Braemar to Blair Atholl

[GravelInspector]

(Route reversed from WalkHighlands category, but the closest match available.)
Cycled from Braemar to Blair Atholl. I was on a road-touring bike, which really wasn't the tool for the job. Carrying quite heavy camping kit didn't help either.
Nothing particularly interesting about the section from Braemar as far as White Bridge. A few patches of gravel (well, cobbles - up to fist-sized) dumped into potholes on the landrover track made for tricky cycling in places, but nothing too drastic. After White Bridge I continued cycling towards Bynack Lodge, my planned lunch stop.
The first ford (near spot hight 432m) elicited a few minutes thought before I realised that there was no real possibility of getting across it dry-shod. So ... wade across, no problems. The bottom of the panniers touched water a couple of times, but nothing to get the sleeping bag wet. The next several fords were equally unproblematic. In foul weather, that's not going to be the case.
After lunch I started south trying to ride, but the state of the track rapidly reached the point that I had to start pushing. I'd hoped to get at least another couple of km south before having to push, but that's life. On a mountain bike, without panniers, you could probably make considerable distance further on wheels.
The next 4 or so km over the Glen Tilt watershed and into Glen Tilt itself were a purgatory of bashed ankles until I took the pedals off. The route is all - as mapped - pathway rather than track, and only short sections are wide enough to ride. Again, with a mountain bike, you'd probably spend more time on wheels, but since i'd chosen to take the tourer and camping gear, that wasn't an option. Much of the path is simply too narrow and boulder-girt to even consider cycling. After I took the pedals off, I reckon I was making a good kilometre an hour more, but I was falling behind schedule all the time, which wasn't good. Several "bad steps" had me considering unloading all the baggage off the bike to portage baggage and bike across rock ledges leading into gullies and such-like obstacles, though I always avoided it. Some steps involved quite off-balance grunts to get the bike and load over boulders though, and your chain guards may get bent if you're not careful.
Eventually I rounded the corner to the memorial bridge and the state of the path improved. Still not cycleable, on my chariot, but I picked up a bit more speed. Eventually after 9 or 10 km of pushing, I merged onto landrover track again, and put the pedals back onto the bike.
The track down Glen Tilt is pretty rough for a road bike. It has recently (2014?) been dressed with a lot of very sharp quarry debris (while on the Braemar side, they seem to use more rounded river gravels), which is probably why I took a puncture just below Forest Lodge. I also discovered that my tyre pump had a blockage, preventing me from inflating the new tube fully, and guaranteeing me another puncture a kilometre further on. After that, with time pressing to get back into mobile phone contact, I reluctantly continued with a bone-shaker back wheel which slowly, painfully and noisily got me to Blair Atholl to tell the wife I was down from the mountains, but that the rest of my trip was off because of the state of the back wheel.
So a qualified success : main objective achieved, though the shortcomings of my chosen equipment clearly revealed.

One word of warning - after floods last year, the "camp site" at River Tilt Park doesn't have on-grass camping for people who don't have an airbed. So you've got a mile-long extra trudge for an £18 (!!) stay at the Blair Castle camp site. Which was a very unwelcome discovery at the end of a long and tiring day.
Statistics
From the (hand-made) GPX file, I get "Length: 28.3 miles 45.5 km
Ascent: +1323m -1525m
Naismith: 11h 18m"
That's a bit more than I'd have expected. It did feel a harder day than I'd planned on, but I'm surprised by that ascent figure, and that I managed to better Naismith, given the slow pushing of the bike and the stops for maintenance.