Munro Bagging: What is it all about?

Sir Hugh Munro was an original member of the Scottish Mountaineering Club (SMC) and in 1891 he wrote an article for their journal with a definitive list of all the mountains in Scotland over 3,000 feet. He created the list using maps and by taking barometer readings at the top to check the heights of mountains whose summits were of “sufficient separation” from their neighbouring tops. He did not define exactly what “sufficient separation” was and this has lead to a great deal of debate.

His original list was made up of 538 summits with 282 being “Munros”. It is not clear when these mountains first became known as Munros, but the popularisation of “Munro-bagging” seems to have started with the publication of a book by Hamish Brown, Hamish’s Mountain Walk, in 1974. It documented his four-month self-propelled journey (apart from some ferry crossings) round all the Munros.

By the 1980s Munro-bagging was becoming a very popular hobby. So much so that there was even a BBC series called the Munro Show presented, in a light-hearted manner, by Muriel Gray in the early 1990s. Many found the pronunciations of the tricky mountain names by Sorley MacLean, a great poet from Raasay, very memorable.

The first person to complete the Munros is said to be the Rev. A.E Robertson of Rannoch in 1901, but there is some doubt if he did them all. The first confirmed completion (plus the tops) was in 1923 by Ronald Burn.

There is a tally here of all the Munro completionists.