8 Oct  2016

The “Real 3 Peaks Challenge” was organised by a mountain guide living in Kinlochleven who was fed up with finding so much litter on The Ben, so he came up with the idea of getting teams of volunteers together to tidy up the “3 Peaks”.

Our day started in the visitor centre car park where we chose our weapons – picking sticks, rubber gloves and bin bags, and off we set up the tourist path.

Reaching the top, we set to work sweeping the plateau and it seemed like under every rock there were wrappers, cans, plastic bottles, beer bottles, champagne corks, items of clothing, or tissue paper, along with banana skins and tangerine peels a-plenty. There was even a section of turf at the top and a smashed up toilet bowl. Soon we had all filled a couple of bags, plenty others who were there offered to help carry the heavy loads down and we took our time on the downhill filling more bags as we went.

Altogether around 267kg of rubbish was collected on the day, which was a great achievement. Thanks to Richard Pyne of Rich Mountain Experiences for organising the event and hopefully team DMC will be represented there again next year.

• Mhairi, with Paul and Jim