The White Mounth

A minor classic, the round of Lochnagar and the White Mounth, more often referred to simply as ‘The Circuit’, offers the runner that peculiar combination of high summits and remarkably easy ground so characteristic of the Cairngorms. Which is not to say that more difficult, technical running does not exist, nor that a few boulder fields will not have to be crossed. But in general, the going is good, and fast — unless attempted on day when a rapid thaw is in progress and the hard névé of weeks gone by is consigned to memory.

In fact the snow was hard on the last climb to the summit plateau of Lochnagar, sufficently so to warrant an axe for a few hundred feet, but thereafter the going was tiresome, an increasingly soft crust collapsing on every step. Even on the flat it proved hard work, the last climb to Broad Cairn a miserable affair. And yet, there are few places where the vast space of the Cairngorms is more apparent, a seemingly endless array of layered ridgelines reaching beyond the wide snowfields that glittered beneath azure skies. Well worth a little extra effort I thought.