The Munro Society Annual Lecture
I’m delighted to say I’ve been asked to deliver the Annual Lecture of the Munro Society on Saturday April 18 at the Birnam Institute, Birnam, Perthshire.
I’ll be talking about Wild Scotland – A Spirit of Place, and will self-indulgently concentrate on those areas that have formed the bedrock of my outdoors career, the hill and mountains of the Scottish highlands and islands. With Scotland being able to boast some of the finest access legislation in the world, I’ll discuss the opportunities that are available for climbers, hill-walkers, Munro-baggers and backpackers, including some footage from my recent BBC television programme on the Sutherland Trail. However, the underlying theme will beone of protection and conservation and why it is the responsibility of outdoor folk to care for the wild places of Scotland..
The Munro Society was founded in 2002 and is open to anyone was has completed a “round” of the Munros. Much of the thinking behind the Society’s formation was to “give something back to the mountains”, a concept that strikes a chord among many hill-goers and a theme that I’ve discussed often enough on this website.
Among the initiatives undertaken so far by the Society are the following:
1) Establishing an Archive dedicated to preserving material relating to Munros and Munroists.
2) Monitoring the condition of Munros and Furths in terms of erosion and other man-made intrusions (the Mountain Quality Indicators, or MQIs for short). This is an ongoing process and a central database has been established.
3) The Society has organised the re-measuring of those mountains just above and below 3,000 ft with the latest measuring equipment, completing this task for Foinaven and Beinn Dearg (Torridon) in 2007.
4) The Society has actively supported campaigns such as that to extend the Cairngorm National Park and that against the Beauly to Denny power line
The Munro Society encourages new members from the ranks of Munroists and an application form can be downloaded from the Society’s website at www.themunrosociety.com. There is an active social side with an Annual Dinner and several weekends throughout the year spent among the hills.