Eyes on the Ridge: The Goats of Creag Dhubh
The Black Crag
Stand in Newtonmore on a winter morning and look up. Creag Dhubh doesn’t tower over the town—it looms. Dark crags break through snow and heather, and if you’re fortunate, you might spot movement on the cliffs: shaggy shapes navigating ledges that would make a mountaineer think twice.
The hill rises with such steepness that it feels bigger than the numbers on a map would suggest, its long ridge perched on the edge of Badenoch like a watchful presence. The sharpest face turns south and east, where dark rock breaks through the green covering in dramatic crags and terraces that give the hill its name: Creag Dhubh means “black crag” in Gaelic.¹ ⁵
But before we explore the geology and ecology that make this hill remarkable, you should know about its most surprising inhabitants: a herd of ancient Scottish hill goats that have turned these cliffs into their kingdom. Their story is written in the rock itself.
Bones of Stone
The bones of this hill tell a very old story. Far below the ground, strong heat and pressure changed solid rock into schist, a hard stone made in thin layers. Because it is layered, schist breaks easily into flat ledges and large blocks. As those blocks crack and fall away, they break into sharp, loose stones that collect on the slopes below; this broken rock is called scree.
Walk across Creag Dhubh and you’ll find the ground changes character constantly: thin and mineral rich in some places, deep and peaty in others.³ ⁴ ⁵
When ground stays waterlogged year after year, plant material can’t fully decompose. There’s not enough oxygen for the bacteria and fungi that normally break things down.
Instead, dead plants and soil organisms pile up, partially decayed, building a dark, springy layer over centuries. In the Scottish uplands, where rain is generous, peat forms as a blanket across flatter ground and in hollows. Where slopes gather trickling water, peat can grade into proper mire: wet, squelchy ground studded with specialised bog plants.³ ⁴
The Hill’s Living Fabric
This variety in the ground drives everything that lives here. The different soils, the wet and dry patches, the rock and peat all power the hill’s ecology. On the lower southeastern slopes, upland birch woodland takes hold. In pockets where the rock chemistry is richer, hazel becomes abundant and the forest floor blooms with herbs.
Where water flushes down through the lower reaches, alder trees appear, threading through rushes and bog plants.¹ ²
Beneath the cliffs, the surface becomes a patchwork: blocky scree and mineral soil next to peat and wet hollows. This mosaic supports an unusually rich carpet of bryophytes (mosses and liverworts), humble plants without flowers or roots. Some of these species are called “Atlantic” types, normally found much farther west. Finding them this far east makes botanists take notice.¹ ²
Above the woods, the crags carry their own botanical treasures. Rock whitebeam clings to the cliffs, as does maidenhair spleenwort. These are plants that have mastered life in the vertical world, tucking themselves into fissures and ledges where thin seams of moisture cling to stone.²
Water is never far away. The River Calder runs through the lower reaches of the site, cutting through Glen Banchor on the hill’s northern flank. The wider catchment includes the River Spey system, known for Atlantic salmon and otter. Both species likely visit this particular stretch, the salmon pushing upstream on ancient instinct, the otter hunting in the pools and riffles.¹ ²
All of this; the rock, the peat, the water, the ledges—creates a stage. And on that stage, one unlikely performer has thrived for generations.
Watchers on the Ridge
The old Scottish hill goats of Creag Dhubh are a presence that doesn’t fit neatly into “wild” or “domestic.” And it’s in winter, when the wind cuts across the ridge and snow piles in the gullies, that these animals truly show what they were made for.
According to site records, these goats descend from animals introduced around the mid twentieth century. Their numbers once climbed to about a hundred, then were managed down to a smaller herd, usually somewhere between twenty five and thirty individuals.¹
But who, or what, are they exactly?
The answer requires understanding a distinction that’s easy to miss. A breed is usually a defined population with paperwork: a managed studbook, selected traits, formal registration. A landrace or hill type is something different. It’s shaped more by place, survival, and repeated local breeding than by any human registry.
Across Scottish hills, goats living out on rough ground tend, over generations, to settle into a recognisable hardy form: long hair that thickens in cold months, compact build, strong horns that serve as both tool and ornament.⁹
The most honest name, given the evidence, isn’t a tidy pedigree label but a truthful one: old Scottish hill goats, a local landrace type rather than a closed breed. Individual herds often carry their own histories, but they seldom come with paperwork. The trace is carried in place, in behavior, in how the animals fit the ground beneath their hooves.¹ ⁹
Winter Masters
On Creag Dhubh, this form makes immediate practical sense, especially when winter arrives in earnest.
The long coat is the first line of defense, not just thick, but layered. The outer guard hairs shed rain and snow, while the dense undercoat traps air close to the skin, creating insulation that conserves precious body heat. As temperatures drop and the wind screams across the exposed ridge, that coat can mean the difference between survival and hypothermia.
The goats don’t hunker down in sheltered glens. They stay out on the crags, moving through conditions that would turn other animals rigid with cold. You might see them silhouetted against a grey winter sky, utterly unbothered by weather that sends deer running for tree cover.¹ ⁹
Their climbing ability becomes even more critical in winter. When deeper snow accumulates on flatter ground, burying the easier grazing, the goats simply go vertical. They pick their way across cliff edges and broken ledges where wind has scoured the rock bare, finding footholds that look impossible from below.
These are places where the steepness prevents snow from piling up, where scattered vegetation still pokes through the ice. What looks like impossible terrain to us is their safe corridor, a network of routes they know intimately.
The strong horns serve in sparring between rivals and defense against threats, but also as a tool for pushing through scrub and bracken, or for balance on icy surfaces when grazing lines narrow to treacherous paths. Watch a goat use its horns to test the stability of a snow covered ledge before committing its weight, and you’ll see these aren’t just ornaments. They’re survival equipment.¹ ⁹
The All-Seeing Eye
Look a goat in the eye and you’ll see something unsettling: a horizontal slot where you’d expect a round pupil. It looks almost alien, like something from science fiction.
But there’s genius in that strange shape.
Their pupils are horizontal and rectangular, not round like a deer’s or vertical like a cat’s. This strange shape supports a wide panoramic strip of vision across the landscape: approximately 320 to 340 degrees of view without moving their heads.
Think about that for a moment. Nearly a complete circle. A goat can see almost everything around it simultaneously.⁸
For a grazing animal on exposed ground, this is vital. They can scan for danger while feeding, watching nearly the entire circle of the horizon at once. A predator approaching from behind? The goat knows, without ever lifting its head or turning around.
But there’s an extra cleverness, almost mechanical in its precision.
When a goat lowers its head to eat, each eyeball can rotate in its socket so the horizontal pupil stays roughly level with the horizon. The head tips downward. The eye counter rotates. The panoramic band of sharp attention stays aligned with the ground rather than tilting uselessly with the muzzle.
Picture yourself trying to watch for danger while bending down to pick something up. You’d have to keep turning your head, checking around. A goat doesn’t. Its eyes compensate automatically, maintaining that wide scanning band no matter what angle its head takes.
In winter, when a goat is navigating icy ledges or watching for threats in failing light, this design becomes even more valuable. They can browse sparse vegetation while maintaining constant awareness of their surroundings, perfectly suited to life on harsh, exposed terrain where a moment’s inattention could mean a fall, or worse.⁸
It’s the kind of feature that makes you stop and wonder: how does an animal become so precisely fitted to a place?
Hidden History
High in the crags sits a small cave that carries both the weight of story and the complexity of history. The cave most associated with this hill is commonly called Uamh Chluanaidh, also known as Cluny’s Cave.
Accounts link it to Ewen Macpherson of Cluny during his years in hiding after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, when the British government hunted Jacobite leaders across the Highlands with a price on their heads. For men like Cluny, the landscape itself became refuge.
The cave’s exact formation is not well documented, though caves in schist terrain typically develop where natural weaknesses in the layered rock (cracks, joints, or zones of softer material) allow weathering to hollow out spaces over time.
What is certain is its character: it’s described as a small cave rather than an extensive tunnel system, but its true nature is known to few. Access is difficult, requiring scrambling skills and intimate knowledge of the crag’s geography.
Here’s the remarkable thing: you could walk past it without ever knowing it was there. The entrance is concealed by the natural chaos of the cliff, hidden behind ledges, obscured by vegetation, camouflaged by the broken geometry of the rock face itself.
This invisibility would have been precisely what made it valuable as a hiding place. In an age before helicopters and thermal imaging, a man could vanish into these crags and become, effectively, invisible. The same broken terrain that offers the goats their winter corridors offered hunted men their survival.⁷
Modern cave records emphasize that confusion has long existed between several sites with similar names, including Cluny’s Cage on Ben Alder and other “Prince Charlie” caves scattered across the region. Without an expert guide who knows exactly where to look and how to reach it safely, the cave remains what it was meant to be: a secret written in stone.
History in the Highlands often lives in multiple places at once, and certainty can be elusive.⁷
The Vertical World
The climbers, meanwhile, have their own relationship with the rock. The crag above the A86 road has earned fame as a roadside cliff of steep schist with horizontal strata, layers that create natural lines up the face.
Routes can be long, exposed, and serious, demanding both technical skill and nerve. Climbers speak of the rock with respect: it’s not forgiving, but it’s honest. The holds are where they are. The protection is what you make of it.
In prolonged hard frosts, seepage and a waterfall line freeze into high grade ice climbing, transforming the same face that grows rock whitebeam in summer into a different kind of winter wall, one that glitters with verglas and frozen spray. The ice routes draw specialists from across Scotland, people who understand that climbing frozen water is as much art as athletics.¹ ⁶ ¹⁰
The Living Ridge
Creag Dhubh, then, is not one thing but many: a ridge of metamorphosed stone, a mosaic of habitats, a climbing ground, a refuge for rare plants and old stories.
The goats move across it with an economy of effort that comes from generations of learning the same steep ground. Their warm coats and near complete field of vision allow them to thrive where the winter wind bites hardest, where snow covers everything except the places only they know how to reach.
The cave keeps its secrets, visible only to those who know where to look. The climbers keep coming back, drawn by the quality of the rock and the seriousness of the routes. The rare mosses keep growing in their microhabitats, oblivious to classification and rarity.
And the hill itself continues its slow transformation, weathering grain by grain, growing peat molecule by molecule.
The goats still climb. The cave still hides its secrets. And on winter mornings, when frost glitters on the crags, those horizontal pupils are still scanning the ridge, watching the same horizon their ancestors watched fifty winters ago, seeing everything, missing nothing, perfectly at home in a landscape most creatures would consider impossible.
Footnotes
1. Scottish Natural Heritage. Creag Dhubh: Site Management Statement (site code 455). Reviewed 10 March 2010.
2. Scottish Natural Heritage. Creag Dhubh: Citation (site code 455). Notification reviewed 10 March 2010.
3. Scottish Government. Guidance on Developments on Peatland: Peatland Survey. 2017.
4. Forestry and Land Scotland. Forestry, carbon and peaty soils. Updated 18 July 2025.
5. Smith, R.A. Geology of the Newtonmore – Ben Macdui district. NERC Open Research Archive report, 2011.
6. UKClimbing. Creag Dubh (Newtonmore): crag information and route notes. (Accessed December 2025.)
7. Grampian Speleological Group, Scottish Cave and Mine Database. Chluanaidh (Uamh) / Cluny’s Cave (site details). (Accessed December 2025.)
8. Banks, M.S., Sprague, W.W., Schmoll, J., Parnell, J.A.Q., Love, G.D. Science Advances 1(7): e1500391, 2015.
9. Watt, H.B. (with supplement by F. Fraser Darling). Journal of Animal Ecology 6: 15–22, 1937.
10. Scottish Mountaineering Press; Nisbet, A. (and others). Highland Outcrops South: SMC Climbers’ Guide. ISBN 9781907233227, 2016.