Glen Dye

We were but 3 for the first Friday afternoon walk of June - Nigel, John and I. We delayed our start a little to let the forecast morning rain pass, but met up at Clatterin' Brig at 12:30, leaving one car there before driving back over the Cairn to start our walk at Bridge of Dye.

It was a fine afternoon and the initial part of the walk up to Char Bothy - which we'd done 2 years ago - was fine and easy. We stopped there for a few photos:

From there, we took a sharp left turn over the bridge and continued on the good quality track for a bit, stopping occasionally to take in the views:

All good things come to an end and soon we reached the fork where we had to turn left and head up and over the hills, along a distinct trail, albeit of much poorer quality than we had got used to up to this point:

We came across a pool of water, swarming with tadpoles:

John was our navigator and frequently referred to the OS maps he was carrying, looking out for the junctions we had to find to get to Clatterin' Brig. When we got to the high point of our trail, John spotted a trig point on the map off to our right, so he and I decided to climb a little further and try and find it, whilst Nigel decided to have a rest and a coffee. The extra climb proved fruitless - we never found the trig point - but we did get fine views out to the North Sea:

On the descent, we spotted two beautifully constructed stone circles that initially looked like wells:

Still don't know what they were.

Further down the hill, more junctions and forks on the trail. The map said there was a body of water adjacent to some woods, but we couldn't find it at first:

We took the left fork and, lo and behold, there was the water we were looking for:

Now we were definitely on the home stretch and the trail had improved again, back to the quality we had started with. The burn snaked left and right of the trail and there were several bridges we crossed, but what we hadn't counted on was the number of fords we had to traverse as well - four of them, I think, each one a little swollen from the recent rains, making crossing tricky at times:

No major mishaps here fortunately, and soon we had Clatterin' Brig in sight. Just time for a couple of celebratory finish photos:

Arriving at the car park, we changed our socks and shoes then climbed up the stairs to the cafe, posing for another team photo first of all:

The bad news was that the cafe was closed! John had checked the web site beforehand and thought it was open until 7 pm, but that turned out to be Saturdays only. It closes at 4 pm other days. Undaunted, we drove to Fettercairn and had cups of tea in the Arch.

A fine afternoon's entertainment, with big kudos to our navigator, who redeemed his reputation after the slightly dodgy climb up Mortlich a few weeks ago. The Strava stats show: