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Corbett bagging: Beinn Mholach, from Dalnaspidal

Written by Fiona

August 30 2022

The remote Corbett, Beinn Mholach, is approached from Dalnaspidal, which is conveniently located just off the A9 on the Perthshire and Highlands border.

There is a long track along the western shore of Loch Garry and while my pal Ben and I chose to walk this, it also offers a fairly easy mountain biking route. The track is uneven in places but never tricky nor technical.

Start of the walk at Dalnaspidal.

The start point is also above 400m elevation so there is much less climbing than for other Corbetts. Strangely, my Garmin watch and Strava have the total ascent at 1211m, while the OS Map reckons it’s 782m. Walk Highlands puts the ascent at less than 500m?! Ben’s Suunto watch recorded 611m, which seems the most accurate of all. This is all rather odd…

The skort! I am wearing the new Flanci skort “Texa”. Discount code Fiona10 on all non-sale items.

Views from the lochside.

Anyway, suffice to say, while this is a long walk at 24km, it’s not a huge effort in terms of climbing.

Ben and I wanted more time for chatting, so we walked the 5km track along the lochside and then another 1.5km on a less obvious path through boggy moorland before reaching a track again for another 0.5km. I think that confident mountain bikers could do all of this on two wheels, although many will choose to leave their bike at the end of the lochside track.

We met a group of cyclists coming the other way. It turned out to be Scottish hand-cyclist Neil Russell and friends, including Rosie Baxendine. They were riding a 125km Dalwhinnie/Corrour route.

There is a broken bothy close to the track just after a path heads uphill towards the summit of Beinn Mholach. It looks like it has seen much better days, but it would still offer an overnight place to sleep if you were not too bothered about cleanliness.

The bothy.

Rugged walking on Beinn Mholach

We started the climb on rugged moorland at about 430m elevation. There were bits and pieces of track and trod with plenty of heather, other vegetation and bog to negotiate.

While this doesn’t sound too pleasant, Corbett baggers will be familiar with the rough terrain. The reward for fewer paths on the less trodden Corbetts are much quieter mountains.

It was only on the descent that we met two other walkers during our day of hiking.

At first, the gradient is quite steep as we headed towards a minor summit of Creag nan Gabhar. After this there was flatter walking along a wide ridge and then another steeper section of uphill.

The summit cairn can be seen from far away and up close it’s a magnificent marker. There is also a trig pillar close to the large cairn. The views from the top at 841m are impressive.

The Corbett is located at the heart of a fabulous Highlands landscape and overlooking Loch Rannoch. We could see many mountain peaks all around in the distance, including the obvious triangle shape of Schiehallion.

Wearing the new Flanci skort “Texa”. Discount code Fiona10 on all non-sale items.

The weather was mild and we enjoyed a mostly sunny day. The air was quite still, too, which meant we encountered midges and lots of flies.

This isn’t a hugely noteworthy Corbett and the landscape lower down isn’t as attractive as many other places in the Highlands, but the summit vista made up for the long walk and rugged ascent.

See OS Maps for my route.

Corbetts bagged: 97

• Thanks to Ben for some of the photos.

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