cheviot to Hoy. I've no idea if that's theoretically possible, but I do know that, on one particular day of a winter anti-cyclone, it's what I saw, with wind turbines on Soutra catching the sun and visible to the naked eye. There's enough in Scotland to occupy a lifetime. Just once in a lifetime, perhaps, I've seen almost all of it at once.
