There is a question that sounds silly and is not: how many mountains does a country have? It sounds like an encyclopaedia fact, fixed and checkable. In Scotland it is not, and the reason is that the answer depends on a list one person started in 1891 and that has been corrected ever since.
01 The problem there was in 1889
Before that list, nobody knew how many Scottish summits exceeded 3,000 feet. And that is not a figure of speech: published estimates ran from 31, in one author's guides, to 236, in the third edition of another book that appeared in 1884. A factor of almost eight between one figure and the other.
When the Scottish Mountaineering Club was founded in 1889, one of its declared aims was precisely to fix that: to document accurately every Scottish mountain above that height. The task fell to Hugh Munro, a founding member of the club, a mountaineer and therefore someone who knew the ground.
He worked from his own experience and from detailed study of the available mapping, the Ordnance Survey sheets at 1:10,560 and 1:63,360. In September 1891 he published the result in the club's journal.
02 The list and its hole
The tables listed 538 summits above 3,000 feet, of which 282 were regarded as separate mountains. Those are called Munros; the rest are tops. And there, in the phrase separate mountain, lies the hole that has kept things interesting for more than a century.
Munro set no measure of topographic prominence — the height you must descend from one summit before climbing to the next — to decide what counted as an independent mountain. He simply decided. That is why there are Munros with very little prominence, included largely because their summits are hard to reach.
The contrast with the other Scottish lists makes it clear. Corbetts, between 2,500 and 3,000 feet, and Grahams, between 2,000 and 2,500, do require at least 500 feet of prominence to qualify. Munros, the most famous list of all, are the only one without a rigid criterion.
That is why the tables have been revised several times. In 1992 a book on the relative hills of Britain showed that three tops had more than 500 feet of prominence, and in the 1997 revision they were promoted to full Munros; five others were promoted in that same revision.
03 The mountain that lost its rank
Between April 2007 and July 2015 the Munro Society re-surveyed twenty summits and tops known to be close to the 3,000-foot bar. On 10 September 2009 it announced the result for one of them.
Sgùrr nan Ceannaichean, south of Glen Carron, measured 913.43 metres. The threshold is 914.4. It fell less than a metre short, and with that it stopped being a Munro. The mountain had not moved a centimetre: the instrument had changed.
It is worth pausing on what that means. Thousands of people who had climbed that summit believing they were completing a list found out it no longer counted, and just as many who had not climbed it found out they no longer needed to. One decimal place reorganised a lot of people's plans.
04 Collecting summits
The publication of those tables in 1891 is usually considered the founding act of modern peak bagging. Climbing them all has its own name, Munro bagging, and as of 31 December 2023 there were 7,654 people who had reported completing a full round.
The first continuous round, meaning one linked up without going home in between, was completed by Hamish Brown in 1974. The speed record stands at 31 days, 10 hours and 27 minutes, set by ultrarunner Jamie Aarons in June 2023.
The best known of them all, and number one on the list, is Ben Nevis, the highest summit in the British Isles at around 1,345 metres. It is also a good reminder of what is up there: at the top there is a cairn and a shelter and, very often, thick fog and no view at all.
05 What the list did to the country
A fact that looked bureaucratic ended up organising how an entire country walks. The list gave Scottish mountains something they did not have: an order, an objective and a reason to go to summits nobody would otherwise visit, in remote glens with no obvious appeal.
That has a side effect that is useful for travellers: there are whole glens with accommodation, transport and well-trodden paths that exist because somebody decided, more than a century ago, that a particular summit deserved a line in a table. And there are others, right next door, that are empty because it did not.
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And there remains the underlying idea, which is useful far beyond Scotland. What we call a mountain is not only a feature of the ground: it is also a convention, and conventions are written by somebody. Here we know who, when and with which maps.
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