Buachaille Etive Mòr (The Great Herdsman of the Etive)
Buachaille Etive Mòr is a Munro, one of Scotland’s 282 hills over 3,000ft / 914.4m high. A common location for mountain landscape photographers is to position yourself on the lower slopes of Beinn a’Chrulaiste, a Corbett (a hill in Scotland over 2,500ft high), which has multiple options for wild camping and offers outstanding views of its more photogenic neighbour.
Although the slopes of Beinn a’Chrulaiste are by far not an original location for photographing Buachaille Etive Mòr (I’d imagine it’s the third most common view of the hill by photographers after the waterfall on the River Coupall and Blackrock Cottage), I was keen to see if I could capture the view without the A82 road or the river in view.
Buachaille Etive Mòr is a very popular hill with both hillwalkers and climbers. The most common ascent for walkers is via Coire Na Tulaich, a rocky amphitheatre on the northern slopes of the mountain (on the right in the photographs I’ve taken here). The corrie has a steep head wall and has been the scene of several avalanches over the years, sometimes fatal. The east and south-east faces of Buachaille Etive Mòr are a myriad of rocky ridges, gullies and steep buttresses which are popular with climbers and scramblers. An obvious waterslide slab, lit up by the sun in the fifth image below, is the starting point for Curved Ridge, a technical scramble (or low grade rock climb) I’ve enjoyed immensely in the past. It winds its way up the mountain just behind the left skyline before coming out at the notch beneath the top of the prominent Crowberry Tower. Other scrambles in view include North Buttress, Broad Buttress, Lagangarbh Buttress and the Northeast Ridge of Creag Coire na Tulaich, all to the left of Coire na Tulaich.
