Needed to squeeze in another hill day without overcooking things too close to the Fling, so it was off to the Monadh Liath today for a round as runnable as any of last week’s Drumochter Munros and a wee milestone in notching up my 200th discrete Munro on Carn Dearg. Not perhaps a big deal when it’s taken me over 30 years to collect that lot, but it’s approaching three-quarters of the total when I’ve also got nearly two-thirds of the Tops (just have to make things difficult for myself by maintaining that the Munros without the Tops are Munro-lite!) and maybe starts to bring the endgame within sight should I choose to really start attacking the rest instead of constantly repeating those I’ve already done. So of course I was tempted to extend today’s round to pick up the western outlier of Geal Charn (926m version and not the 889m or 766m ones you see on the map), but not tempted enough to stretch my 17 miles by another 10 (!) with the Fling just six days away, and that one got left for a rainy day with a pleasant run out through Glen Banchor ample compensation for the spurned opportunity. Amazed that today’s three-Munro round (at less than 3,800 ft ascent) was once a five-Munro round before the demotion of Carn Ballach and Carn Ban to Tops but, while I’m largely sceptical about tinkering with Munro’s Tables except where responding to new survey data, I’d have to agree they’d have been the softest of full Munros when there are many more significant Tops and typical of the anomalies you can only really reconcile by doing the lot!
