During our original crowdfunding campaign, we successfully raised £8,123 with 175 wonderful supporters. We are now continuing to accept donations to keep repairs going. Find out more about our original plans below.
Welcome to the Mend Our Mountains Beinn a'Ghlo appeal.
We're trying to raise £10,000 for one of Scotland's most amazing mountain routes - up Carn Liath on the Beinn a’Ghlo massif. You can help us repair it by pledging today - the £10,000 we want to raise will enable us to undertake urgent work to halt the erosion in this area.
The mountain
Beinn a’Ghlo lies in the southern reaches of the Cairngorms National Park, rising up above Blair Atholl in the Forest of Atholl. It is a great sprawling mountain massif rather than a single peak, with three Munro summits, vast ridges and remote corries (of which there are nineteen in total!).
The most accessible and lowest of the three Munros, Carn Liath, is a familiar sight for those driving north along the A9 at the Pass of Killicrankie. It is mostly climbed from near Loch Moraig, on its own or as the first part of the longer Beinn a’Ghlo traverse, a serious undertaking that requires a full day of committed hiking. The summit offers an excellent viewpoint looking south over lowland Perthshire. The massif also forms part of an incredibly rare and internationally significant protected Cairngorms habitat – more than 80km² is SSSI or similar.
The problem
The walk up Carn Liath on Beinn a’Ghlo begins on boggy heathery ground, but as it starts to climb steeply, it soon becomes an obvious and badly eroded white granite scree scar which can be seen from miles around as it extends up the hill.
It is one of the greatest upland path priorities in Scotland due to the extent of existing damage along the route and the likelihood of increased erosion in the next five years and the risk to fragile, unique flora and fauna from trampling and disturbance. In such a sensitive and protected mountain environment, finding a complementary path repair solution is all the more complex and crucial.
The solution - and what your pledge will do
Carn Liath requires a major path repair project with light-touch techniques in some of the lower sections and a fully-built path higher up the hillside. This will combine a mixture of aggregate surfaces on shallower gradients and stone pitching on steeper terrain to address the erosion issues.
Construction work will require a huge 300 – 400 tonnes of material to be sorted out and bagged, then flown by helicopter up on to the hillside.
Part of the approach taken at Beinn a'Ghlo is to also complete preemptive repairs in other areas, hopefully meaning that these areas require less attention in the future. We need your pledges to help secure and protect this habitat, and the stability of the surrounding environment, which will hopefully last for many tens of years.
Incredible rewards
To help us reach this total (and those in our other Mend Our Mountains projects) we're working with a huge number of partners, many of whom have made incredibly kind donations - you can see some of them below.
It means we can offer an amazing range of rewards - from t-shirts and mugs to unique experiences. You can see all of these, many of which are exclusive to the Scottish projects, on the right. We think there's something for everyone, on any kind of budget, and we've worked hard to make sure our partners are offering you something really great in return for your valuable pledge.
And it's not just about Scotland. As you've probably guessed, Mend Our Mountains is a huge campaign, spanning the entire family of 15 UK National Parks. We've got 13 primary projects in 11 parks, and every park will benefit in some way. Crowdfunding is just part of what we're doing - we want to raise £1,000,000 in total, the most ambitious campaign of its type ever.
If you want to take a look at all the projects in the appeal, and see how close we're getting to our overall target, check out the Mend Our Mountains Crowdfunder Homepage.
Pledge today and protect Beinn a'Ghlo for the future.
Reward images
Organic cotton Mend Our Mountain tees. Sizes shown: Men’s Medium, Women’s Small.