Trail magazine – the July 2021 issue

The ancient forests and Munros of the Cairngorms offer the perfect wilderness escape. Add pack ponies, a teepee and a woodburning stove, and you've got the trip of a lifetime.

Bored of camping on the ground? Then spend a night dangling high in the hills, sleep with 300m of thin air directly below you, and experience the highs – and lows – of portaledging.

To celebrate Trail's 30th year we've been dusting off our archives each month to resurface a favourite mountain adventure from the past three decades. For the final instalment of the series, we're heading back to November 2003 when our former writer Piers Pickard made the short flight across the Irish Sea to tackle seven mountains that would all reach Munro status if they were picked up and plonked in the Scottish Highlands. The big question was, do the big peaks of the Emerald Isle have the character as well as the height to match their counterparts in Scotland?

More people are hitting the hills than ever before – and they're bringing more litter with them. We last probed the problem of mountain litter two years ago, but how are things looking as we move into the second summer of the pandemic?