A mountain climber from Glenrothes has completed the ascent of all of Scotland’s Donalds – with his faithful pet dog by his side.

Murdo Murray set out to tackle Scotland’s as many of Scotland’s Munros as he could just two years ago, and realised that the Donalds were also doable at the same time.

He said: “My dog Chester and I were both very late starters to hill-walking, with our first walk together being the munro Ben Chonzie in May 2024, when Chester was already six years old.

“We quickly discovered that we had a shared love for hill-walking and after that took every opportunity to head out to climb hills, mainly munros whenever good weather was forecast.

Chester is only the third dog to have climbed all of Scotland's Donalds.

placeholder image — Chester is only the third dog to have climbed all of Scotland's Donalds.

“Being ‘fair-weather hill-walkers’ only, I looked for a different hill walking challenge through the winter months in order to try to keep our hill fitness up before resuming munro-bagging in the spring.

“Walking up the Donalds was perfect for that purpose.”

Mrdo discovered that for himself and Chster to become “compleators” they had 89 Donalds, plus 52 Donald Tops to climb to be recognised by the Scottish Mountaineering Club (SMC) as compleators.

“Living in Fife, I had initially thought that the Donalds would all be quite close at hand,” he said, “our very first Donalds walk was the lovely Glen Sherup Horseshoe in the Ochils, which did nothing to dispel that notion.

“However, our first very long day out in the Galloway Hills walking up Corserine and the Rhinns of Kells made me realise how wrong I was, especially when factoring in the Edinburgh and Glasgow traffic.

“But I did love the fact that bagging the Donalds took us to beautiful parts of the south of Scotland, that we would otherwise possibly never visit. I decided to buy a campervan in December, which was a bit of a game-changer as we put it to very good use to help bag our remaining Donalds in the Galloway hills in two-day bagging trips in 2026.

“We had so many great days out after we started walking up the Donalds, that I decided to continue bagging Donalds with Chester throughout 2025 as a side quest to our munro-bagging adventures. We particularly took the opportunity to take advantage of times when there was better weather in the south of Scotland.”

Last month the pair climbed Curleywee in the Galloway Hills to complete the set of Donalds – with Chester being only the third dog to ever do so, which Murdo described as a “bitter sweet moment”.

“I was so proud that we had managed to complete them together, with Chester becoming only the third dog to do so, but I was also a bit sad that this chapter of our hill-walking adventures had come to an end.

“We “compleated” the Donalds in 39 separate hill-walks over a 22 month period. In total we took approximately 225 hours to walk 418 miles with 102,000 feet of ascent. I have found that bagging the Donalds has really helped us to build our hill-walking experience up, in particularly to enhance our skills at negotiating our way through peat hags and rough pathless terrain.

“We still have plenty of munros, corbetts and grahams left to walk up together, and I suspect that we may also re-visit some of our favourite Donalds walks again in the future.

“I would definitely recommend climbing the Donalds to any keen hill-walker with their dogs.”