50 Classic Routes on Scottish Mountains

The overall difficulty of a route is assessed in terms of "grade", "terrain", "navigation" and "seriousness", with each given a rating from 1 (easiest) to 5 (hardest). For planning the holiday, one can add these four ratings together to give an Overall Difficulty Rating (ODR) for each route. This is most useful information, because distance alone gives an inadequate assessment of the demands of a particular route. For example, Route 44 Broad Cairn in the Cairngorms is a 14 mile ODR 5 for a fairly easy day whereas Route 37 Beinn Dearg (Torridon) in the Northern Highlands is only 11 miles, but an ODR 18 for a much more challenging expedition.

Storer stresses that his sketch maps are not intended for use on the hill and the appropriate scale, either 1/50,000 or 1/25,000, Ordnance Survey map is essential for these routes. However, this brings me to my only criticism of the book. For someone like me who started walking in the Lake District with Wainwright's pocket volumes, Storer's book is somewhat lacking in detail. For this reason alone and perhaps unfairly, given that Wainwright's volumes are truly phenomenal for meticulous detail, I withhold the "fifth star" from Storer's otherwise splendid Classic Routes.