On one of those occasions we choose Ben Lomond, in the main, because it is the most southerly of the munros.

Around 30,000 people take to her slopes each year leaving a clear broad scar on her ridge. In recent years this 10-25m-wide path has been repaired and kept to a width of 1-2.5m.

My enduring memory of this mountain, from my first ascent, was the path on the summit ridge – it was more like a trench where a gritty wound led to the trig point.

That day was hot, my face was pink, Dad wore trainers and Pepe, Mum and Dad's dog, was with us.

On the summit we looked down the cliff faces on the east side and over to the loch on the west. The landscape was deep bottle green and dark blues underneath the overcast sky.

I had watched this mountain all my life throughout every season. From my bedroom window in South Lanarkshire I could see Ben Lomond change from burnt orange to white to green. Certainly from my perspective, I could acquiesce with the belief that the hill's name comes from the Cumbric word llumon meaning beacon, blaze or light.

When I returned with my friend a couple of weeks ago her lower slopes were looking bare. Much of the conifer woodland had been felled, I had been forewarned of this by a chatty woman in a small village where I had stopped to buy some juice.

I stopped on the path that winds its way through this woodland from Rowardennan. A tall birch was bending over, freed from the surrounding pine trees, and formed a delicate leafy arch over a view of the loch.

Following my friend meant that I was keeping a faster pace than I would normally, so the mountain's south ridge seemed to be ascended quickly, a walking rhythm.

Then as I passed through the hems of the clouds on entering the summit cone my face tingled with the temperature change. A new awareness in the ensuing gloom. I was alone.

I shut my eyes in the solitude. The cool damp wind massaged my thoughts, my friend's voice said: "Aye it's a soft wind." There was no-one there.

I followed the narrow path on the west side of the ridge, occasionally the buttresses atop the ridge oozed out of the drifting mist. When I curved towards the north east the ghostly white of the trig point appeared, as did the dark shadow of my friend sitting quietly in the wash of the inner sanctum of clouds. The pale grey rocks over the summit look like waves held in time.

On our descent there was a fleeting view through the clouds like a peephole to another world, light flashed then dimmed.

Despite the other possible origin of her name being barren hillock, from the Gaelic, luimean, she does not appear so with her wooded lower flanks and her pride of place beside the loch.

The ptarmigan ridge which comprises a knolly crest sweeping south west from the main body of the mountain is, of course, named after the alpine bird the ptarmigan.