Sometimes your past and your future flash before your eyes. At the end of April 2014, the first thing to flash before my eyes was my breakfast. I was on a small open boat between Girvan and Ailsa Craig being very seasick. Apologies to my fellow travellers who all seemed to be coping much better than me. When the boatman decided it was too rough to land, circled the island and then headed back, between bouts of retching I began to contemplate the future. If I am to continue prioritising Marilyns, it will require many more such boat trips. Absolute height is to be my new goal, which will keep me on terra firma much longer. Having already climbed every Marilyn above 560m, I shall try to collect my handful of outstanding Sims and start doing the Highland Fives, picking up Marilyns and Humps within that category.
A handful of outstanding Sims, from Beinn a'Chlachain (photo: Robert Phillips)
Moving from my sickbaglog to my baglog, during 2014 I added Marilyns from south Wales to Skye; those in Wales as part of my continuing quest for Deweys, of which I now have just eleven left. Hirfynydd, with its motorsports track and windfarm, was probably my least inspiring Marilyn of the year. Skye may well have provided the best in Sgurr na Stri, and I even ventured back into a boat (rather larger and run by Calmac) to collect Dun Caan.
I had a mixed-weather week in Morvern and Ardnamurchan, however region 18 provided some great hills. The best weather was in July in Aberdeenshire where I collected a dozen 500m+ Marilyns in temperatures higher in Celsius than they had been in Fahrenheit when the late snows of spring 2013 had restricted me to lower hills on my previous visit to the north-east.
