Potarch to Banchory

From http://bvhill-walkers.blogspot.com/

It was a lovely morning on Saturday and, having cancelled my golf, Jo and I decided to take the bus down to Potarch, have a spot of lunch - and a beer of course - then walk back to Banchory along the new Deeside Way paths.

It's very civilised and well laid out - a bit of climbing up to the car park at Shooting Greens once you're past Dave's house, but, from there, the Deeside Way seems to peter out a bit. There's plenty of forestry trails back to Banchory of course, but we didn't see anything marked out as the Deeside Way. There's also a bit more of an upwards stretch from Shooting Greens - a little surprisingly up to 900 feet in all.

We wandered around a bit on the mostly downhill section, following our noses from Shooting Greens back to Banchory, but we were still a little surprised that it took us well over 3 hours - the distance was almost 14 kms - and we were walking at a reasonable rate considering it wasn't entirely flat. Here's the stats and the route:

A nice walk nonetheless, but one of the reasons for doing this was to figure out the route and whether it was feasible to cycle from Banchory to Potarch - as we have discussed a couple of times. Certainly the way we came back, it was a fairly steep downward section and would be a pretty challenging cycle uphill - we saw a few who tried but were pushing their bikes up. I remember many years ago cycling from Banchory up to Shooting Greens with Ken Page and, although we made it, it was pretty tough - and we were 20 years younger!