Banchory Veterans' Hill-walkers

What is it about Upper Deeside? Every time we jump on the bus to Ballater, Balmoral or Braemar for one of our walks we seem to be blessed with glorious weather - and yesterday was no different. After a few days of freezing weather, the temperature suddenly took an upward surge and the skies remained blue for our Seven Bridges walk. Polhollick Bridge had just reopened last month, 3 years after the devastating floods that struck the area, thus opening up this popular walking route again and we decided that now was the time to tick this one off our list. Six of us caught the 201 bus leaving Banchory just before 1 pm - Ian, Colin, Nigel, Steve, Jeb and I - and nobody had to shell out any cash this time. Promises of drams to celebrate Nigel's big birthday the day before may have encouraged a couple to come out of hibernation - Jeb, in particular, had, up until then, been on a Dry January, and Nigel himself was just getting back in to the swing of things after a couple of weeks of se...

Great turnout for the first walk of 2019 - 8 of us showed up at Brimmond Hill car park at 1 pm for what was scheduled to be a 9 kms hike. The area is well known to Gordon and Stewart, who regularly take the dogs up Brimmond Hill, but they were not familiar with the first half of this particular walk ( https://my.viewranger.com/route/details/MjA2Mzk5Nw==?ref=57.181850989705694|-2.233402000000069|18 ). The instructions seemed clear enough - there were 30 separate waypoints taking up 17 pages of printing on A4 paper, but, after a while, all the key directions in the photos began to look the same. Stewart and Gordon knew roughly where to head and Craibstone golf course was always in view so we were never going to get lost, but finding the exact turning points proved too tricky for me. It transpired in the end that we omitted the loop that should have taken us to the Tyrebagger car park (about waypoint 17) and instead Gordon led us straight back up Elrick Hill, where we stopped at the t...