Mountain walks

To reach the start of the path, head either through the toilet block building, or round the side of it, and directly across the vehicle track. You’ll find a water station here. 

Follow the 1m-wide path up through the woodland.

After around 300m you will pass through a tall gate in a deer fence. 

Continue for 200m to cross a wide forestry track. You will find the path getting a bit steeper now.

Continue for another 900m to reach the next gate and fence, passing over slopes that used to be covered in closely planted spruce and larch, but are now clad in a growing forest of native birch and Scots pine thanks to the management of Forestry and Land Scotland. 

The gate at the top of this section is the start of the 2,173ha area that the National Trust for Scotland cares for on behalf of the nation.

As you step out onto the more open slopes, the wide depression of Coire Corrach opens out to your left. The name simply means ‘steep corrie’ in Gaelic, due to the craggy back slopes of the coire. 

Trust staff and volunteers have been expanding woodland cover in this area over the last 30 years, using fencing protection to enable natural regeneration. The coire was well used for many centuries for cattle grazing – the remains of several stone shielings, where people would live while looking after the cattle in summer, can be found here.

The path now steepens and zigzags as you draw level with the back wall of the coire. 

The path here had eroded up to 20m wide in the 1980s before repairs took place, and Trust staff work hard to keep trampling pressure off the ground either side of the path.

A further 1km up the open ground and you arrive at the next gate and hill fence. It’s well worth turning about here to drink in the view over Loch Lomond and its many islands.

A further 500m, including some steep, stone-pitched zigzags, brings you to the halfway point on Sron Aonaich. 

Here you’ll find the path gradient becomes much less steep, with a broad ridge opening out ahead and the rising bulk of the Ben Lomond summit now visible. Sron Aonaich means the ‘nose of the ridge’. 

You are now out of the lower grassland and heath and into a different habitat type. A cap of deeper peat blanket bog sits across the ridge here, with vegetation dominated by sedges, sphagnum moss and dwarf shrubs including heather.

After 1.5km enjoying the views from the ridge, the path starts to steepen again. 

Lots of repair and maintenance work has been done (and continues to be done) along this section, which was up to 25m wide in the past. This gave rise to a former jokey name for the Ben Lomond path of ‘the other M8’. 

Off to the right, or the east, a small distinctive knoll with a craggy face carries the name of Sithean. This is Gaelic for ‘fairy hill’, a name often given to such knolls in times when it was believed faeries and other-world creatures lived in such hillocks.

The next 600m brings you to the foot of the last steep climb towards the summit ridge. 

If it is windy, this is a great time to stop and get your extra layers on, and have a bite to eat, as you can feel very exposed to the weather once you start heading up this next section.

You’ve now got a steep 300m section with a stone pitched surface. This is a technique we use to maintain a stable surface on steep ground and try and keep walkers contained onto a narrower line, to prevent erosion. It takes a lot of work to install, with one person completing around 1.5m per day. 

On the way up this section, keep an eye out for traces either side of the path of the old pony track line, which took more of a zigzag route up the steeper ground here. 

At the top of the steep zigzag you come out onto a fantastic view, looking out and down to the east and north. The dramatic crags below sit at the top of Coire Fuar, the ‘cold corrie’. 

Although initially steep from this point, the gradient eventually levels off as you attain the ridge for the walk along towards the summit.

The vegetation at this altitude is more fragile and sensitive to trampling pressure; sticking to the path surface up here greatly helps towards looking after the habitats and mountain landscape.

On the last approach towards the summit there are a couple of places where the path comes close to the edge of the northern coire. This is Coire a Bhathiach, or the ‘cow-byre corrie’. It’s uncertain why it got this name, but the precipitous crags are a marked contrast to the gentler slopes to the south.

The summit is marked by an Ordnance Survey trig point, erected in the 1930s. 

If you are lucky enough to have a clear view, you’ll see Loch Lomond stretching up to the north, with the Arrochar Alps, including the Cobbler, off to the west. 

Out on the skyline to the west, look for the island of Arran to the south, or the three lumps close together of the Paps of Jura. If it is really clear, you might see the southern headlands of the Isle of Mull.

To the north, the distinctive lump of Ben Nevis is visible some 44 miles away, with the mountains of Glencoe slightly to the left. 

Another mountain in the care of the National Trust for Scotland, Ben Lawers, is also clearly visible to the northeast.