Craignaw is a small but very rocky hill in centre of the Galloway Hills

Galloway Hills

The Galloway hills are part of the Southern Uplands of Scotland, and form the northern boundary of western Galloway. They lie within the bounds of Galloway Forest Park, an area of some of largely uninhabited wild land, managed by the Forestry Commission...

 of southern Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

. Unlike many hills in the Southern Uplands

Southern Uplands

The Southern Uplands are the southernmost and least populous of mainland Scotland's three major geographic areas . The term is used both to describe the geographical region and to collectively denote the various ranges of hills within this region...

, Craignaw has a complex and rocky summit area, with a long line of crags and rough ground on the east side. The hill is largely composed of granite

Granite

Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...

. Near the north end of the hill is an interesting area of terrain known as the "De'ils Bowlin' Green" where various rounded granite boulders are scatterd at random over an area of nearly horizontal granite slabs. These are believed to be glacial erratic

Glacial erratic

A glacial erratic is a piece of rock that differs from the size and type of rock native to the area in which it rests. "Erratics" take their name from the Latin word errare, and are carried by glacial ice, often over distances of hundreds of kilometres...

s or result from a similar glacier process. On the west side of the hill, near grid reference

Grid reference

Grid references define locations on maps using Cartesian coordinates. Grid lines on maps define the coordinate system, and are numbered to provide a unique reference to features....

 NX458831, a few hundred meters from the summit is an F-111E Aardvark

General Dynamics F-111

The General Dynamics F-111 "Aardvark" was a medium-range interdictor and tactical strike aircraft that also filled the roles of strategic bomber, reconnaissance, and electronic warfare in its various versions. Developed in the 1960s by General Dynamics, it first entered service in 1967 with the...

 crash site. The site is marked by a small memorial to the two US Airforce pilots who were killed in the accident (Captains Spaulding and Hetzner). Although the crash happened on December 19, 1979 there are still small amounts of aircraft debris in the area.

Walking

Craignaw is quite a remote hill and climbing it is a long and rough walk from the road-ends at either Craigencallie or Bruces Stane.

Climbing

There is some good but short rock climbing on Craignaw at Snibe Hill, Memorial Crag and Scotland Slab. However in winter after a good freeze the broken ground on the east side of the hill has some of the best ice climbs in Southern Scotland with routes of up to 150 m in length. The most famous of these is the frozen waterfall

Waterfall

A waterfall is a place where flowing water rapidly drops in elevation as it flows over a steep region or a cliff.-Formation:Waterfalls are commonly formed when a river is young. At these times the channel is often narrow and deep. When the river courses over resistant bedrock, erosion happens...

of the Dow Spout.