Buachaille Etive Mòr from the Devil's Staircase, Glen Coe, Highlands, Scotland

Buachaille Etive Mòr from the Devil's Staircase

This picture of Buachaille Etive Mòr from the Devil's Staircase is for sale.

It comes as a canvas (from £77.70), a framed print (from £70.25), a framed mounted print (from £72.96) or an acrylic (from £174.64).

Why not take a look at my other pictures from the West Highland Way.

The Devil's Staircase is the name of the path that winds from Altnafeadh in Glencoe up towards the bealach between Stob Mhic Mhartuin and Beinn Bheag. At this little bridge, it crosses the Allt a' Mhain, which it continues to follow up the slope.

The West Highland Way takes this route out of Glencoe on its way to Kinlochleven. Originally known as Mam Grianau, the Devil's Staircase had already been in use as a drove road for hundreds of years before it was given its English name by the troops of Major William Caulfield, who built a military road over the bealach around 1750 in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden. The task of carrying building materials up these slopes was not a popular one. British troops themselves had used Mam Grianau over half a century earlier, on their way to enforce the Massacre of Glencoe in 1692.

Caulfield's Military Road only lasted until around 1785 before it was superseded by the less direct but also less dangerous route to Kinlochleven through Glencoe and along the banks of Loch Leven, now the B863.

The navvies who built the Blackwater Dam perpetuated the name. Constructed between 1905 and 1909 to power an aluminium smelter in Kinlochleven, the dam was the last major Scottish construction project to be built by manpower alone. The workforce of nearly 3,000 Irish navvies lived in a shanty town below the dam. Some chose to spend their wages in the Kingshouse Hotel, the nearest pub, which was a long climb down the Devil's Staircase, and a long drunken stagger in the dark at closing time. Many lost their lives when the devil "claimed his own".

The mountain opposite the Staircase is the 3,350 foot Buachaille Etive Mòr, the Great Herdsman of Etive. The mountain's distinctive pyramidical eastern point, known as Stob Dearg, dominates the route from Rannoch Moor into Glen Coe, and it is often photographed from that angle.