So, what's this about?
We've done a fair bit of walking in mountains, and we don't feel we're ready to stop yet.
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Based in the Hillfoots in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, we've obviously spent a significant amount of time exploring and daunering among our very own Ochil Hills; they're there enticing us every day.
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Even before the dreaded Coronavirus pandemic arrived to effectively curtail any significant travel, I had had a notion to design a personal challenge much nearer to home involving the Ochils.
Over the years, we have regularly climbed the 2,000 feet plus (610m) hills and tops in the Ochils (known as Donalds - more of that later), often all in one day. And so the idea of looking at those 500m and over took shape. But this only added another 20 hills, many of which we had already climbed. OK - what about over 400m? Well that added a whole new dimension as that seemed to mean about another 50 - which was becoming more of a challenge.
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And the first part of the challenge was in itself quite an undertaking - cataloguing / listing the summits in the Ochil Hills over 400m above sea level (My List) - which raised a couple of fundamental questions.
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First question - what do we mean by "the Ochil Hills"? You'd think there would be quite a straightforward and simple answer - aye, right! Having scoured the references I could find, I eventually gave up looking for the definitive definition of the boundary, and decided to make up my own - a feature, as it turns out, of this game! So here we go: at the boundary of the Ochil Hills are Blairlogie - Blackford - Dunning - Forgandenny - Bridge of Earn - Milnathort - A91 back to Blairlogie.
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Second question - what do we mean by a "summit 400m and more above sea level"? To explain this, it might be useful to refer to the previously mentioned "Donalds". These were defined in 1935 by Scottish Mountaineering Club member Percy Donald as Scottish Lowlands mountains with summits over 2,000 feet (610m) above sea level (the general requirement to be called a "mountain" in the British Isles, although I have gone with a more recent metric convention that 600m is the height requirement) and over 100 feet (30m) in prominence, and which also had "sufficient topographical merit". Well, I wasn't sure what the last bit actually meant, so I dropped that, which left the definition of a summit to be included in "A Game of Stones" as one which is in the Ochil Hills and is more than 399 metres above sea level - but I experimented with and finally decided on a "simple" prominence height requirement (Notes: C), which led to some previously unnamed (on the Harveys and OS maps) summits needing to be labelled, which was interesting - and possibly controversial! (Notes: B)
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Which rather leads on to a third question - why A Game of Stones? Just simply the result of an over-active imagination. For a start, I have to imagine that I am going to get to the top of 77 hills! And then how do I prove I've been there? Being a bit of an occasional geocacher, I very briefly considered placing caches on every summit, but there were a couple of flaws to this idea:
1 - some of the hills already have caches on them, and duplicates are not allowed, and 2 - I really did not have the energy to go through the process of registration, production and maintenance of caches even once, far less almost 80 times! Hence the idea to keep it simple and just leave distinctively marked stones (Notes: A) as markers on or as close as possible to each of the summits.
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