Saturday 24 March 2012

Warm day in the big glens

This time last year - and, indeed the year before - I was wading about in 3 or 4 feet of snow. Not today though as the Scottish March temperature record was broken a bit to the east. 
My brother and I spent the day in Glen Strathfarrar on four perfectly proportioned Munros. A mixture of springy turf and very wide vistas gives a day to savour. Despite the haze, from the summits you can see more or less every major summit north of the great glen and a fair few to the south of it such as Nevis and the Cairngorms. The country to the west around the head of Loch Monar looked particularly fine in the sunshine with twinkling lochans and deep glacial trenches cutting through to the west coast. Real fiords - I was half expecting to see longships appearing.


The glen has a curious feature in that it is 'closed' in the winter. Despite the obvious fact that the road was built with public funds during the hydro boom the glen is 'private' and they can throw a gate across the entrance to prevent 'poaching'.  I think in this context poaching is a euphemism for unfettered access by the great unwashed. In summer, the gatekeeper dispenses the privilege of access to your own countryside up a road that you pay to maintain via your lecky bills but in winter you must phone the Mountaineering Council of Scotland to obtain access to the inner sanctum.
While driving up the glen to meet my brother I happened upon a tweedy type in a utility truck who ostentatiously passed the layby he should have drawn into and forced me to reverse a hundred yards to the last one. That's not easy while tugging your forelock. He gave me the onceover down his nose before driving off at speed. His land apparently or maybe not. 
What a ridiculous throwback to a less enlightened age. The MC of S should cut out the kow-towing and get them telt - oor hills and access for all.
For reference here are the access arrangements.
However, the gates and padlocks should not discourage you from visiting Glen Strathfarrar. The place itself is warm and welcoming with shaggy woods and quiet stretches of deep brown river. The hydro schemes have weathered into the background and are barely noticed. I doubt the same will be true of the windfarms in 50 years.
Time to go - venison stew for tea but don't tell anyone.

Saturday 17 March 2012

Pass of the fair haired lads


A longish half run and half hike through a stretch of country on the south side of the loch that was new to me. The route included a fair length of forestry road which rose at a gentle angle to the edge of a green tunnel of trees which only opens out at the tiny pass itself. It barely qualifies as a pass until you get over the brow and catch the wide views down to Loch Ness and beyond to the snow capped mountains north and west of the Great Glen. The view is part pastoral, taking in the fields and farms of Glen Urquhart, part urban out to Inverness and part wilderness out to the Affric hills and the Monadliath lining the horizon. This day it was stunning and I had to to stop to take some photos and drink it up for a while. The air moving gently up from the loch felt warm and smelt of vanilla from the yellow gorse in the woods below.
The route plunged down into the woods below on a ladder of zig-zags where the path did not appear much travelled and was mostly grassed over. The steeply pitched curves eventually gave way to a long downward rake of green forest track getting deeper and darker as it headed down towards the lochside. Then, tucked in at the edge of the path I saw my first wild primroses of the year and was forced to stop for yet another photo. These wee Scottish wildflowers always instill a sense of hope in me - their colour, their timing and the way they respond to sunlight make them a concrete proof of spring.
The forest road opened out into a more prosaic commercial forest for a few miles, passing old ruined crofts moss covered and half submerged in the larch and Sitkas. The road then branched into a wide route running downward and a more over grown upward trail. I was heading up but stopped first to treat a wee blister at the broad junction. Above and behind me was a margin of the forest which had taken a real battering in the recent gales with at least half the trees leaning over or blown down completely. The remaining trees creaked, cracked and groaned like wild animals. Even in midday sunlight it was an alarming noise and I mentally crossed this route off my list for winter night outings.
The forest and the wide road ended at Erchite farm which is split into an abandoned wester and a thriving easter which both share an unrivalled view up the glen to the Moray Firth and down the loch to Drum and beyond. I followed an increasingly boggy and sketchy path up through new scraggy forestry clinging to the crags. The road eventually just ended in what looked like a turning circle hanging above a gorge. There was no obvious route but I could just see some open moor a few hundred meters up through the forest. No choice but to bushwhack up through the ripping and tearing wind fall until it eventually opened out into equally tricky steep heather. I wheezed upwards to a small summit and then on to the cairn of Beinn a Bhataich. It had turned a fair bit colder as I climbed but it was still a surprise when a squall rose over the shoulder from the loch and fell as a short but dramatic snowstorm.  
From the summit all that remained was a short rough descent to the road and a 2 mile jog back to the car in the warm westering sun. 
A nice round for the first half with much to like - the wee pass itself, the rocky conglomerate crags which point to the violence of the formation of the Glen itself, 3 seasons in 3 hours and the all pervading scent of spring. 
However, I plan to look for alternative endings for next time.




 

Monday 12 March 2012

Gear of the Year

Time for some gear talk and my vote for gear of the year as winter comes to a close. 
I considered my excellent Inov-8 Roclite 315s which have been through a lot over two years - hell on the Fannichs, a Highland Cross and more snow than we have seen in the previous decade and are still going for more. Comfy, grippy and hardy.
Honourable mentions to my lovely Haglofs hoodie fleece, my Howies merino 'surf style' base layer - which they stopped doing for some reason - and my PolarBuff. Nice to be warm...

But the winner is....my still shiny Hope Vision R4 LED light set. For a northcountryboy like me it means an extra 18 hours a day of potential playtime per dreary December day. It's a headtorch, it's a bike light, it means an end to night time as an excuse for not riding, running or even hillwalking. It's like a sunny day you fix to the front of your bike. And its made in the UK. 

Turkey of the year also belongs to the UK. A Montane eVent SuperFly jacket that leaked from the off. It took nearly a year of discussions to persuade Montane that the jacket was faulty. Just not good enough.

Tuesday 6 March 2012

Green and pleasant land

While working away for the week I took a quick opportunity run along the Grand Union Canal in Hertfordshire. A pleasant enough 5 miles along the chalky footpath with the constant soudtrack of the West Coast mainline thundering past every few minutes. This part of the country is threatened by the HS2 expansion and many feel it is worth protecting. As a Highland Scot it would be easy to get snotty about landscape quality, about its lack of wildness, the fact that it is heavily populated and a bit degraded already but tonight as dusk fell it looked and felt like England is supposed to - green and pleasant. Worth loving and protecting.
Still, you wonder if the same conversations took place when the navvies turned up to dig the Canal.....