Mount Keen

South side of Mount Keen

Mount Keen ( Gaelic: Monadh Caoin, German: The rolling hills ) is a mountain in the Scottish Highlands. It is located about 50 km southwest of Aberdeen in the county of Aberdeenshire. The nearest major town is located about 10 km north of Ballater. Its height is given as 939 m ASL ( 3081 feet), so it is one of the 282 Munros in Scotland.

Geography

Mount Keen is in the extreme east of the Southern Highlands, also referred to as the Grampian Mountains. He will allocated in the extended sense of the mountain group of the Cairngorms, the main chain of the northwest lies beyond the River Dee. The mountains around is in the edge region of the Highlands, and thus rather hilly, steep slopes and large height differences between valleys and mountains, there are hardly any. Mount Keen protrudes along with its lower neighbor, the Braid Cairn ( 887 m) ( coordinates of the Braid Cairn: 56 ° 58 ' 22 " N, 2 ° 56' 44" W56.972777777778 - 2.9455555555556939 ) as the only striking elevation of the treeless landscape out far visible. The next highest mountain is located about 15 km west Lochnagar.

It extends as a flat ridge about 2 km approximately north-south direction and extends beyond the immediate area of about 200 m. On the eastern side a mountain 765 m high saddle with the Braid Cairn it connects.

Ascent

The mountain can be climbed in principle from two sides, from the south from the Glen Mark and from the north to the Glen Tanar.

In the south, the path starts at the homestead Auchronie car park and initially follows flat for about an hour the Glen Mark to the same abandoned farm. Shortly before the source of running Queen 's Well is happening, which is spanned by a 3 m high, crown-shaped monument. It was originally built in honor of Queen Victoria. From the courtyard of the road for about an hour becoming steeper rises in the valley of the Ladder Burn on a high plateau at, of which is seen from the summit of Mount Keen for the first time. The path now runs almost straight towards the southern flank of the mountain and follow it in another hour to the summit.

The northern route is much longer and starts at the hamlet of Millfield Parking, happens to be from where in the south the Home Farm and Glen Tanar House. The wooded trail follows the creek up to the half way hat that. " Hut halfway ", which is reached after about two hours After another two hours the trail left hand over a bridge that washed away during a heavy flood in 2002, but was rebuilt again for better accessibility of the mountain. The path leaves the Glen Tanar and rises steeply to the summit of Mount Keen, which is reached after about 1 ½ hours.