Knock Hill, above Knock village

My rule before anything else, and I’ll say it every time: always go back down the way you came up.

This was the second hill of the day. Meikle Balloch was done by the morning, and Chase — who’d been up it with me — was showing no signs of being bothered about another one. So I hit Take me there in the app and followed the route through Maps.

Getting parked

Before you get to the car park you turn off the main road onto a dirt track. Follow that for two or three minutes, all the way along, until you come to a sharp bend to the right. The car park is on the left of the bend, and it’s very limited for space — a handful of cars and that’s your lot.

Get out of the car and face down the road (not the road you just came up, the one at the bend). The hill gate is on the left-hand side. It’s hard to spot at first, so keep your eyes open for it.

The route

From the gate it’s roughly a five minute walk straight through the trees until you come to another gate.

After that one you’re out in the open. There’s a wee boggy patch at the foot of it just before the climb starts, but nothing to worry about.

Then it’s straight into a steep climb, and this is the hardest part of the route. The sensible thing, on a second hill of the day, would have been to take it steady. Instead I ran it, because the personal trainer in me was spurring me on, and I paid for that with a few thirty-second stops to get my breath back.

Partway up there’s a flat rock that was crying out for a seat and a water break, so I gave it one. I took a few photos from there and had a proper look at the view before carrying on up to the main gate below the summit. You can see the trig point from the gate, so you know exactly what you’ve got left.

The top

Chase cracked his best smile for this one. He knows fine there’s a treat behind the camera.

Here’s a wee bit of history for you if you’re interested. That pillar is a trig point — properly a triangulation pillar. Ordnance Survey put up about 6,500 of them from 1935 to map the country, sighting from one to the next, which is why they always sit somewhere you can see a long way. GPS made them redundant but plenty are still standing.

A few steps along there’s a cairn, so tradition is to place your marker as a sign of respect to the hill. There’s an old Gaelic line for it — cuiridh mi clach air do chàrn, “I’ll put a stone on your cairn.”

The top itself is a wide heather plateau, purple to its edges, and this is a hill that sits on its own — so the farmland runs out square and gold on every side of you, and behind it the sea lies along the whole horizon in one blue band. That’s what you get for the twenty-five minutes.

I always take a moment to reflect when I’m at the top, and realise how lucky I am to have this sort of experience on my doorstep. We take too many things for granted these days.

Before heading back down, me and Chase had a quick snack and some water to fuel us up. Pistachios, since you’re asking.

Ten minutes at the top, then back down the way we came.

Worth knowing

The steep pull after the second gate is the only real effort on this one. Everything before it is five easy minutes through the trees, and everything after it is heather and views. There’s that boggy patch at the foot of the climb, but it’s a couple of steps and you’re past it.

The car park is tight. If there are two cars in it already you’re going to be thinking about where else to put yourself, so it’s not one for turning up to mob-handed.

And take my times with a pinch of salt. Twenty-five minutes up is me running it with the personal trainer in my head telling me to keep going, not a sensible benchmark. If you’re new to this, walk it, give yourself the hour and a half the app suggests, and you’ll have a far better day than I did gasping at the top of the steep bit.