A couple from Surrey asked at the café on Sunday morning whether the mountain was open.
They had looked for opening hours online and found none, and had interpreted this as meaning it might be closed rather than as meaning it is a hill.
They were told it was open. They were also told it is always open, that there is no gate, no ticket and nobody at the bottom, and that this took some of them a while to get used to as well.
The better question
The follow-up was more sensible than the first, and is recorded here because more people should ask it.
They asked whether they should go up.
“And that is the right question, because the answer that day was no. Cloud was down, they had trainers, and neither of them had been up anything before. Nobody was going to stop them. That is the bit people find strange.”
The café owner
What they did
They did the shore path instead, which was suggested to them, and which takes two hours and is flat and was in sunshine all afternoon while the top stayed in cloud until six.
They came back on Wednesday with boots bought in Inverness and went up, and came down at half four, and were pleased with themselves in a way the café owner describes as “very good to see”.
She has since put a small board by the counter. It says what the cloud is doing, whether the path is wet, and how long it takes.
She reports it is the most-read thing in the building.
