I and my partner had been staying in Blairgowrie for a few days for our somewhat belated 'summer' holiday due to a persistent injury on his part. The injury meant our usual line up of long walks, Munros and generally jam-packed days had to be scaled back a bit, so were fully utilising the selection of shorter Walkhighlands routes: we'd also recommend the Kirkmichael loop, Den of Alyth and Hill of Alyth in this area.

We started our day driving over from Blairgowrie to a Blazin Fiddles soundtrack, admiring the lochs by the roadside. Although it was November, it seems a sunny Sunday is still busy in Dunkeld so we got one of the few parking spaces left in the Cally car park.

We started our walk following the signposts along the tracks to Mill Dam. There was plenty of beaver evidence around here, particularly in the Lunan Burn flowing south. It's great to see they've made their way up from the Tay into its tributaries and are doing so well.




It really is remarkable how they slow the water down - the water was only just shy of the top of the wee bridge over the burn. Most of their activity seemed quite recent and a significant number of the felled trees were left where they'd fallen - we'd seen similar things over on the Bamff estate near Alyth the day before. Perhaps at this time of year, with fewer green leaves around, they're eating more bark and the tree chomping is more for culinary purposes than for engineering.

They had also clearly been recently active further up on the lochside. We noticed that here they had taken away a number of the logs they'd felled from this area, perhaps to a project elsewhere on the loch.



I'd eyed up a diversion from the main Atholl Woods path shortly after Mill Dam to take us through some deeper forestry. Last time we'd been in the Dunkeld area we'd ended up with an excellent haul of various fungi and, although a little late in the season, I thought Rotmell Woods could offer some mushroom spotting opportunities. I was correct - we saw several boletes, russulas, false chanterelles and hundreds of sulphur tufts growing out of the roots of an upended tree.







Further on we saw more boletes, and most impressively what we think was Boletus erythropus - when cut it stained almost instantly a bright blue!




We rejoined the main Atholl Woods path a little further on and stopped for lunch. This is clearly a popular loop as we saw plenty of folk pass us whilst we had our sandwiches. As noted on the walk description, there are some lovely views on the next section of the walk as the forest opens up and you can look back over up Strath Tay and towards Pitlochry.



We again decided to do a little diversion from the main route to check out Cave Pass (marked on the 1:25,000 map). The walk up to this was on some wide but steep forest tracks but this petered out and turned into a narrow path descending the other side. I thought it would make for an exciting mountain bike descent, and a few tyre treads showed others had clearly had the same thought! We tried to find the caves to no avail, but we did see a group of climbers on the sport routes of Cave Craig.



The paths on the ground a little further down from Cave Craig bear little resemblance to what the OS map reckons are there, so we ended up back at the car park a bit sooner than expected. After a brief stop to check out some oyster mushrooms, we decided to add on a little out-and-back to King's Seat via Polney Loch to make the most of the remaining daylight. We had some lovely evening light over the loch and through the trees.



We are both in agreement that autumn seems the best time to visit this bit of the world - the combination of autumn colours, fungi and a bit of beaver spotting makes for a lovely day out.