Craignaw is a hill in the Dungeon Hills, a sub-range of the

Galloway Hills The Galloway Hills are part of the Southern Uplands of Scotland, and form the northern boundary of western Galloway. They lie within the bounds of the Galloway Forest Park, an area of some of largely uninhabited wild land, managed by Forestry an ...

range, part of the

Southern Uplands The Southern Uplands ( gd, Na Monaidhean a Deas) are the southernmost and least populous of mainland Scotland's three major geographic areas (the other two being the Central Lowlands and the Grampian Mountains and the Highlands, as illustrate ...

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a Anglo-Scottish border, border with England to the southeast ...

. Unlike many hills in the Southern Uplands, Craignaw has a complex and rocky summit area, with a long line of crags and rough ground on the east side. The hill is largely composed of

granite Granite () is a coarse-grained ( phaneritic) intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly cools and solidifies under ...

. Near the north end of the hill is an interesting area of terrain known as the "Deil's Bowlin' Green" where various rounded granite boulders are scatterd at random over an area of nearly horizontal granite slabs. These are believed to be

glacial erratic A glacial erratic is glacially deposited rock differing from the type of rock native to the area in which it rests. Erratics, which take their name from the Latin word ' ("to wander"), are carried by glacial ice, often over distances of hundre ...

s or result from a similar glacier process. On the west side of the hill, near

grid reference A projected coordinate system, also known as a projected coordinate reference system, a planar coordinate system, or grid reference system, is a type of spatial reference system that represents locations on the Earth using cartesian coordin ...

NX458831, a few hundred meters from the summit is an F-111E Aardvark crash site. The site is marked by a small memorial to the two

U.S. Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the air service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part of the United States Army Sign ...

pilots who were killed in the accident (Captains Spaulding and Hetzner). Although the crash happened on 19 December 1979 there are still small amounts of aircraft debris in the area.

Walking

Craignaw is quite a remote hill and climbing it is a long and rough walk from the road-ends at either Craigencallie or Bruces Stane.
Craignaw Photo Tour
– 29 images from the Bruces Stone Car Park to the Summit and Back via the Loch Valley Trail

Climbing

There is some good but short rock climbing on Craignaw at Snibe Hill, Memorial Crag and Scotland Slab. However, in winter after a good freeze the broken ground on the east side of the hill has some of the best ice climbs in Southern Scotland with routes of up to 150 m in length. The most famous of these is the frozen

waterfall A waterfall is a point in a river or stream where water flows over a vertical drop or a series of steep drops. Waterfalls also occur where meltwater drops over the edge of a tabular iceberg or ice shelf. Waterfalls can be formed in severa ...

of the Dow Spout.

References

Marilyns of Scotland Donald mountains Mountains and hills of the Southern Uplands Mountains and hills of Dumfries and Galloway Climbing areas of Scotland Grahams {{Scotland-sports-venue-stub