Betty is the first dog to scale all of Scotland’s hundreds of mountains and hills

(Image credit: Shona Marshall)

published 29 April 2025

Earlier this month, a nine-year-old Kerry blue terrier became the first dog to scale all of Scotland’s hundreds of mountains and hills, plus some of the highest peaks in England, Ireland and Wales.

Since 2021, Betty, who lives in Kinloss, Moray, with her human Shona Marshall, has scaled 282 Munros, 227 Munro Tops, 222 Corbetts, 231 Grahams and 140 Donalds, plus 22 Furths (Munro height; there are a further 12 that don’t allow dogs).

The latest climb was 2,818ft-tall Morrone, a Corbett above Braemar, atop which she paused her paws to take in 360-degree views of the Cairngorms and perhaps reflected on her great achievement.

Fewer than 100 people have ever completed this ‘full house’ of Scottish summits; climbing all 282 Munros alone takes most an average of 15 years to do, but Betty and Marshall did all the Munros in one year, averaging about four hills a week to complete the rest of the list.

‘The initial aim was to complete by June, by Betty’s 10th birthday, because you just don’t know how long you’re going to have your dog around and how long they’re going to be capable of walking up hills,’ explains Marshall, who adds that Betty ate more than 800 hard-boiled eggs and 415 tins of sardines when scaling the 1,124 peaks.

Visit Kerry Blue Rescue online for more information on the breed

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

Sign up for the Country Life Newsletter