William Sydney Scroggie was born in Nelson, British Columbia, Canada, in 1919. He moved to Scotland after his father, originally from Newport, Fife, was killed during the First World War while serving in the Canadian Army.
Scroggie attended John Watson's Institution in Edinburgh and Dundee's Harris Academy where he played wing-forward in the school rugby team of 1935-36 that went unbeaten, he was also keen mountaineer.
On leaving school he was taken on by Dundee publishers DC Thomson and became a sub-editor on The Hotspur before it became a comic.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, he quickly volunteered for the Army. During the war he saw active service with the 7th Cameronians, Scottish Rifles, before becoming a Lieutenant in Lord Lovat's Scouts, a ski/mountain regiment.
Just weeks before the end of the war, in northern Italy, he stood on an anti-personnel mine, losing his right leg and the sight of both eyes.
He spent the next three months in a Naples hospital where he was given an artificial leg, before being shipped home.
Undeterred by his injuries, he studied at New College in Oxford, before returning to Dundee, where he worked on the switchboard at NCR, walking there with his tin leg from his home outside the city, every day, until he retired 23 years later.
In 1954, he began teaching himself Greek, learning from a braille grammer book and eventually working his way through the writing of Herodotus and Thucydides. He was also a poet and author with several volumes of published work.
He resumed climbing mountains, with friends, or his children, acting as guides.
He was presented with a degree of Doctor of Laws by the University of Dundee in 2001.
The year before, on Tuesday, June 27th, a cairn was unveiled in his presence on the summit of Balluderon Hill in the Sidlaw Hills, 5 miles north of Dundee and 2 miles north of his home at Bridgefoot.
It is a metal disc on a stone cairn, topped with a block of Aberdeenshire granite. The disc points in the direction of all the major hills and mountains seen from the summit, from the Grampian Mountains to the north, the hills of East Lothian beyond Edinburgh to the south and the Bell Rock Lighthouse out in the North Sea to the east.
The lettering on the disc also reads:
This cairn was erected on Balluderon Hill 1322 ft June 2000 in tribute to SYDNEY SCROGGIE "MAN O`THE HILLS" 'He gae'd his ain gait a` his life but whiles wi' others een`'.
After his death in September 2006 a small plaque was placed at the bottom of the disc, reading "In fond memory of Sydney Scroggie Oct 1919 - Sept 2006".
The hill can be reached from the car park at Balkello Woods, half a mile to the south, a good path snakes its way up to the top which sits above an old quarry and commands a view south over Dundee.