by Morag M » Sun Jul 04, 2010 5:13 pm
Date walked: 02/07/2010
Time taken: 10 hours
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Hi everyone, just to let you know how I got on on Friday. My hubby Andrew and I set off to tackle Ben Vane, Beinn Ime & Beinn Narnain feeling very motivated we left the car park at Inveruglas opposite the power station at about 11.30am. I had a route printed off from scottishport.co.uk and A had his compass.
We walked along the road past the power station then soon turned left onto the tarmac road which lead under the railway, we kept on this road, passed the electric substation, somewhere along this road we turned left and passed a dam, just after the dam was a gate with a wooden stile which we climbed over and passed a brick shelter on the right hand side, we carried on this path until it came to an end, there was a memorial plaque at the end of this road, not knowing where to go now we crossed the stream and headed into the trees, no path obvious to us, we started to climb a mountain which we believed was Beinn Narnain, this was slightly hairy (at times on all fours), however the views were terrific, (my camera does not do them justice - will have to get a new one) when we reached the top we were sure we were on Narnain (however asked a couple who were at the top just to confirm) it was extremely windy on the plateau, we explored the summit for a while - found this great fun, we then headed off down Narnain in the direction of Beinn Ime, going up and down was not hard, and we soon arrived at the top of Ime, we headed to the right first to the small pile of stones, then we took the left up the path to the highest summit, at this time the mist came down and it was raining, we sheltered a bit in this summit, views were magnificent when the mist cleared, then as we were still feeling fairly fit we decided to head for Ben Vane, we left Ime and headed down the grassy slopes of I don't know where, there was no obvious path, very hard going, the rain came down heavier and we decided to leave Ben Vane for another day - (really my hubby's idea, although I don't think we would have found it anyway It was hard going making our way down to the bottom, we had to keep going up and down as there were a lot of steep drops, eventually we got near the bottom and could see a stream, we tried to walk along side of this (we knew we were heading in the right sort of direction) it was too marshy (no path), we eventually came to pine trees and headed toward them, we clambered along a metal type fence at the side of them, to avoid getting out feet stuck in the boggy grounds, after a while we headed off to the right then came to the dam that we had passed on the way up, however we were on the wrong side and had to clamber down rocks (at this point I did not think I was going to make it) we literally had to slide down these rocks on our backs, eventually our feet hit the road on which we had came up from I did not know whether to laugh or cry at this point (my hubby was singing Valdaree, Valdaraa), we arrived back at our car at 10pm soaking wet and glad to be alive. . If anyone can help tell me where I went wrong and where I was walking I would grateful.