Galachlaw Wood

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 21 Apr 2026

This wood - not officially named - sits behind (North of) the houses built on the former grounds of the Princess Margaret Rose Orthopaedic Hospital. The two East-West entrance/exit points are, for the purposes of a short dog walk, so far apart that most people, from my observations, leave by the same way they came in. I did (or think I did!) take a picture from the high point within this wood (Galachlaw). But can't find it. Notwithstanding this, I shall make the points I was going to make attached to that missing picture. (It's a very small wood, so I feel the comments are still appropriate despite this picture being a little West of the missing summit picture.) All modern mapping shows a (prehistoric) cairn at roughly the same location as the summit. OpenStreetMaps call the hill 'Galach Law' and state that it is 205 metres high. The Ordnance Survey always call it 'Galachlaw', without any gaps. And there is never a 200m contour line in site on OS maps from any era. A 1974 map gives a summit height of 197m and shows the cairn slightly (50-100m) Westnorthwest of the summit. Admittedly it would be odd if there was a cairn downhill of such a small hill, but the summit just looked like a tricky hump on a mountain bike course to me, with no obvious prehistoric structure in sight.

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