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Second year of going walking on Christmas Day and with the forecast for sunshine decided to bag our first ever Christmas Day Hill - Mealna Letter. Reading others reports, I decided to take the "cheats" way to avoid the worst of the boggy ground, parking in the large entrance way to a forestry track along the road to Dalnaglar Castle and following the forestry track up. Slight issue though, the car became surrounded by ducks! Moss and Zena thought they were going to get an early Christmas dinner!
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- Quack!
Moss herded the ducks along the track until they eventually decided to fly off, Zena remained on the lead otherwise there may well have been duck for dinner!
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- Duck herding
The track led through the forest and eventually opened out where the trees had been felled and new ones planted. I almost let Zena off-lead at this point but spotted a roe deer in the distance so she remained on the lead. Just as well as it turned out there were a few of them around. Passing through another small patch of trees we left the forestry area and continued heading up through the heather and tussocky grass heading slightly to the right to meet the wall.
I thought maybe away from the forestry Zena could be off-lead at last but nope! Instead of roe deer there were now red deer. Two groups of deer Zena never even noticed, but she did spot a single deer and if she hadn't been on the lead she would have been off after it. The wisest choice was just to keep her on the lead, bit less fun for Moss who had no one to run around with but she managed to keep herself occupied.
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- Deer spotting
Once reaching the wall, having navigated a slight boggy section, we climbed through a convenient gap and went over/under the wire fence on the other side to meet the path that followed the wall all the way to the summit of Mealna Letter. There were a couple of boggy bits but these were easy to avoid, though it probably helped that it remained cold enough to keep it slightly frozen.
At the summit there was a gap in the wall but unfortunately there was no where for the dogs to get under the fence on the other side to head across to the summit cairn, so they were left on the other side of the fence while I went the short distance down to the cairn which is lower than the wall, so they still reached the summit. As we were heading back down the same way I figured there was no point in lifting them over only to lift them back across again but something to bare in mind if doing the whole circuit with dogs, you may need to lift them over the fence.
From the summit we returned the same way, I did consider just following the wall down but decided not to. We crossed the wall a bit further down to avoid the pools on the ascent, angling towards the forest a gap in the trees giving us a target to aim for and we reached the track that would lead us back down to the car that fortunately hadn't been taken for a joyride by the ducks.
