A Pitlochry Bothy Weekend

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 A remote loch in the Scottish Highlands.

In Mid February 2025 my hillwalking friend John, who I've known since the 1980's, kindly invited me on a weekend trip up to Pitlochry. He was hill bagging in the area but fancied an overnight stop in a bothy as well. Above is the track in.

I'll not name it as it's not an MBA one and if it has a name I've forgotten it. Just a basic wooden hut but the last time I was in here with friends it was in a blizzard with 70 mile an hour winds and snow falling inside it due to numerous gaps in the timbers. A surreal occasion that sticks in the mind, like being inside a snow globe yet sitting beside a coal fire, getting an occasional light dusting of thick flakes falling around you. It's still a drafty bothy if the wind blows but we were just thankful it was open and available as that last outing was 20 years ago. Only one room but a good fire.

The usual good night was had beside the fire with food and drink. Later on in this trip I sampled a taste of a 4 star hotel lifestyle but I did not envy the guests there at all. This for me is perfect.... and free.

We watched the world's first entertainment centre as various shapes and images danced through the flames. You could have the world's finest entertainment centre at your fingertips.... and still be bored. Yet I'm never bored watching a fire. A primeval satisfaction inside body and mind that never loses it's power to fascinate and magnetize the soul to it's crackling call to arms. You just can't get that effect in a hotel room. A small crested bird in the flames at the top looking down....and a younger bird directly below it looking up. An image of a small dog in the base of the flames. One moment out of hundreds of images created at random then forgotten. The first television for humans.

We also had a ghost dog with us. Front half dog... back half constructed of rubbish found in the bothy.

Wooded islands near the bothy.

The walk out again in the morning. It was very mild for midwinter, damp and grey but it didn't rain. 

Central Highland Scenery near the bothy.

On the way back to Pitlochry, a small but prosperous Highland town, it did start raining gently. John was intent on doing a hill not far from the Corbett Ben Vrackie, 841 metres and a fine viewpoint but one of the real joys for me, at my age, is that I no longer have to go up them. I climbed Ben Vrackie decades ago and  enjoyed it but did not fancy doing it again in this type of weather. 

Luckily John's route to the hill passed through Pitlochry so I got dropped off for a few hours exploration of this fine Victorian spa town. Unlike most Highland towns it has retained a prosperous and genteel air about it and I was surprised how busy it was for mid February. It was jam packed with tourists and traffic. Pavements and main road both heavily congested. The usual Scottish tourist season 20 years ago used to be around six months from May to October but by the number of visitors here it's all year round now.

Unlike Bowling, where I was miffed by the number of tourists at that location, I didn't mind it here at all as I wasn't looking to get parked anywhere, luckily enough, and it's also decades since my last proper visit. It's quite a posh place but being fixated years ago on hill lists we only ever stopped here briefly for takeaway chips.

So it felt good to wander around and see the place properly in 2025.

The Rob Roy Way sign. A multi day trek from Drymen to here apparently... or you can do it in reverse.

And that was just the start of my small adventure here.... to be continued.

A Delightful Walk. A Humble Stream. A Perfect Day. Book Choice.

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A few days after the unexpectedly busy Bowling walk on a Saturday I was back out again, this time in midweek. And this time I picked an unfashionable area I've always enjoyed in the past. As I will probably want to do it again I will not name it as I don't want to jinx it... or make it busy.

This walk is handy as I can get a bus right up to it. Funnily enough I've always found that the quietest walks occur most often on the edge of cities and towns and this is certainly the case here. Around 8 years ago Alex and I went to Knoydart, supposedly a remote empty Scottish Highland wilderness yet it was mobbed, around 200 people in the small village: the main and only pub on that peninsula full every night with hill walkers, yacht folk, tourists from London, Munro baggers, tour boats, kayakers, cyclists, and internet influencers. Probably because for decades the pub and the area around it has featured in numerous newspaper colour supplements as 'the remotest pub and village in Scotland/ and the UK. . The place to be.... ( May 2017 it was, just looked it up on here.)

Fortunately this area has not appeared  in newspaper supplements/ anywhere else important, to the best of my knowledge, so I'm happy to keep it that way. A humble stream above. This housing estate and the woods above it also transported me right back to childhood as in both places five minutes walk from your front door takes you into woods, streams, meadows and open heath lands. Wild, empty, delightful. If you know where it is don't say as I'll just delete your comment :o)

It was a beautiful stream so I followed it uphill until it turned into a shallow pond with tadpoles and frog spawn in the water. I was the only person here so I was able to easily think back to all those past times, alone or with young companions in the 1960s in a similar environment around Nitshill. In those days children could wander about in the woods without parental supervision and a stream like this one was a powerful magnet.

you could play with the tadpoles, even take them home in a jam jar ( not advisable now. dig your own small pond in your garden or even a sunken plastic container level with the ground making sure any frogs/ newts/ tadpoles can get back out again easily and they will come of their own accord if no fish are put in it.) or you could cross the stream on a fallen tree, catch fish, push each other in etc.... hours of fun and entertainment.

Further up it had several deeper pools and waterfalls with a delicate path running beside it all the way. Loads of other walkers or cyclists would have ruined the magic somewhat ( and trashed the path) but so far my luck held. No one but me here.

I'm not completely anti social and I enjoy a good chat if it happens so when I met a local dog walker we had a few minutes pleasant conversation about this and that. I was already in a good mood seeing the tadpoles and it continued for the rest of this walk.

Numerous paths crisscross the landscape above the estate so although I've walked here many times over the years there's always scope to find new routes. During the entire walk  in this vicinity I bumped into four people. Two male elderly dog walkers, a female jogger, and a local young guy. My kind of numbers for a walk... instead of hundreds. And not a single bike. Bliss.

Part of the reason for that might be the number of toppled trees up here blocking many of the paths and not cleared away yet. ( Although I used to cycle myself the sheer number of cyclists now, especially on local canal paths and cycle tracks does annoy me somewhat. As a walker you have to be hyper aware of them at all times now to avoid a painful accident... yet when I was a cyclist, despite being careful and going slow around any potential hazards, all my crashes occurred on shared paths: dogs on extended leads suddenly running straight out in front of me, children doing likewise, farm dogs attacking, youths in notorious housing schemes throwing things at you, other much faster cyclists cutting me up etc...(luckily it was only me swerving and getting hurt, not them, so no legal issues).....which is why I always preferred the minor road network or wild empty tracks. Much safer.  

As a child I'd have loved this mind you. A test of balance route across the stream.

 Nature's windfall playground... with the added risk as to how far you could walk up it before they crashed to the ground. Pick one you can jump off easily if they do fall.

Even as a humble old walker it was a mini adventure obstacle course to get round the number of trees toppled across the paths in the wake of Storm Eowyn.

After the woods and meadows higher up I descended into the housing estate itself as I remembered a central green ribbon running through it that was also pleasant to walk. It starts on the left here once across the road.

 A nice additional route down to the roundabout.

Most of the time you would hardly know you were walking through a housing estate at all.

The other half of the walk took place on minor roads and tracks with few cars. My kind of cycling... or walking route.

 And this too was very pleasant. A perfect day out in fact. 10 out of ten for pure enjoyment. Passed nine people in total, chatted to five. Not a single bike encountered. A modern miracle. A bus back from a second much larger housing estate completed the walk.

While we are on the subject of enjoyment I can recommend two book sets.  The GONE series by Michael Grant and The ENEMY series by Charlie Higson.  In both everyone over 15 years old has disappeared or been changed dramatically leaving the children to fend for themselves. Like Lord of the Flies on steroids... or LSD. If you liked Dune, Lord of the Rings. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Andre Norton's Witch World or Game of Thrones you should like these modern classics. Fast paced, vivid characters, no dips in quality at all from beginning to end. Best books I've read for years. Adventure/ Fantasy/ sci fi/horror genre. Around six books in each series which is remarkable. A journey of a lifetime as a reader as I'll probably never encounter anything as good as this again sustained over 3000 pages.

If you don't fancy that genre much then I've just finished James Patterson's Jailhouse Lawyer which is another good book I'd recommend. Two gripping enjoyable legal plots in one book.

Bowling. Not far enough from the madding crowd.

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A view of Bowling Harbour. For me personally I made the mistake of going to Bowling on a sunny Saturday in March 2025. I arrived just after 10:00am and it was already busy down here. Normally, on previous visits, by bike or car or on foot, solo or with a friend you do get folk visiting here but not in great numbers, maybe 30 or so at most. On this occasion it felt like hundreds of people. In a town or city centre, not a problem for me, as it's expected, but here, for me personally, it just felt wrong. It is a beauty spot with good walks/cycles in both directions but on all other visits it did not feel crowded... and now it did. Even as a child with my parents visiting Clyde coastal beaches like Ayr, Troon, or Largs I never liked sitting on  crowded sands with loads of other families a mere ten feet away in all directions. An inevitable occurrence when most families then took two weeks off work for the Glasgow/ Paisley/ Clydebank fair fortnight in July/ August. Even though each city/ town had a different two weeks, crowded resorts were still the norm in the 1960s when I was growing up. Very good for shops and businesses but not for me. This reminded me of that.

I was lucky enough to get a parking place in one of the last spaces in the overflow car park but I was already starting to wonder if coming here was a good idea. It is beautiful here but I prefer it quieter. I only spent a couple of hours walking here but it was enough. In that time well over 100 cyclists had passed me and at least 100 pedestrians and try as I might I just couldn't escape them. 

Normally when I come here it's very easy to escape people but not on this occasion. No matter if I took the back trails away from the main canal tow path or went down to the beach at the river bank, people kept appearing and popping up. ( I deliberately avoided taking photos with folk in them so these photos only appear to look deserted. It was not.)

There's been a lot of over tourism reports recently of holiday hotspots but as I don't frequent most holiday hotspots I'm largely shielded from it on walks outdoors. I have noticed a big rise in people going outdoors more since covid but I naively thought it would be OK here when it was still March but apparently tourism in Scotland is a year round event now.

There's plenty to see and photograph here and I'm as guilty as anyone for posting about where I go but for the first time I was really questioning  if it was a wise move.... for my own future benefit. On previous posts here I was usually marvelling at how easy it was to escape into the woods and meadows on foot or bike, escape any crowds and be surrounded by wild nature. That such a place still existed so close to major urban areas of population. Not any more I'm not.

A moorhen. Maybe it still is that way midweek or on poor weather days but I mainly felt sorry for the wildlife on this occasion, getting ready for crucial spring breeding after being hit with bird flu the last few years.

A male mallard duck.

Pochard ducks.

Someone had made an effort to tidy up all the rubbish in one small area that some humans always leave behind them ... but then left it there, presumably having no bags with them to put it in. Note the number of black dog s**t bags. Every walk now is littered with them. People go to the bother of picking up dog poop into a bag then instead of taking it to a bin they leave it dangling from a hedge, fence, bush, tree, often at children's head height, all along every path. Why? One of the modern mysteries of life. 

The River Clyde down at the beach with the Erskine Bridge in view.

Kilpatrick Hills above Bowling.

Trying to escape the crowds worked out well as I wandered down to the river in time to see this large ship travelling up the Clyde to the inland docks, either at Clydebank or Glasgow. Atlantic Wind it was called.

Accompanied by the usual two tugs. Anglegarth , above.... guiding/steering from behind.

And the CMS Wrestler out in front.

The deep water channel markers for ships entering the River Clyde.

I was taking plenty of good photos and seeing interesting things but just not enjoying it as much as I should have, mainly due to too many other people around me. Once I reached the Saltings area, seen above, I turned back, vowing to avoid going out at weekends in future if I could avoid it. Luckily I'm retired so every day is a potential holiday. It is getting harder to find quiet places though in the TicTok/ instagram era.

Some nice reflection shots. I couldn't help remembering the last time I took similar shots though in a previous year (autumn) when I was so inspired on that quiet walk by the serene beauty of it all that I became fairly poetic and borrowed the famous image of Ophelia by the artist Millais as an imaginary companion, floating down the canal beside me. No chance of that happening today. What a difference in experience between two posts of the same place.

https://blueskyscotland.blogspot.com/2021/11/lusset-glen-old-kilpatrick-to-bowling.html

Despite being a glorious day I turned back and headed for the car.

Once back at the car, and still only early afternoon, around 1:30pm I headed for Dumbarton Castle then Dumbarton itself but the roads were so busy with traffic by this point I doubted I get parked anywhere... and so it proved. I was also seriously worried about denting my car and almost did as it was mayhem out there.  To be honest I was very glad to get home. No stress, no potholes to avoid... no big bills to pay from a simple day out.

My next post will be of a walk I did enjoy. A quiet rural gem... which brings a dilemma with it. How do you post a secret.... and keep it safe....?