Mountain landscape - Scotland

Looking over the Glen Coe peaks to Schiehallion from the summit of Bidean nam Bian, a Munro in the West Highlands of Scotland. Image © Colin Henderson Photography. Permission required before use. To license this image, please contact me quoting the f

Glen Coe ridges and Schiehallion 3.13am

This view, as seen from the summit of Bidean nam Bian in Glen Coe, looks over Bheinn Fhada and Stob Coire Raineach on Buachaille Etive Beag towards Stob Dearg, one of the two Munros on Buachaille Etive Mòr. In the distance, almost 60km away, is Schiehallion, another Munro which was instrumental in the creation of contour lines on a map. Some basic internet research I’ve done here led me to the blog of Heikki Vesanto, a Finnish Geographic information systems (GIS) professional, who shares a neat story of how, in 2015, he tracked down the remains of an observatory on the slopes of Schiehallion which, in 1774, Nevil Maskelyne, an astronomer, and surveyor Charles Hutton would have lived in whilst they conducted ‘astronomical observations and plumbline readings‘ around the mountain.