I started writing this as a post about startrail photography, but my verbosity got the better of me and I ended up at about 2000 words — mostly describing the trip. So I decided to split the posts and do one dedicated to our wild-camping trip so that I could keep the photography post more focussed…

One night, a friend (the guy pictured in the images) and I were in the local pub, several pints into the evening, and we started discussing a hypothetical wild-camping trip. We decided there and then to take a trip to Galloway Forest Park, where we could hike across the remote wilderness and camp where we wanted thanks to Scotland’s access laws.

I had another motivation for choosing Galloway: that it was a Dark Skies park and I wanted to attempt some startrail photography (more on that in the next post!).

After weeks of planning and preparation, we set off into the hills of the Southern Uplands from the car park by Loch Trool. For our first day, we planned a route to Merrick, the highest mountain in the Southern Uplands at 843m. We would walk the long way around, via lochs between The Range of The Awful Hand and the southern end of The Dungeon Hills — they all sound very imposing, dont they? Finally, we would ascend Merrick via Redstone Rig and press on a short way to set up camp for the night between the peaks of Merrick and Kirrereoch Hill.

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