I decided to do the Lochnagar round of five Munros above Loch Muick, breaking up the 20-mile trip with a wild camp. With rain forecast, the hut (above) is where I made camp.
This is what I wrote in my diary that night: “Of all the things I could be doing in life, the places I could be seeing, tonight I’m sleeping in a horse shed on a mountainside in the Cairngorms, the midges swarming about me, praying that Dobbin, who isn’t about at the moment, doesn’t come home and stamp on my sleeping head. What am I doing here?”
According to a map at Spittal of Glenmuick, where I had grudgingly paid £3 to park (meaning the miserable camp wasn’t even free), this building of wood and corrugated iron was marked as Allan’s Hut. It failed to point out that Allan was a horse. Perhaps I shouldn’t grumble so? By morning, I was glad of the shelter as it rained in sporadic bursts overnight.
The location of the camp had other benefits, for I was standing on my first Munro, Broad Cairn, within 20 minutes, and on my second, Cairn Bannoch, by 9am. In truth, these weren’t the most wonderful hills, awesome in scale rather than in form. The wreckage of a plane lies very close to Munro number three, Carn an t-Saigart Mor, from where it was an undulating march over my final pair of hills, the non-descript Carn a’Choire Bhoideach and the grand Lochnagar.
As I meandered up Meikle Pap, one of Lochnagar’s four tops, to get a better view of the mountain’s corries and cliffs, a swirl of black cloud swept over my head, accompanied by an enormous clap of thunder. Thunder and lightning are great motivators I find. They make you want to descend very, very fast, as thoughts of being fried to a crisp spin through your mind.
I was soaked within moments as fat drops of rain fell from the sky as if Lochnagar was a Brazilian rainforest. Sheets of lightning illuminated the sky above the mist that had wrapped itself around me. I wondered how the 20 or so people I had seen on Lochnagar were coping. The world was wicked for a few minutes and I don’t mind admitting I was scared. In hindsight, it livened up what was an otherwise prosaic day and night.
Heights of Madness 
Strictly speaking, Lochnagar is the water at the bottom of the corrie. The motorway leads to Cac Carn Beag at the summit.
Hah! I’m delighted to have come across this post.
You are not the first to pitch a tent in Allan’s Hut, but I’m glad to see the practice continues. I stumbled across your post while searching for photos of the old Allan’s Hut (so far, no luck), which was a wooden-walled construction with many planks missing. In 1979 my friend Steve and I arrived there at sunset (because we hadn’t read the post-bus timetable properly), and pitched an old two-man tent inside the hut for a bit of extra shelter. As I recall, some of our guy-ropes actually ran out through gaps in the wall to be pegged down outside the building.