Qualla: Pentland Hills

Pentland Hills: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sourav Niyogi, (WT-en) P.K.Niyogi at English Wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 4.0. The name has nothing to do with the Pentland Firth. That strait, far to the north between Orkney and Caithness, is etymologically unrelated - a coincidence of sound that has confused mapmakers for centuries. The hills southwest of Edinburgh take their name from a small hamlet called Pentland that sits just beyond their eastern end, first recorded in the 12th century. The hamlet's name probably comes from the Cumbric pen llan, meaning 'head or top end of the church or enclosure'. From the 16th century onward people began applying it to the whole range. Two place-names in two different lost languages, both meaning something like 'the high place', happen to land on the same English spelling. The hills themselves predate both names by about 400 million years.

Read more: Pentland Hills on Qualla

Image: Sourav Niyogi, (WT-en) P.K.Niyogi at English Wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pentland Hills: What the Rocks Remember

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kitkatcrazy at English Wikipedia, Public domain. The Pentlands are mostly Devonian Old Red Sandstone, weathered out of a desert that covered this part of the world some 400 million years ago when Scotland sat near the equator on a vanished continent called Laurussia. Layered through the sandstones are basalts and andesites from...

Read more: Pentland Hills on Qualla

Image: Kitkatcrazy at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Pentland Hills: The Peaks and the Park

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Apotnis, CC BY-SA 4.0. The range stretches roughly twenty miles southwest from Edinburgh's suburbs toward Biggar and the upper Clydesdale. Scald Law is the highest point. Other named summits include Carnethy Hill, East and West Cairn Hill, the two Kips, Turnhouse Hill at 1,660 feet, and the long ridge ...

Read more: Pentland Hills on Qualla

Image: Apotnis | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pentland Hills: The Deer, the King, the Chapel

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.0 de. About 66 feet beneath the surface of Glencorse Reservoir lie the submerged ruins of a medieval chapel called St Katherine's in the Hope. Local tradition connects its founding to a royal deer hunt: King Robert the Bruce, the story goes, staked the Pentland Estate against the life ...

Read more: Pentland Hills on Qualla

Image: CC BY-SA 2.0 de

Pentland Hills: Rullion Green and Its Cairn

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Webb, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 28 November 1666, on the eastern slopes of the Pentlands above Glencorse, around 900 Covenanters made their last stand against a government army. They lost. Around fifty died in the battle and the pursuit that followed it. Most of the rest were captured; many were executed, ot...

Read more: Pentland Hills on Qualla

Image: Richard Webb | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pentland Hills: Little Sparta and the Long Quiet

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the southern part of the hills, just outside the village of Dunsyre, the artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay spent forty years building a garden called Little Sparta. He inscribed lines of Latin and English on stones, planted classical follies among the burns, and turned an up...

Read more: Pentland Hills on Qualla

Image: Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data | CC BY-SA 3.0