Chester: Murdo Murray
Curleywee: 21 August 2026
My dog Chester (and myself) were both very late starters to hill-walking, with our first walk together being the munro Ben Chonzie in May 2024, when Chester was already six years old. We quickly discovered that we had a shared love for hill-walking and after that took every opportunity to head out to climb hills, mainly munros whenever good weather was forecast.
Being ‘fair-weather hill-walkers’ only, I looked for a different hill walking challenge through the winter months in order to try to keep our hill fitness up before resuming munro-bagging in the spring. Walking up the Donalds was perfect for that purpose.
In the beginning I mistakenly thought that we only had 89 Donalds to climb together to be recognised by the Scottish Mountaineering Club (SMC) as compleators. Fortunately, I discovered just before we started that we also needed to climb the 52 ‘Donald Tops’ in order to be recognised as compleators. This came as a bit of a shock and meant that we had to carefully plan our Donalds hill-walks to make sure that our routes also included the Donald Tops. At times this made for some quite long hill-walking days and I found our copy of the SMC Guide-book to the Grahams & the Donalds to be a brilliant help in this regard.
Another brilliant free resource I also made use of was the walkhighlands web site and app. The ‘Donalds Map’ function there, allowed me to tick off the Donalds hills and tops we had completed on a map of Scotland so that I could easily see the Donalds we had completed and those still left to do. I also made use of walkhighlands recommended routes when available, and read other users walk reports of their Donalds walks on the site to inform my planning and to give me an idea of what to expect. Where necessary I also made use of the free tool on the site to make up my own gpx navigation files to download onto my watch and mobile phone to assist with our navigation on the day.
Living in Fife, I had initially thought that the Donalds would all be quite close at hand. Our very first Donalds walk was the lovely Glen Sherup Horseshoe in the Ochils, which did nothing to dispel that notion. However, our first very long day out in the Galloway Hills walking up Corserine and the Rhinns of Kells made me realise how wrong I was, especially when factoring in the Edinburgh and Glasgow traffic. But I did love the fact that bagging the Donalds took us to beautiful parts of the south of Scotland, that we would otherwise possibly never visit. We decided to buy a campervan in December 2025, which was a bit of a game-changer as we put it to very good use to help bag our remaining Donalds in the Galloway hills in two-day bagging trips in 2026.
Unlike the munros, we found that we would very rarely meet another person on our Donalds walks, but sometimes it felt so nice to have the mountains completely to ourselves. It was certainly a big culture shock when we first returned to munro bagging again and encountered crowds of people making their way up Ben Lomond!
I would definitely recommend climbing the Donalds to any keen hill-walker with their dogs. I have found that bagging the Donalds has really helped us to build our hill-walking experience up, in particularly to enhance our skills at negotiating our way through peat hags and rough pathless terrain. It has also helped to vastly improve my navigation skills, which came in very useful to locate the summit of those Donalds with no cairn or trig point to help!
We had so many great days out after we started walking up the Donalds, that I decided to continue bagging Donalds with Chester throughout 2025 as a side quest to our munro-bagging adventures. We particularly took the opportunity to take advantage of times when there was better weather in the south of Scotland.
It was a bitter-sweet moment when we compleated the Donalds on Curleywee in August 2026. I was so proud that we had managed to complete them together, with Chester becoming only the third dog to do so, but I was also a bit sad that this chapter of our hill-walking adventures had come to an end. However, we still have plenty of munros, corbetts and grahams left to walk up together, and I suspect that we may also re-visit some of our favourite Donalds walks again in the future.
We compleated the Donalds in 39 separate hill-walks over a 22 month period. In total we took approximately 225 hours to walk 418 miles with 102,000 feet of ascent.
