THE START OF AN ATLAS


Auchineden

a high land Eden

a Scottish Oukaimeden

for the start of an Atlas

'Mountains that flow'.

This view looks north to Loch Lomond and the Highland range from Auchineden Hill on the eastern rim of the Kilpatricks.

This was the hill that started it all, when I decided one clear blue late February morning to 'get on my bike' so to speak. As a boy I had done the 20km cycle to Queen's View (the car park beneath Auchineden) several times. Those legs were, last time I looked, and beneath all that hair, still working. On the back of this beautiful day there were two others venturing into the Campsies opposite and Mugdock Country Park beneath to the south. After these three days there was no looking back. The hills and this wondrous late winter clarity had turned me. The next six months were spent ecstatically exploring. It was only then that I realised the true nature of what Glasgow actually was, a city that flowed, at times quite seamlessly, into a high land of unending wonder.

Looking south to the city of Glasgow, with Mugdock and Milngavie somewhere in the mid distance.

Looking west to the Campsies on a sparklingly clear day in late February. Dumgoyne is on the left below the slightly higher Earl's Seat with Slackdhu on the right. Another angle from the back of these two mammaries can be seen elsewhere on the site. Auchineden, aka The Whangie, is one of the Kilpatrick's more idiosyncratic hills featuring as it does a strange geological formation that lends it its name. The deformity in question, a deep Caesarian cleft in the hill's side, is apparently the production, in a bygone epoch, of some extraordinary terrene convulsion. Local legend tells a different story, a story of the Devil who was travelling north to appear at a Highland witches black mass. In anticipation of all that pallid, cavorting flesh, the Devil lashed its tail in the region of Auchineden thus fashioning the whangie fissure. Consequently, some refer to it as The Devil's Staircase.