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Headed out for my first walk in ages due to work, house move and football season being back up and running.
I had meticulously planned to hit Jocks Road, up Tom Buidhe & Tolmount (liked Stretches inversion over Loch Callater!
) over to Loch Esk and through the Valley at Moulnie Craig. Sadly as I pulled up to the Clova hotel I was told I would get no further forward as they were resurfacing the doll road (finally!) and I could end up stuck there behind the workers/machines/half destroyed roads for the day / night.
Ho hum, what to do. We have all been faced with this kind of on the day decision change, usually down to the weather or because we slept in and the daylight was running out; que frantic webbing/looking at maps. My decision process was made more difficult by...
a) I wanted to get high enough for a potential inversion
b) I wanted to choose a route that I had some familiarity with for navigational purposes (on my own and no idea how thick the clag was)
c) I didn't have a huge amount of daylight left
d) I didn't fancy doing Loch Brandy / Wharrall again as I have done them 5 times this year
e) If I hung around at the Clova hotel car park consulting my map any longer I'd have been inside having a pint and food and then I'd never get out.
I decided on a wee meander through Glen Uig right the way round behind Cowharn and back but my mind went back to an Inversion as I was driving there and so I finally decided it was going to be Cat Law; a hill I hadn't been up in a few years.
Cat Law is a wee gem of an Angus hill, much ignored despite it's prominence from the a90 (the triple hump on A90 beside Forfar/Kirriemuir which interrupts the view between Driesh and the walls of Loch Brandy and Wharral). Glen Uig is a nice glen on a sunny autumn day but sadly it was grey and miserable as I parked the car up at between East and West Lednathie. I headed down into West Lednathie farm...
- West Lednathie farm
From the sign marked Cat Law I began to start climbing up a landrover track towards a small patch of forest and a lot of clag. Along this wall and faint track, I must have disturbed around 125 pheasants (male, female, baby), 43 rabbits and two baby deer...
- Annoying pheasants, rabbits and baby deer as I go...
.
From here I climbed over the homemade fencepots and into the unamed forest. About 1k or so of ducking and diving through trees I rejoined the landrover track towards the end of the forest and the beginning of the climb up Bodandere Hill...
From here I simply followed the landrover track until I hit the fenceposts at Monthrey, it was around here that I knew I was getting to experience an inversion as I could feel the sun burning it's way through the clag....
- I can feeeeeeeel it.....
From here it was simply a case of following the fenceposts all the way to the top of the hill and peep my head through the clouds and get the jacket off....
- it's summer again!!
The view from the top was beautiful and the heat was fantastic, I reckon the cloud stopped at about 575m and I was lucky to get a cracking view of Glenshee, Glen Isla, Glen Prosen, Lochnagar/Broad Cairn, Clova and Lethnot peeping through, sadly Craigowl hill and the Sidlaws must have been just covered....
- From the main fencepost
- No Sidlaws to be seen....
- Glenshee and Isla
I ended up on top for about 2 hours or so enjoy the peace, quiet, heat and soup; not a soul to be seen or heard. I then pulled myself away from all of these comforts considering whether I should head over to Cowharn or not, I decided to pack up and head back to the car knowing that I would have to go back through clag to go back above the cloud again. Mount Blair was visible and was poking out quite prominently considering it's Graham status! Anyway, it was back to clag...
- get the jacket back on.....
On my way back down I came across another few deer but sadly this was all I got (given my limited skills and shoddy compact camera....
Another blast through the forst and down the steep slope to Wester Lednathie and it was back to the comfort of my car. A nice wee day out and it's always quite an experience going through an inversion and it's very hard to imagine how nice it always is above the clag (aeroplane moments!).
For those who haven't been up this way yet, it's worth a visit; it might not be a Munro but it's a gem and always pretty quiet as most of the hordes go elsewhere in Angus. I'll quite probably be back in the winter too.