More exciting outdoor-adventurousness news as promised, but first a bit of scene-setting: we went on holiday to Scotland at the end of July. It's a long old drive so we stopped off on the way to visit our friends John and Tracey at their home in Silverdale, just south of the Lake District. We were only there for a day or so but did get to do a bit of exploring, in particular the spectacular coastal location at the northern end of Morecambe Bay.
Morecambe Bay is a vast expanse of estuarial sand and mudflats and fairly notorious for its shifting landscape and dangerous tides, and most famously (in recent times anyway) for the incident where over 20 Chinese cockle-harvesters drowned in 2004. Just to demonstrate the fickle nature of the landscape, there was until recently (properly recently as in a few weeks before we were there) a vast flat expanse of sand extending out from Silverdale Cove to the main channel of the River Kent as it emerged from its mouth a couple of miles to the north, but recent heavy rain had induced a sudden course change and the river had turned south, carved out a great gouge in the sand and created a substantial sand cliff only a couple of hundred yards from the beach, which Alys and Nia kindly posed by for scale and subsequently hilariously pretended to push their little brother off.
Despite the apparent foolhardiness of attempting such a thing, guided walks are periodically available, weather and tide conditions permitting, and a person with the grand title of the Queen's Guide To The Sands (well, presumably King's Guide these days) has the job of scoping out a safe route. As publicly-accessible walking routes go it's probably not as dangerous as the Broomway in Essex - less chance of being maimed by discarded military ordnance, for instance - but definitely not to be trifled with. It is at least still passable, though, unlike the Wadeway in Chichester Harbour where you would now disappear into a canal halfway across.
Anyway, we didn't do any of that, preferring to head home for a refreshing beer and a soak in the hot tub. The following day we headed off to continue our journey north to our destination of Hunter's Quay holiday village near Dunoon on the Cowal peninsula, which I see I mentioned here. I see that I laughingly make reference to there being no point building a bridge across from the mainland (the intervening channel being basically the confluence of Loch Long and the Firth of Clyde) as it wouldn't get much use. That may be true, but more pertinently it's a couple of miles across and would therefore be a fairly major feat of engineering, not to mention one spanning a major shipping lane. Whatever, there isn't one, and so once you've got as far as Gourock (which you do by basically heading north into Glasgow and then turning left) you are obliged to queue for a ferry. Anecdotally, and I'm not saying this justifies the cost of a bridge, the ferry terminals were pretty busy in both directions when we crossed, and by no means everyone got on the first one that showed up.
Anyway, the holiday village was perfectly nice, featuring the usual chalet-slash-static-caravan accommodation and the usual array of food and drink facilities plus some entertainment for the kids. I'm always unavoidably reminded of Hi-De-Hi in places like this but it was actually perfectly nice. More importantly a) Hazel had managed to wangle a super-cheap deal for a short break and b) a shortish drive north (no ferries required this time) takes you to the north end of Loch Lomond and the vicinity of the Arrochar Alps, some of Scotland's most southerly and therefore most easily accessible Munros. Technically the most southerly Munro is Ben Lomond, but from where we started it's rather awkwardly situated on the east side of the loch, and in any case I'd been up it before, back in about 1999.
So, emboldened by everyone's conquering of a rather wet and soggy Pen y Fan for my birthday in February I devised a walk (basically this one) that would bag two Munros and offer the possibility of a crack at The Cobbler, just short of Munro height but an interesting scrambly challenge. I had mentally earmarked that last bit as very unlikely to come off, but it's good for Plan A to be ambitious as long as there's a Plan B you can fall back on.
There's a car park by the shores of Loch Long just outside the village of Succoth, which I expect you can make up your own jokes about - you know, Elizabeth I visiting and declaring "the mountain view enchanteth most delightfully, but the neighbouring village sucketh most egregiously", that sort of thing - anyway, point is it offers a good starting point for the walk. If you've been paying attention, though, you'll have clocked that Loch Long is a sea loch, and that therefore you are going to be obliged to gain all 3000+ of those Munro feet without a head start. Moreover, if you follow the anticlockwise route I'd devised, the usual route of ascent up Beinn Narnain, the first Munro, is a relentless direct upward slog along the remains of an old cable railway, of which only a few lumps of concrete footing remain. Once you get out of the woods the relentlessness eases off a bit and it's quite pleasant, though challenging. Eventually you arrive at a pretty intimidating wall of rock which you have to find a scrambly way up to get onto the summit plateau and bag the trig point. Beinn Narnain is 926 metres or 3038 feet and (depending which list you use) is around 257th of the 280-odd Munros on the current list.
It's not the Black Cuillin, but it is far from easy - considerably more challenging than a good few of my previous Munros, and I was and am inordinately proud of the kids for giving every impression of enjoying the whole thing and seeming engaged by the idea of coming back and doing some more in future. I should also add a word for Hazel who had sustained a badly bruised ankle in a comedy incident with a shot putt at school sports day a couple of weeks earlier but clearly didn't want to let the side down and struggled up anyway. That constraint did mean that we had to abandon the idea of bagging the day's intended second Munro, Beinn Ime, which was disappointing but which I was half-expecting before we'd even set out.
The walk out down the valley which separates Beinn Narnain from The Cobbler is a delight, as it's a pretty good path alongside a pretty river and affords excellent views of the Cobbler's knobbly profile in particular. A bit of steep zig-zagging back through the woods and you're back at the car park. After a long and strenuous walk like that a pint is very much in order and I heartily commend to you the Village Inn in Arrochar which has excellent ale from the Fyne Ales brewery. Two things to say about Fyne Ales: firstly haha, you see what they did there, and secondly I'd had them before in a pub in Edinburgh in 2011.
Anyway, the important thing here is that this was the kids' first Munro, and the first time I'd had an opportunity to add one to my list since back before we had kids. We actually did three Scottish trips with our friends Jenny and Jim and on those trips bagged four, four and zero Munros respectively, so this was actually the first one I'd been up since 2010. My personal count now stands at fifteen.
Route map and altitude profile are below: total distance is about twelve kilometres or seven-and-a-half miles.
No comments:
Post a Comment