Castle Law, Dumyat

The hill is named after the people who fortified it. Dumyat is thought to come from Dun, a hill fort, and the Maeatae — the tribe recorded as living north of the Antonine Wall — and the fort they built is still clearly visible on the summit of Castle Law, the western of the hill’s two tops.

Excavation by Dr Murray Cook and Professor Gordon Noble of Aberdeen University has produced radiocarbon dates, and the dates are the interesting part. There are at least two periods of use: one around 500 BC, and another between the fifth and seventh centuries AD. A thousand years separate them. Somebody built a fort here in the Iron Age, the hill went quiet, and then in the centuries when the Maeatae and their neighbours were dealing with the aftermath of Rome, somebody came back and used it again.

At 418 metres Dumyat is not a large hill, but it is a conspicuous one. Its shape forms an important part of the scenery around Stirling, and it turns up constantly on postcards and calendars, usually paired with the nearby Abbey Craig. It is a popular climb with visitors to the Stirling and Trossachs area, helped by the history of the town and the closeness of the Wallace Monument.

Its geology is written across the southern face. A prominent gully runs almost straight up the scarp and continues down the gentler northern slope, formed by erosion along a fault where soft pyroclastic rock meets harder andesite and basalt. Where the andesite slightly overhangs is the darkest and least exposed part of the climb, which is not particularly difficult. Further gullies, torn out around the main fault as a consequence of the great Ochil Fault, run off to the right into Dumyat and offer shortcuts to the summit. They are not equivalent. Raeburn’s Gulley is dangerous and should be left to experienced and properly equipped rock climbers; Siart Gulley can be managed by anyone of average ability.

The scree on the scarp face rewards looking down as well as up. It is a source of agates, not always of the best quality, and occasionally of smoky quartz and citrine, along with the inevitable quartz, calcite and barytes, and two ores of copper — malachite, and less often azurite.

Farming here has only ever been sheep farming, the ground allowing nothing else, and the hillsides carry several sheep folds and the ruins of a shepherd’s stone house. There was small-scale mining for copper and barytes at one time; those workings are abandoned.

The summit has accumulated its own small collection of monuments. There is a memorial to the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, a memorial bench to Michael Simpson, a long-serving and much-loved member of the Open University, a trig point, and a cairn with a beacon on it. The beacon was commissioned for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 and carried up and erected by the Menstrie Scout Group, as part of the chain of beacons lit across the country that year. It is currently filled with stones. Each of them is a wish that somebody climbed up here to leave.