summits of the Ben Lawers range whilst grazing animals at height during the summer. The mapmaker Timothy Pont visited the area 1590s, and writer Ian R. Mitchell considers that Pont's surveys show that he, or one of his associates, is likely to have climbed Ben Lawers, and should therefore be credited with earliest recorded ascent. Otherwise, the earliest recorded ascent was by members of a party organised by military surveyor William Roy: although it is not certain that Roy himself climbed the peak, his writings show that measurements were taken from the summit of Ben Lawers on 17 September 1776. In 1878, a group of twenty men led by Malcolm Ferguson spent a day building a cairn nearly in diameter in the hope of bringing the summit above the "magic" figure of . The cairn, which was topped with a massive block of white quartz is no longer there; in any case the Ordnance Survey ignored it as an artificial structure that was not truly part of the hill. Ownership Prior to the 14th century, the mountain stood on the lands of Clan MacMillan. Chalmers of Lawers obtained the land by force from the clan in the mid 14th century in the reign of David II. The land was confiscated from the Chalmers family in 1473 by James III and given to Sir Colin Campbell of Glenorchy after Thomas Chalmers was implicated in the murder of James I. The lands have mainly remained in the ownership of the Campbells of Glenorchy and Breadalbane right up to the present day, with some notable exceptions. Many of the farms were sold off in the late 1940s. Most of the south side of the Ben Lawers range has since 1950 been owned by the National Trust for Scotland, and was purchased through the generosity of Percy Unna, a mountaineer and one time president of the Scottish Mountaineering Club. The area of land under trust ownership was extended in 1996 by the purchase of the neighbouring Tarmachan range. The trust built a visitor centre located at the western end of the range that had an exhibition that explained the geological formation of the mountain, but this was closed and demolished in 2010. A new car park has been built on the opposite side of the road, from where a path leads to the summit of Ben Lawers by way of the intermediate peak of