Munro Bagging

I've always loved mountains as I grew up in the heart of the Mourne mountains in Northern Ireland, but I'll write more about them in another post. For this post, however, I'll focus on the fact that I've lived in Scotland for over six years and decided that 2021 was the year I finally started Munro Bagging.

What is a Munro?

Munros are mountains in Scotland over 3,000 ft (914.4m). They are named after Sir Hugo Munro, a founding member of the Scottish Mountaineering Club who published the list of mountains meeting this criteria in 1981.

There are 282 Munros in total.

Why do you want to bag them?

Munro bagging is a common pastime for walking/ mountain enthusiasts where you challenge yourself to climb to the peak of all the highest mountains in Scotland. My friend bought me a wallchart and accompanying book full of maps of each Munro as we started this journey at the beginning of June. These have been great for planning hikes, and tracking which Munros we've climbed and when.

When I tried explaining this to a colleague he mentioned it was like catching Pokémon and he's not wrong. Gotta bag 'em all!

Routes and Planning

A lot of planning goes into each of the hikes: making sure we have the right gear to keep ourselves safe and warm, figuring out if the Munro(s) are dog friendly (and if not, can I find someone to look after them while we're gone?), researching the route, downloading maps and planning out snacks.

Walk Highlands is by far the best resource we have found for the routes, they come complete with ratings, starting points, route maps and photo descriptions to help along your way. My one nitpick is that it refreshes while you're out, and if you don't have a signal you will lose the maps (not making that mistake again).

We've since upgraded our watching to Garmin Fenix 7s which we can set up the GPX file to help with navigation which has helped us out of more than one tough spot with poor visibility!

We've also made the mistake once so far of being underprepared with food and snacks, having a sandwich and packet of sweets between us before getting stuck in standstill traffic for 6 hours on our way home. Thankfully a kind stranger shared a multi-pack of crisps with us so we wouldn't go hungry.

Progress so far

This was originally intended to capture the Munros bagged in 2021 (11 of them!), however, as we progressed it felt more fitting to turn this into a living document and add to it as we go. One thing that did change by July 2022 was that we started recording adventure clips of our hikes which are continuously getting better!

Maybe someday we'll revisit some of the original hikes and accumulate some footage, but for now, we've got videos from our 14th Munro onwards...

We hope to be able to look back on this post with fond memories as we attempt to bag all 282 Munros...

This is what Lewis looks like roughly five minutes into every hike: