Loch Awe from Beinn Eunaich

One day, I will learn to pronounce Gaelic words.

I apologise for how shoddy this photograph is, but I had just climbed both Beinn a'Chochuill and Beinn Eunaich so I pretty much did the best I could in the near-dusk light and without risk of losing fingers to the cold.

The climb was fantastic. Once my calves had stopped complaining about the hard track to the mountain proper, we got to the first summit in just a few hours and we had at least a little view from time to time as the clouds danced around one another.

After a spot of lunch on a snowy ridge at around 800m and with a curiously large boulder to block the wind, the second peak – Beinn Eunaich – proved much trickier. Visibility was low, with the bright snow barely distinguishable from the white cloud around us. I was losing motivation before the last fifty metres of climbing when Eunaich's rocky and jagged promontory was at least impressive enough to spark some feeling in me.

This picture was taken just after we dropped out of the cloud that covered the mountains around Loch Awe and Loch Etive that afternoon. It was quite incredible: when we noticed the lakes had stopped being blurred, Daniel and I looked behind us, where a thin veil, barely a foot above our heads, shrouded the mountain.

In the centre of the picture is Kilchurn Castle and the wonderful reflective surface is that of Loch Awe, which thoroughly deserves its name even if the Gaelic "obha" doesn't relate to the English "awe" in anything but sound.