Craig Phadrig: The Forest With No Wrong Way Through

Kirsty and I live just below Craig Phadrig, in Scorguie, and most weeks we'll head up into the forest for an evening walk. What I love about it isn't the fort at the top, or even the view, though both are worth the climb — it's the paths. There's a proper route if you want one, waymarked in blue and yellow all the way round, but underneath that there are dozens of smaller ones, worn in by years of people using the hill as a shortcut, a dog walk, a way home. You can walk it a hundred times and still find a turn you hadn't taken.

That tangle of paths turns out to be the whole story of the place in miniature. People have been finding their own way up and across this hill for well over two thousand years — building on it, burning it, then quietly coming back to it long after the official reason for being there had gone. The forest, in its own small way, just keeps doing what it's always done.

More Paths Than the Map Shows

Forestry and Land Scotland waymarks two official routes from the car park on Leachkin Brae: a blue Hill Fort Trail, 1.9km, that takes you straight up to the summit, and a yellow Craig Phadrig Trail, 2.3km, looping wider through the trees. Stick to either and you'll have a fine walk. But walkers here have never really stuck to the lines on the noticeboard — Walkhighlands notes there's a genuine wealth of paths threading the hill, more variation than any single marked route can show, and that's been true for as long as we've lived beneath it. Some are shortcuts between the Scorguie and Leachkin sides. Some don't seem to lead anywhere in particular, which is half the fun of taking them.

As the Highland Pictish Trail puts it: “No matter the season, you are always guaranteed a friendly smile from fellow walkers.”

A Fort That Needs a Bit of Imagination

The reason anyone built here in the first place sits right at the top: a hillfort whose inner rampart was raised, then deliberately burnt, sometime in the 4th or 3rd century BC — hot enough, by one estimate, to reach 1,200°C and fuse the stone itself into glass. Archaeologist Alan Small dug two seasons here in 1971 and '72 and turned up Pictish-era pottery imported from France, evidence the hill was reoccupied as a high-status site long after those original walls had already burned. What survives today is a grassy, oval mound with the line of the rampart still traceable underfoot — atmospheric, but modest. Go for the setting and the story more than for a ruin you could photograph from the road.

King Bridei, Maybe

Local tradition has long held that this was the fort of the Pictish king Bridei mac Maelchon, and that St Columba climbed up here in AD 565 to convert him to Christianity — the same journey on which Columba is said to have turned back a beast in the River Ness, the first recorded sighting of what would become the Loch Ness Monster. It's a wonderful story, and even Forestry and Land Scotland's own signage is honest that there's little evidence to support it. A 2024 reassessment by the North of Scotland Archaeological Society argues Bridei's actual fort more likely stood on Inverness's Castle Hill, or at Torvean nearer the river — Craig Phadrig fits the legend better than it fits the geography in Adomnán's own account. Nobody can say for certain, and I rather like that.

The View That Makes the Climb Worth It

Whatever you make of the history, the reward at the top is real: the Beauly Firth opening out below you, the Black Isle beyond it, and on a clear day the long dark shape of Ben Wyvis on the horizon. Curiously, the view back over Inverness itself is almost entirely screened by trees — this is a firth view, not a city view, and it's better for it. Late afternoon is best, when the light comes in low and flat across the water; on a genuinely clear evening it's worth timing the walk for it on purpose.

When to Go

Spring brings bluebells along the lower paths and the year's lowest midge counts, which in the Highlands counts for a great deal. Early autumn runs it close, with the beech turning before the clocks change. Come in high summer and the breeze off the firth up here is kinder than a sheltered glen, though I'd still bring repellent. And if you fancy this walk's twin, Ord Hill sits directly across the water on the Black Isle — another vitrified fort, another forest, half an hour's drive from the same car park.

We've walked Craig Phadrig in every season now, in mist and in hard winter sun, and it still doesn't feel used up. That's the thing about a forest that's been worn into shape by thousands of feet rather than laid out by a planner — it keeps surprising you, right on our own doorstep.