Sgurr Dearg - Inaccessible Pinnacle

About Sgurr Dearg - Inaccessible Pinnacle

Sgurr Dearg, the red rocky peak, is a Cuillin mountain on Skye whose highest point is not the mountain itself but the Inaccessible Pinnacle perched on top of it: a fin of rock some 50 metres along its longest edge, known in Gaelic as An Stac. Its tip is the summit at 985.8 metres.

That arrangement makes Sgurr Dearg the one Munro whose top can be gained only by rock climbing, and the single largest obstacle facing anyone working through the list. Local guides run a steady trade escorting parties up it. Charles and Lawrence Pilkington made the first ascent in 1880; Sir Hugh Munro never climbed it.

Unusually for the Cuillin, the Pinnacle is basalt rather than gabbro, and the rock is correspondingly slippery in the wet.

Background written from facts in the Wikipedia article on Sgùrr Dearg (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 57.213, -6.235. Plan your finish with the daylight safety planner.

Finding the summit

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

Survey method

Leica RX1250

Record revised

24-Jun-19

Drop measured from

NG 44787 21380 · 798.2 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.

The Sgurr Dearg - Inaccessible Pinnacle group

6 other listed summits sit in the same prominence group, with Sgurr Dearg - Inaccessible Pinnacle as the independent hill at its head.

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