Badandun Hill circular

[martin.h]

A hill very close to home and one we enjoyed doing in August last year, this little trip out was just to get us out into the hills and get us familiar with the first few km's of a walk I have planned in the spring... a walk over to Mayar from Forter

No need for an early start so we were off from home at 08:15 and arrived at the little parking area by the phone box in Folda at 09:15, the forecast was for better weather towards the west with the small chance of a bit of sunshine we had originally planned a trip out to have a go at Hunt Hill until we saw the forecast, not great, especially for the Mount Keen area

We were away from the car at 09:30 heading for the gate at the start of the track heading for our hill. It was bright and clear







The nice thing about this walk is that it's very straight forward using good tracks throughout, you can concentrate on the views rather than too much on the map



The views are nice towards the hills and munros to the north, there's not much snow on them at the moment just how that compares with previous winters I'm so sure, I was expecting the higher mountains to be covered, especially in February, there's no doubt the climate is changing







Getting closer to the top



At the trigpoint on the summit we could see Mayar and some of my planned route to reach it from here, we're looking forward to it, on a nice warm day in May would be nice







The air was clear so we had some nice views



Cairngorms










Mount Blair


From the summit we headed down the track aiming for the junction at NO215685 where we turned south to start the long walk along the track heading towards Auchintaple Loch.



Looking Back


It's a fairly long trudge to the loch, on the way we had views of the dreaded Crock, we might do that one day



The last time we did this we took the track that went NW ish above the loch, this time we were going to take the track down towards the loch to have a closer look at it. This track took us around the loch and over the dam, it's a nice end to the walk, very picturesque looking over towards Badandun Hill and the little boat house.







We eventually gained the outward track at around NO190652 for the easy walk back down to the road and on to the car.

This is a nice little walk with good views, a part of the world we'll spend more time exploring over the coming months in anticipation of the finer weather when we plan a few days out in the Cairngorms

[rockhopper]

Good result - nice to be able to explore new areas and agree with you that this does make for a relatively straightforward walk

...and get us familiar with the first few km's of a walk I have planned in the spring... a walk over to Mayar from Forter

Have distant memories of approaching Maya and Driesh from Auchavan which is just up the road from Forter - seemed to make sense and avoided a much longer drive

[martin.h]

Good result - nice to be able to explore new areas and agree with you that this does make for a relatively straightforward walk

Looking at the map and the tracks that go over the lumps and bumps we could stay high for a lot of the day without too much effort

...and get us familiar with the first few km's of a walk I have planned in the spring... a walk over to Mayar from Forter

Have distant memories of approaching Maya and Driesh from Auchavan which is just up the road from Forter - seemed to make sense and avoided a much longer drive

That's interesting, there's a track that runs from Auchavan down the east side of the River Isla back to Forter, that might save a bit of backtracking and give us some different views, seed planted, cheers