Broad Cairn

About Broad Cairn

Broad Cairn stands in the Grampians roughly 26 km south of the River Dee near Balmoral. Its Munro status comes with a prominence of only about 64 m, so it reads less as an independent mountain than as a high point on the surrounding plateau country.

Background written from facts in the Wikipedia article on Broad Cairn (CC BY-SA 4.0). Heights, prominence and grid references come from the Database of British & Irish Hills, not from Wikipedia.

Access rights here

General position for Scotland — local byelaws, seasonal restrictions and closures can override it. Full details: access rights in Scotland · check another location.

Daylight at this summit today

Sunrise

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Sunset

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Daylight

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Civil twilight ends

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Computed astronomically for 56.919, -3.249. Plan your finish with the daylight safety planner.

Finding the summit

The recorded summit point is cairn. On broad or flat summits the obvious cairn is not always the true high point.

Survey method

Leica RX1250

Record revised

15-Dec-24

Drop measured from

NO 2348 8174 · 933.1 m

Survey notes are field observations recorded in the Database of British & Irish Hills (v18.3, CC BY 4.0) by the hill-surveying community.

Which hill this one belongs to

Broad Cairn is not counted as an independent hill in its own right. In prominence terms it belongs to Lochnagar - Cac Carn Beag (1,156 m) — the nearest Marilyn you can reach from this summit without first dropping below its key col, 933 m.

Grouping is by prominence alone: a summit belongs to the nearest higher Marilyn it connects to without a deeper intervening col. Over a large massif that can gather hills no one would walk in a single day, and which few would describe as parts of the same mountain — it is a measure of independence, not a suggested route.

Nearest listed peaks