Lomond hills on a winters day

Looking towards West Lomond From East Lomond

To be honest it was a bit of a sluggish and slow start not helped along by the promised weather forecast with the prophets of snow doom clearly in charge of the overhead motorway gantry signage. However, weather Armageddon did not arrive, quite the reverse actually, and the Lomond hills were very busy with people, some maybe not quite as well equipped as you would expect for a winter mountain walk. Some appeared to not be enjoying the frozen ground on the steep East Lomond ascent path something from which I derived a little amusement and even more appeared not to be enjoying the steep frozen descent, from which I derived even more amusement. 

The first climb felt like a bit of a slog and it seemed to take an age for my legs to get going but eventually I made it up the path on to the exposed flank of the hillside. Despite the glorious blue skies and sun shine it was a strong, biting cold wind sweeping the summits so I barely stayed long enough to take a photo or two before descending towards the masts and then on towards the limekilns. The timber walkways above the boggy ground were icy and so I took it a bit easy here as I didn’t really fancy a dook in the freezing boggy water underneath the walkway. 

The Limekilns

I took a slightly different route skirting around the famers fields just above the Craigmead road to get back towards the Craigmead car park just to avoid the herds of walkers and turned into the farm track just before the car park, almost going full length on the ice in the process. From here the paths at the reservoirs were free of ice and, even better, almost free of walkers as well as being relatively sheltered from the wind so it was almost warm. Eventually I dropped into Glenvale and then climbed up to the summit of West Lomond. Happily by now my legs seemed to have woken up a bit and were not objecting quite so much.

I tried to hide from the bitter chill of the wind in amongst the little semi-circle of stones by the trig point and managed a couple of photos but the wind was eye wateringly strong. Initially I had thought I would run back towards the middle car park and then descend back to Falkland via Maspie Den but Maspie Den is on the north side of the hill and in the forestry so there was a good chance of ice as there was no way the sun would have got to it yet if it was going to at all today. Instead I braved the herds of walkers, with solo’s and pairs seemingly to have been replaced by larger groups which took more effort to negotiate my way past and climbed to the summit of East Lomond again. I didn’t really stop at the top this time which was by now covered with folk and quickly descended down into Falkland missing out the frozen path completely by careering down the less slippery tussocky grass to the side of the path and then picking my way down the frozen steps through the woods a bit more cautiously back to the car which was parked just at the bottom of the path next to the piles of rubble that used to be the old Falkland Paper Mill.