SUMMIT CAIRNS MAKEOVER IS STILL A DELICATE ISSUE

IT had been 20 years since I last stood at the summit of Beinn Odhar but even allowing for the tricks memory can play over that passage of time I was convinced something was different.

The steep slopes were all too familiar, the constant relentless push from Gleann Cumhang impossible to forget. The expansive views from the top were also instantly recognisable.

Then it clicked. I was certain the cairn had been far more substantial, a huge pile that had started sprawling like an octopus spreading its tentacles. Now, there was just a small, neat pile in its place.

The man behind this makeover was Alan Dawson, co-creator and custodian of the Grahams list, author and constant mountain surveyor. The fact his publishing company is called Pedantic Press is a huge clue to his mission of trying to iron out inaccuracies on hill heights and mapping.

The issue of cairns is an emotive one and many hillwalkers reckon they should be left alone. But many cairns are relatively recent additions to the landscape or have been extended way beyond their original purpose. These piles aren't regulated. No one owns them. Anyone can build one so logically, anyone can also dismantle or alter them.

Every cairn is different. You can have a big, beautifully built beehive which looks perfect in the setting on one mountain, while a smaller, untidy stack of boulders on another just looks out of place.

When I started walking the hills, it was fairly common practice for anyone reaching the summit to add a stone to the cairn. This had its roots in an ancient tradition where clan warriors placed a stone in a pile before heading into battle. Those who survived returned to remove a stone with the ones that remained built into a cairn to honour the dead.

I can't think of any battles taking place on Scottish soil in recent times – heated arguments over sandwiches don't count – but still the stones keep piling up. It's not difficult to see how so many cairns have become massively enlarged and out of control, another example of how humankind feels it has to leave a mark wherever it goes. The 'Leave no Trace' message is not just about litter.

These constant additions change the shape of the original marker and sometimes the nature of the surrounding terrain. For instance, there's enough untidy clutter on Ben Macdui without anyone else adding to it, and the rocks taken have left the thin soil of the fragile Cairngorms plateau more prone to erosion by their removal. Yet even then there remains an attitude in some circles that cairns are sacrosanct, untouchable.

There is no one-size-fits-all category. Large cairns can provide welcome shelter on barren and windswept hilltops and some can be useful for marking path junctions or showing a way through boulder fields.

Yet Ben Nevis is littered with untidy and unnecessary piles which can prove more dangerous than useful, leading walkers away from safety and too close to huge drops. The alarming regularity of marker cairns springing up in the complex ground of the Black Cuillin so annoyed one famous Skye guide that he could be seen kicking them down with regularity.

Alan regards his cairn reduction work as a form of rewilding, an attempt to repair the damage by multitudes of walkers over the years and leave the summit in a better state, yet others regard it as a form of vandalism.

In many cases, as on Beinn Odhar, he has built a smaller, neater cairn to replace the bigger one. Apart from the sheer amount of labour needed to reduce the piles – the Beinn Odhar adjustment took 90 minutes of hard work – the main problem is where to put all the rocks without making the landscape look worse. It's difficult to know exactly where they had been before and impossible for anyone to carry them back down the hill. Rolling them down steep slopes is definitely not an option.

Alan doesn't build cairns where there is a natural rock summit or touch any historic burial or ancient ones, mainly because he feels they tend to be better built in the first place and don't detract from the landscape, even though some have been the victims of extra pile-ons in more modern times.

He often has to accept that any tidy-up would be an impossible task. That was the case on the coffee table-sized summit slab of Sgurr nan Gillean in Skye as there was simply nowhere to dispose of the rocks safely.

He also had to admit defeat on Tom a' Choinnich in Glen Affric. Despite having a second pair of hands to assist it all proved too much as there was nowhere to put the displaced boulders, and after two hours' hard labour he called it a day. And one look at the monster cairn on Maol Chean-dearg convinced him any attempt to decrease the pile was pointless. One of his most pleasing pieces of work was on Shalloch on Minnoch in Galloway where he dismantled the messy summit cairn to reveal a little pair of rocks that had long been buried by the add-a-stone brigade. He then built a small cairn next to them with rocks from the old one (this is the true summit, not the huge jumble nearby that surrounds the trig pillar).

His work is never going to gain universal approval but if it continues to stifle the sprawling messes that top our mountains I'm sure the majority will applaud his efforts.