Duncarnock Hill Fort

Hiking with Kids


Duncarnock Hill

I had stopped hiking with the kids around last October after the Bowie Hill debacle. The weather by then was deteriorating as were the daylight hours. The last thing I wanted to do was to drag the poor souls up a hill through the pouring rain. Fast forward to now, late spring, where I'm dragging my kids up a hill in the pouring rain.

How To Get There

The map below shows the location of the hill. We drove by car through East Kilbride and followed the signs for Newton Mearns (ooooh fancy!). Before reaching Neilston we turned off and took the farm roads to Glanderston road. There is a space to park a couple of cars.

Where it is in Scotland

The Route

The Walk

From the car we walked down the farm track and took a right through the gate which took us past the fishing reservoir, known as Glanderston Dam. The rain had just started to come down and we were able to take shelter under a couple of large trees. Once the worst of the rain had passed, we walked along the waterfront and passed through a metal gate. At this point the route took us through a open field, we stuck close to the shore of the water, the kids were a bit nervous around the cows but it wasn't long until we were at the stile. 
The locals

Walk along the water


The kids enjoyed clambering over the stile and even more fun climbing directly up the hill. They dealt with this really well although there were a couple of instances that steps cut into the hill were too large for wee legs. We reached the top a little over half and hour after starting off from the car, the height of Duncarnock is 198m, although there is only 64m of ascent from where we started. The kids were excited to reach the top the weather had got worse with the rain and wind picking up so it was good to be able to head back to the car in good spirits. The plan was to do a loop of the dam to get the view from the other side but because of the weather our plans were cut short. We descended of the back of the wee hill and made our way back to the stile. From here we followed the same route back to the car, the total time out and back again was 50 mins. 

Over we go

Taking the direct approach

Nearly There

The Top



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