Southern Upland Way - Bargrennan to Dalry

[andrewl7642]

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The first bank holiday in May seemed as good a time as any to make a start on the next stage of the Southern Upland Way, this time the plan was to walk 56 miles from Bargrennan to St. Johns town of Dalry over the course of 3 and a half days.

We got dropped off at Bargrennan, mid afternoon with all our backpacking gear all ready and raring to go and immediately began marching towards Loch Trool, a 5 mile stroll.

ready to set off from Bargrennan

Upon reaching Loch Trool, we took a detour from the main route to visit Bruce's stone, a large granite boulder commemorating Bruce's victory in 1307.

Loch Trool

Bruce's stone

From Bruce's stone we followed the path up the Merrick to visit Culsharg bothy, where we would be spending the first night. The bothy was really in no fit state for sleeping in so we pitched the tents out front and spent the remainder of the evening drinking Beer by the campfire (fire pit was already there). We made sure to carry away all our rubbish.

Culsharg bothy - an empty shell

In the morning we retraced our steps back to Loch Trool and continued clockwise around the loch to eventually meet back up with the main route.

A few miles later, as the rain started to come on heavy we reached White Laggan bothy. We stopped here for about 2 hours, and had lunch while hoping for the rain to subside but it just wasn't happening. We needed to stick to my schedule and reach Dalry so we just braved it and got wet... wet is an understatement.

White Laggan bothy

The walk to Dalry took much longer than expected (starting from Culsharg bothy didn't help) , eventually approaching Dalry rather late about 10pm. It was pitch black, still raining hard and we were completely soaked through not knowing where we were going to find a camping pitch. We were still about 4 miles from Dalry, luckily a farmer who had just left Dalry, heading home was kind enough to offer us a lift and turn back into the village.

We were no longer in the mood for sticking around and putting up tents at this point so made a late night call to have us picked up and called it a day. I had never been so happy to be back at my parents house that night.