Potarch to Banchory

Just four of us finally managed to make it along today for the second practice/training walk of 2017 - Messrs Sharp, McWhinnie and Stewart were joined by Nigel Meany, making his debut in the Hill-walking section.

Today's routemaster was John, who'd been advised on the route by our normal team leader Ken. We set off a bit earlier than initially planned to try to avoid the wet weather forecast to come in from the west.We took the bus down to Potarch - with Nigel the only one to have to pay cash - and started to walk back along the Deeside Way, past Dave's house and up the hill towards Slewdrum Forest and up from there towards Shooting Greens. That's when John felt the time was right to consult the map to find the route that Ken had advised us to take:

 

Nigel sat down and waited patiently:

I set up the camera for a team photo but Ian had wandered off to check the route:

The map said we should keep the tree line to our left and eventually everything would open out and we would see Scolty appearing on our right. We all had doubts for a while, but eventually, sure enough, there was Scolty tower. We decided to climb to the top, approaching from the south. John and I climbed the tower, but Ian and Nigel declined, so I took this photo of the two of them from above

John took this photo of me at the top of the tower:

Then the team photo, complete with the full walk stats:

The route map shows:

The weather wasn't too bad - relatively light showers - not as bad as we feared. We had coffee and scones in The Chatterbox and headed home.