Xmas Eve - Dave's 69th

For the second year in a row, group indoor activities like walking football weren't possible but some of us still managed to get a little bit of exercise prior to again enjoying Dave's hospitality chez Chapel House's carport. Last year, 4 of us walked from Banchory out to Dave's but this year the walk was just half last year's length - a fairly gentle stroll round the Capercaillie circular trail on Ballogie Estate. Jeb and I caught the bus and Dave (+ Ruby of course) and Ken met us at Potarch. The first bit of the walk is on good forestry track - occasionally a little icy in the middle, but there was always a safe track to take. When we took the turn uphill towards the trig point, things changed a bit as we were now in the middle of the forest and it was a bit like the Land of Fallen trees, several of which we had to detour round, over or under:

On reaching the cairn at the top, Dave produced a bottle of fine malt:

Here's our route and the stats:

The plan had been to get back to Dave's by 1:30 pm and we were almost exactly on budget, but we still weren't first to arrive at Dave's festive carport - Andy had caught the bus after ours and was sitting there awaiting our arrival. We had just started to get stuck in to the mini-kegs of Burnside beers when John and Ian arrived on their bikes. They'd had a bit of an ordeal getting through all the fallen trees in Slewdrum Forest, as evidenced by the photos Ian sent me:

There was now a large enough audience for Jeb to stand up and recite some poetry to us:

Jeb's step-daughter Becky works in the NHS and she has been jointly responsible for producing the poetry booklet "Smile with your eyes" which is being sold to raise funds for VaccinAID - a very worthy cause - check out https://www.vaccinaid.org/smile-with-your-eyes if you would like to help out - we all did. Poetry readings eh? Whatever next? Nigel drove in just after this, having had family driving duties to perform - this gave us the opportunity for a team photo, with Jayne doing the honours:

Later, Dave brought out a selection of malts, so it was time for us all to toast Dave on entering his 70th year. This time, I set the camera up at the back of the carport to take the smoke out of the picture:

With dusk not far away, John and Ian decided they should set off on their return journey - this time via the safer tarmac roads via Craiglash. Nigel offered me, Jeb and Andy a lift back to Banchory which we gratefully accepted. On the way, I phoned Colin, who had been unable to make it along to Dave's as he had too much to do at home. "Fancy a beer or two?" - "certainly" was the reply, so we met up with him at the Douglas for a couple of pints of Trade Winds before eventually all heading homewards. What a lovely day - many thanks again to Dave for his hospitality. Next year, he'll be 70 - that should signal a fine celebration.

Forest of Birse

Five of us drove up the seemingly never-ending single track road beyond Finzean for a short walk on yet another beautiful crisp, clear Friday afternoon. We only had a couple of hours of daylight to play with so the walk was always going to be on the short side, but it became even shorter when we discovered a bunch (don't think that's the correct collective noun) of shooters a bit too close to the originally planned route. Our meeting point was the Auld Kirk:

The door is unlocked so I peeped in to check on which hymns we would be singing:

Quick team photo at the start:

The stats and route for our gentle hike were:

Hill of Fare

A brief report and a few quick photos from our walk on a beautiful winter's Friday afternoon. We couldn't get parked at the usual layby on the main Raemoir road as there were new NO PARKING signs there, leading to a couple of cars parking on the verge opposite, but we drove on a bit and parked at the end of the trail that leads down from Hill of Brathens and crossed the road to walk up the track that passes the ruin of Clounie Crighton Castle. The first team photo came as we crossed a field in front of unoccupied farm dwellings:

Through a gate, the trail took us a bit more eastward than we expected and we came across this tall 2-seater "director's" style chair - no idea why it was there, looking up the hill at an open field:

Soon we met up with the main trail that leads up from the aforementioned layby and that we had initially intended to walk on. Finally, we knew exactly where we were and we headed up the hill towards the cairn summit. The sun was going down rapidly and I was trying to calculate how much daylight we had left. Before we got to the top, I thought we should consider heading back down from this point:

I was, however, eventually persuaded to carry on to the cairn:

From there we retraced our steps, heading back to the car. On the way, we passed feeding time at the farm:

Here's our route: