Alistair Fraser
Why the map still earns its place at the top of your pack
The Scottish Highlands are magnificent precisely because they are unhelpful. Ridges run on longer than they should, glens fork in unexpected places, and a shallow-looking slope can hide three hundred metres of relentless ascent. On a clear day you can blunder about and still enjoy yourself. In mist, or in the flat grey light of a November afternoon, the map stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the thing that gets you home.
Three elements do most of the work: contours, grid lines, and symbols. Learn them properly and you can picture the ground before you stand on it — where the crags are, where the deer are likely to be, and where the light will fall at sunset. Skim over them and you will spend a lot of time standing on a path junction wondering which way is north.
Contours: the shape of the hill in your hands
A contour line joins points of equal height. On British hill maps the interval is usually ten metres, with every fifth line drawn bolder and labelled with its height — so if you count up from a labelled 500 metre line, the next faint one is 510, then 520, and so on. Once you can count contours, you can read a slope like a paragraph.
- Close together means steep. Very close together means you will be using your hands.
- Wide apart means gentle ground, often boggy in the Highlands, and often slower than it looks.
- Evenly spaced, parallel lines mean a uniform slope — no surprises, just a steady pull.
- Lines bunching as they go downhill mean the ground steepens below you. Handy to know before you commit to a descent.
- A V pointing uphill is a re-entrant, a stream gully, or a burn cutting into the hillside. A V pointing downhill is a spur — usually the drier, easier line.
Contours also shape your photography. A spur gives you a clean foreground edge and a wide view; a re-entrant gives you shelter from the wind and often a small lochan for reflections. A high corrie rim catches first light while the glen below stays blue.
Grid lines: knowing exactly where you are
The National Grid divides the map into one-kilometre squares. Each square is defined by its easting (how far across) and its northing (how far up). Read eastings first, then northings — along the corridor, then up the stairs. A four-figure reference puts you in a one-kilometre box, which is fine for planning but useless in mist. A six-figure reference narrows it to a hundred metres, and that is the standard you should aim for.
To take a six-figure reference, estimate tenths of the way across the square, then tenths of the way up. Always estimate the second digit of each pair; never round to the nearest whole kilometre and hope. Practise on obvious features — a summit, a bridge, a lochan — until the numbers come to you without thinking.
One caution: grid north, true north and magnetic north are not the same. The difference between grid and magnetic north in Scotland is small but real, and it changes year on year, so check the margin of your map before you trust a bearing. A degree or two over a kilometre of featureless plateau is enough to put you down the wrong ridge.
Symbols: reading the ground before you stand on it
Symbols are the map's shorthand, and the Highlands have a rich vocabulary. Blue is water, in all its forms — lochs, lochans, burns, and the tiny springs that decide where you can refill a bottle. Green means vegetation, and the shade and symbols tell you whether you are looking at dense conifer, scrubby birch, or open moorland where you will be wading.
Black covers rock and most man-made features. Crag symbols, boulder fields and scree all mark ground that will slow you down considerably. Walls and fences are navigational gold: a deer fence running uphill at a known angle is a handrail you can follow in thick weather when nothing else is visible. Footpaths appear as dashed black lines, but treat them as hints rather than promises — in the Highlands a path on the map can be a faint trod worn into the heather, and in boggy ground it can simply vanish.
Spot heights and summit ring contours confirm the tops. Marsh symbols warn you of the wet ground that makes up more of the Scottish uplands than most people expect. And look for wildlife clues: broken crag symbols mean ledges, which mean ravens, peregrines and, if you are very lucky, golden eagles. Rough grassland with scattered boulders is classic ptarmigan country, and the high corries are where red deer hold up in the heat of a summer afternoon.
Practise at home before you rely on it in mist
Navigation is a skill that decays quietly, like a muscle. The place to rebuild it is a kitchen table or a familiar lowland hill, not a cloud-covered Munro plateau in a wind.
- Fold and set the map. Fold it so the area you need is visible, and orient it to the land. Do this habitually until it is automatic.
- Convert features to grid references. Pick ten features near home — a bridge, a lochan, a summit — and write out their six-figure references. Check them.
- Estimate distance from grid squares. Work out a route in kilometres, then add a realistic allowance for climb and rough ground. Hillwalking pace is rarely more than four kilometres an hour uphill.
- Take bearings at home. Set a bearing from your kitchen to a known distant object and walk towards it in the garden or a local park. Then do it with the map folded and one hand on the compass.
- Pick handrails and attack points. Before a big day, plan which wall, burn or ridge you will follow and which feature marks the point where you leave the compass and start looking.
Then test yourself in poor conditions on ground you know. A misty evening on a familiar hill teaches you more than a clear day on a new one. Get the map out again afterwards and compare what you thought the terrain would do with what it actually did. That gap — between the paper and the hill — is where good navigators are made, and it is also where the best photographs and the most memorable wildlife encounters tend to happen.
