Ben Tirran in the mist and murk.
Posted: Thu Oct 03, 2013 11:27 pm
We walked from the Clova hotel. There was initially a little promise of the cloud lifting, but it started to get lower as we climbed the path towards Loch Brandy, lower and lower until it completely hid the loch from view when we got to it. From there until descending from Loch Wharral was all in the clag.
Part of me was quite happy about this as it meant that I had to practice my navigation and pacing in featureless hills in 20/30m visibility. As I'm planning on doing my SML assessment in October that was very handy. It also made us look at all the creepy crawly things that appeared on the walk and some of them were truly wonderful.
Part of me was less happy. Being in cloud is rarely warm and today it was a bit chilly. My walking partner has poor circulation and got hot on the way up in the sun, but when we hit the clag got a bit worryingly cold and white as we progressed through the walk. We put up the shelter when we reached The Goet in an attempt to warm her up a bit, but as this was not proving hugely successful I settled on the 'get down to warmer climes as quickly and safely as possible' technique of warming her up. We managed to miss the path on the west shoulder of Ben Tirran on the way down and ended up going along the very tussocky and heathery side of Loch Wharral, still nearly invisible in the clag even when standing next to it.
They're building some structure at the south end of Loch Wharral but I don't really know what or why, but it means that the path on the map is now a decent sized vehicle track offering an easy route off the hill. We cut off this onto the path to the west of the Adielinn Plantation to cut the corner off the way back to the Clova Hotel.
On walks generally, I entertain myself by counting the number of slugs and frogs I see, in the usually vain hope of seeing more frogs than slugs. As we were descending this path, it looked like it was going to be the same old story of slugs triumphing over their foes, as they were leading 14 to 3 (including one dead frog as I was desperate). By the time we made it up the road to the Clova Hotel, the frogs had turned it around to win 32-14. There were loads of tiny frogs on the road, just a few cms long (and also many squished bigger ones (which I ceased to count)). Am I sad ?
By the time we reached the Hotel again, it had stopped serving food (after 8pm) which was quite disappointing at the time. However, we were well and truly compensated for this lateness by the quality of the fish and chips in Kirriemuir.