UKC

There aren’t many marked paths in the Scottish hills. I’m confident navigating away from the path but how do you avoid a whole day of bog hopping & waist high bracken? And what about deer fences? Do you just climb over them? Any top tips and advice would be really helpful. Any mistakes you’ve made that could be avoided?
thanks 

You'll find a path on the best used routes on all the Munros, and most if not all of the Corbetts. Link-ups between hills or hill groups tend to be where the pathless miles come in - that, or when you're devising your own ways up hills, not following standard routes. It's all par for the course.

You can generally tell where the worst bogs are going to be, and take pains to avoid them. But some bog tolerance will often be needed even on well used paths. I would not deliberately plan a route that was bog hopping all day!

Bracken is a pain in summer, but only a feature in the lower glens so you generally get above it quickly.

Deer fences: I try to avoid climbing them since it risks damaging them or me, but sometimes it's unavoidable. Hopefully most will be marked on OS maps but you do run into unexpected newer ones sometimes. Try to scale them at the big corner posts if you can, or run along for a bit in case there's a stile.

Wait till winter. 

(A bit tongue-in-cheek, but there's several advantages - no bracken, no midges, and if it's cold enough the bogs are frozen over. Otherwise, as Dan touches on above, go high and stay high as much as possible. And take some walking poles for any bog-hopping that might still need doing)

If you are going to an area with Harvey's maps, those mark the worst of the boggy ground fairly well and the fences. 

Route descriptions on the likes of Walkhighlands etc can be useful too. I don't always follow the full route they suggest, but can be handy for getting ideas of where is nice and where the going is a bit tough.

Another vote for girlymonkey’s recommendation of WalkHighlands to see what routes other people have successfully taken previously. Or, if it’s your thing, Cicerone books  will give you route suggestions that usually take a sensible line. The Pocket Mountains series… maybe not quite as much.

To add to the above, when you're actually on the hills look at the terrain and the vegetation and pick your line accordingly. It's generally fairly easy to avoid the worst of bog and peat hags by looking well ahead. For example, look for cotton grass/mosses and for certain colours that tend to signify wet ground. I've never really had an issue with bracken where I've been. But if you do get stuck in some beware the tick.

Dan makes a fair point about not planning a bog-hopping trip for a whole day and about needing some bog tolerance. In my experience if I'm off-roading then if I've read the map and the actual ground well then I may get some bog but it's never a major issue. It's just a part of the wonderful experience that is off-roading in the scottish hills. Getting away from the trade routes is well worth a bit of bog now and then.

PS I'm not a fan of walkhighlands user reports. Whilst you might find the odd useful piece of information most people tend to follow the trade routes and trying to find any useful information amongst the tiresome reports and massive amount of pointless photos is painful. It's a very strange community.

Also, check this bloke out, https://www.luath.co.uk/ralph-storer. His "Ultimate Guide" series is a good companion to other guide books you may have to hand.

Sorry - one last post. I bought this recently, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Munros-Hillwalkers-Guides-Rab-Anderson/dp/19072333....

It's excellent and I highly recommend it. It covers alternative routes to the trade routes and the munro tops (doing these are a great way to get off the main paths and away from the crowds).

I do love your books Dan, but I definitely feel it hasn't been a proper Dan Bailey "great mountain day" if a) there was no bog at all and b) we finish in the light!

All the best

Oli.

All part of the service!

And their endless hectoring.

Just descended the horror path on Carn Liath, Beinn a’ Ghlo

You can keep your red lines

I'd reply sensibly to that if I understood your point but I don't. Sorry. Whose hectoring? And what red lines?

Just back after a few days in South Morar. Very rough going even on paths. No deer fences but there was of plenty bracken, some of it 6 feet high. Had a memorable night camped at Kinlochbeoraid. Definitely not on any trade route.

In the original SMC guidebook there was one route marked with a red line. These became or already were standard routes and through the 80s and 90s became eroded. Quite a few people call them redline routes. 
On a positive note a fair few people had a bloody good day out up there today …. And unlike the last time I was up there, we did not get burgled
 

as for Walkhighland…. Home page more or less accuses you of being a krapkamper or litter fiend, and every page has a health warning. You have to watch your step on the forum too. 

You found paths! Was there in May and missed the bracken. Excellent area

Got you.

The new version still shows the trade routes in red but there are yellow alternatives which is what I was on about. I think we're agreeing with each other. Rather than keep the red routes I'll pass them on to some unsuspecting soul, thank you very much. Perhaps a walkhighlands user.

On that note, I don't read the general information or forums on walkhighlands. The large incidence of unimaginative out and back routes and the user reports are enough to put me off reading any other part of the site but I'm not surprised by what you say. I've also seen a number of people on the hills blindly follow a walkhighlands route, one party even had the description printed out on paper. My guess is the warnings are all to cover their own backsides when someone comes a cropper and blames the website.

I occasionally frequent Walkhighlands, but agree with everything you said.  Just another part of the commercialisation of the outdoors ‘industry’. While the format facilitates new comers, it also seams to encourage a dependency culture of ‘needing’ to know if their is a path, ‘following’ a route, and even to the point of wanting the security of ‘where’ to pitch a tent. Free thinking is not engendered.

Free speech is limited as well.

As said climb deer fences at corner posts or walk along them and you may spot a gap where the fence runs over a stream or depresssion. Very handy if you have a dog. More likely to offer a way under in dry weather.

Bracken is an issue on many grahams especially as you do not hit the heights of corbetts or munros. Waist high would be welcome, rather than the frequent head height. Best tackled going downhill but watch your footing as boots / shoes will slip easily along the stems or get caught up and trip you. 

If using Walkhighlands I look for a route map within each report and skim read to where the writer may recount difficulties or where I expect they may occur.

Scottish Hills http://www.scottishhills.com, is a good alternative to Walkhighlands but has somewhat faded away in recent years. Like Song of the Paddle etc, it has suffered horribly due to vandalism by photofukkit.   

It was and is a friendly place and more suited to those who enjoy planning their own routes.

I had wondered why Kinley had migrated to his own blog site. Shame if it has fallen back.

My experience of walking in Scotland - mostly along glens etc - has been about 1/3rd incredibly solid tracks, 1/3rd paths and 1/3rd rough to very rough terrain. You can sometimes get useful information from Arial photography on OS maps and so on, but it can be quite hard to tell.

Geograph https://www.geograph.org.uk/ can also be a useful resource for scoping out "off-piste" terrain. 

We try to do our best, but I fear too much info. I enjoyed the exploratory side of getting out, especially when many munros were pathless

Used to post regular trip reports there. 

Then all the problems with photo hosting...plus work got busier and sites blocked making it hard to post in work time!

Plus a lot of the activity moved to their Facebook page. Now people post trip photos there and only a few of the old school still post TRs on the site.

SHills was a thing of its time. Splendid, rambling, minimally moderated and chaotic little forum with only occasional bovver.

A real shame so many of the old trip reports were on Photobucket, when I joined I wasn't sure that it was possible to have trip reports of all the Munros/Corbetts/Grahams - it ended up with reports for almost all the Sub-2K Marilyns as well.

The Meets were unmemorable though, in as much as I don't remember much of them.

Tend to do a lot of off piste walking. If I'm honest, the confidence to do that came on a framework of standard route walking in Scotland to learn the ropes.

There are large areas of upland where off path walking is absolutely fine, on low scrub and little bog, there are other areas where it's a pain.

There are areas where bracken will be present mid-June to late-Oct, other areas where there's little.

There's definitely a tolerance that can be built to bushwhacking, but a lot of that is the tricks of minimising the impact of bushwhacking.