ScotWays are looking for volunteers to help us by going for a walk (or run, bike or horse ride) along one of the routes featured in Scottish Hill Tracks. This is a guidebook with a difference – it covers Mainland Scotland (and Arran, Mull and Skye) in a network of 344 routes through hilly or remote terrain. The routes vary from short day walks to long ones, with a few multi-day treks included. In much of the country, intrepid travellers can link together multiple to create bespoke long-distance journeys through wild country, passing through settlements every few days. Scottish Hill Tracks was first published by ScotWays and the Scottish Mountaineering Trust in 1947, and nearly 75 years on (after 5 editions), most of the original routes are still in use.

Many of the routes have even older historic significance, having originated as drove roads, coffin roads and rights of way between remote communities. However, although it’s still possible to walk, cycle or ride over most of the routes, the landscapes they traverse have changed due to developments like wind farms, forestry, fencing and hydroelectricity. ScotWays maintains a web page with updates that we hear about, as a live appendix to the latest 2011 edition, but we’re now working on a new edition. To achieve that, we need the help of volunteers to travel all of the routes by September 2022, checking whether the description we currently hold for each route is accurate, and updating it with any corrections.

Could you help us?

Would you like to walk, run, bike or ride a new route with a different purpose? We still have many routes needing to be surveyed – the outstanding routes are shown in yellow on the overview map. Find out more about what’s involved.