Devon Way & Dollar Glen, Scotland

First published in: The Times Click here to view a map for this walk in a new window

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On this cloudy spring day, Tillicoultry looked just as I remembered it: a neat, proud Clackmannanshire mill town, with the Ochil Hills rearing 2,000 feet behind in a dramatic green wall. The mills had long fallen silent along the River Devon, but sheep still dotted the hill slopes like flecks of snow. St Serf, Tillicoultry’s own 6^th-century miracle worker and missionary, would have enjoyed the sight. The saint, a keen shepherd, had his own flock under special protection. When a rustler stole, roasted and ate Serf’s pet ram, and then boldly denied the crime, the very mutton was heard bleating inside the guilty party’s stomach.

Nowadays the winding River Devon runs at the feet of the Ochils in company with the Devon Way, a beautifully landscaped footpath and bridleway established along a disused railway line. I walked briskly, trying to work off a bacon-and-haggis breakfast, with the slow-flowing Devon on my right hand and the tremendous green and black rampart of the hills on the left. Along the old railway the ash buds were clamped shut and hawthorns still thick with last autumn’s shrivelled berries, but a song thrush in an elder bush was busy trying to charm the laydeez.

Along the valley in Dollar, the Dollar Burn came sparkling from its steep glen through the town. I climbed a steep and slippery pathway up the rocky cleft of Dollar Glen where the Burns of Care and Sorrow sluiced down black rock chutes to mingle in the stream of Dolour. Gloomy names, and a doom-laden history to the castle that blocks the throat of the glen on a formidable bluff. Impregnable it must have seemed to the Campbells who built it, warmed themselves before its enormous stone fireplaces, and shut their captured enemies away out of sight and mind in its cruel and terrible pit prison. Bonnie Montrose couldn’t take Castle Campbell – Castell Gloum was its ominous nickname – when he tried during the Civil War. But the Macleans destroyed it in 1654, firing the stronghold with flaming arrows while the garrison was out scouring the hills for food.

I climbed the spiral stair, to a roof-top view that had me gasping – Dollar below, a gleam of the Firth of Forth amid southern hills thirty miles off, Saddle Hill and King’s Seat towering to the north, seemingly just overhead. Then I descended from Castell Gloum down the Burn of Sorrow, back along the old railway line where mating frogs filled the ditches and wrens sang as if man and his bloody inclinations had never been invented.

Train (www.thetrainline.com) to Alloa (3 miles)

Road: A91 from Perth or Stirling to Tillicoultry; car park off A91, on A908 Alloa road.

NB – Detailed directions, online map, more walks: www.christophersomerville.co.uk

Detailed map of paths in Dollar Glen:

http://walking.visitscotland.com/walks/centralscotland/dollar-glen