Meall nan Tarmachan - Hill of the Ptarmigans - 1044m (Munro), part of Tarmachan Ridge - Ridge of the Ptarmigans. (Other hills - Meall Garbh (1026 m), Beinn nan Eachan (1000 m).
Meall nan Tarmachan is a mountain in the Southern Highlands of Scotland near Killin just west of Ben Lawers. It was our first Munro of the Ben Lawers range. It made a lovely walk on a stunning day! We were joined by Jim and Laura - so had the ultimate treat of not doing the driving :)
We started this walk from a small car park just past the Ben Lawers visitor centre car park. This is also a bit of a treat as it gives you a good head start from sea-level. The drive up is on a windy narrow road, from which we spotted a couped sheep on the hill. So we ran over and helped her over, she did a bit of drunken staggering and then ran off. A nice bit of sheep-saving before we started....
The walk starts near a little bridge just north of the visitor centre on the Lochan Na Lairige road. Cross the bridge over the Allt a' Mhoirneas, pass through a gate and pick up the Land Rover track which heads off in a southerly direction. After a few minutes a smaller track branches off to the right and leads up to the southern flank of Meall nan Tarmachan.
There is a rreasonably well defined path that then leads you in nice zigzag straight up to a knoll which would give you amazing views however the cloud was still a bit low for us to see them. From the top of the knoll, drop down into the ravine at the other side and pick a route up through the crags of Cam Chreag. 
There was a thick layer of quite low level cloud. So we had moments when the sun came through and other times when we could just see the peaks poking through the top.
Even on such a gorgeous day the ascent route still held pockets of snow so some snow negotiating was still required. Luckily none of it was bad enough to cause any problems. A tennis-buddy of J's who had done this walk a week or so before said he needed ice-picks, crampons, the works..... but it had pretty much melted by the time we got there...
Above - Jim and Laura negotiate the snow!
Beautiful view of an off shoot of Ptarmigan ridge... from the summit of Meall nan Tarmachan.
The summit - hurrah - we saw a few other groups of walkers on this walk but not too many. At the top there were maybe about half a dozen of us sheltering from the wind and trying to eat our sandwiches...
Lunch time in the sun. We had some pretty good glimpses of views at this point as the clouds lifted for a while.
braxony! J perfecting his super-tourist/on-safari look. Perhaps our clothing was the reason we didn't actually see any Ptarmigans.......
Heading onwards over the second summit - Meall Garbh at 1026 m and onwards to Beinn nan Eachan at 1000m. Following an excellent winding narrow ridge and negotiating a nice bit of rock scrambling. Unfortunately by this point the wind was just blowing the clouds straight over us so we couldn't really see very much except the ridge in front of us!
We headed off the ridge track before the fourth hill and took a faint path down the hill. Jim stopping for some refreshment on-route.
We stopped at a waterfall fairly well down and had a bit of a snooze in the sun. Could probably have stayed there all day and night if we had been allowed - lovely.
and finally we found the old Landrover track again beside a disused quarry and followed it back to the Lairige dam, from where we had started. Saw tons more frogspawn- although no frogs this time. Also saw a mouse/vole and some para-gliders.We stopped on the way back at the Loch Earn Cafe and watched some water skiers and model aeroplane flyer's mucking about on the Loch, whilst we drank our coffee, ate our cake and rested our feet!
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