On Tuesday a pair of walkers had a run-in with a snake, then ended up stuck on steep ground in the dark. They were rescued, but it's not known what happened to the adder.

The Lomond Mountain Rescue Team reports that the two novice walkers, aged 37 and 41, had left Rowardennan at around 12.30 pm to climb Ben Lomond , reaching the summit at about 5pm. While making their way back along the plateau they thought that they could take a short cut back to down and turned west off the tourist path. They found the terrain difficult and at one point got spooked by coming across an adder, and then found themselves on steep, slippy ground with the light fading.

The team was called-out just after 8.30pm. In conversation with the Team Leader the casualties described their route and passed on a latitude/longitude position from the gps on their mobile phone. From their description of the surrounding area it sounded like the casualties were in the wooded area above Ardess, to the east of Sput Ban.

A group of team members set out up the Ptarmigan Ridge path and located the casualties in a steep wooded gorge. Extracting them involved roping them down and across two major burns and back onto safe ground, and the group arrived back at Rowardennan just after midnight.