Scottish Munros

Munro bagging

In 1891 Sir Hugh Munro published his Tables of Scottish mountains over 3,000 feet, and Scots have been arguing about the list and climbing it ever since. The Scottish Mountaineering Club currently recognizes 282 Munros; the first person to climb them all was the Rev. A. E. Robertson in 1901, and the SMC's list of "compleaters" passed 7,000 a few years ago. It is, by a wide margin, the most popular peak-bagging list in Britain.

Ben Nevis at 1,345 meters is the highest and the busiest, with the Mountain Track from Glen Nevis carrying walkers up its northwest side most days of the year. Beyond it the list ranges from gentle days on the Cairngorm plateau to the Cuillin Ridge on Skye, where the Inaccessible Pinnacle — a rock fin requiring a roped climb and an abseil — stops more would-be compleaters than anything else. Most people do the easy ones around Loch Lomond and Glen Coe first and save Skye and the Fisherfield six for when they're committed.

Using the map

Summits are grouped by area, south to north with the islands last, which is also roughly the order in which the list gets harder. Heights and positions follow the Database of British and Irish Hills, the reference the SMC now uses, so when a survey demotes a Munro to a Top — as happened to Beinn a' Chlaidheimh in 2012 — the list here follows.

Click a badge or its pin to mark a Munro climbed, again for want-to-climb. When you've done the 282, the Corbetts and Grahams are waiting, and the Wainwrights are the Lake District equivalent.

Munro Tops and the changing list

Alongside the 282 Munros, the SMC Tables list 226 Munro Tops — subsidiary summits over 3,000 feet that don't quite qualify as separate mountains. The line between the two has moved repeatedly: the 1997 revision promoted eight Tops to Munros and demoted one, and surveys with modern GPS have nudged a few more since, most recently Beinn a' Chlaidheimh (down) and Knight's Peak on Skye (never up, after a survey found it 36 centimeters short). Compleaters are asked to climb the list as it stood when they finished, so nobody loses a round. The codes on this map are tied to each summit's grid reference, so a reclassification won't cost you a tick.