The long-awaited 250th, and
a real tough one. I had hopes of a great adventure to mark
the occasion but my elaborate plans came to nought and so
we just went a bit further than usual and stayed out a bit
longer. We had nine explorers: Billy, Calum, Fern, Lucy, Maighsi,
Roanna, Robbie, Roslyn and Rowan with ten adults: David, Jan,
John Dove, Mark, Nicci, Pamela, Sam, Sharon, Sheila and Simon,
plus Ellie the expedition dog.
It took a bit of time to get to the start, but there was plenty
of parking space and we set off rather cautiously. It was
some time since I walked this path and, as it turned out,
probably too long. We did fairly well getting down to the
railway bridge and the explorers set off at a cracking pace
across the hill, I had to call them to a halt to let the old
adults catch up.
We followed the path along the shore and stopped for a while
to examine the old village of Polnish way below us. Around
this point I made a major navigational error, which meant
that we continued at a low level, finding a very fine recessed
platform in the birch woods, but leaving us way below where
we should be. I decided to do a recce to see if there was
a way back up the hill to the path; when I looked round almost
everyone had followed me so I carried on. When we were halfway
up we found there were still some people left at the bottom
so we waited on the hill for them to catch up. At this point
the fine physical condition of the young explorers began to
tell. Several of the adults, me included were finding the
climb a tad tedious but at least four explorers went up the
last stretch running. When we finally got to the top for a
rest, the Tunnock’s wafers proved even more popular
than usual.
Everyone had got quite hot on the climb but as soon as we
settled, the wind got up and a light rain began to fall. Rather
than let everyone get chilled I got them all back on the hill
and we climbed a little bit further and found the ‘proper’
path. However, it was too late to continue down to the village
so we set off back across the hill on the path. It proved
to be easier going than the ground we covered before and we
soon reached the point where we should have turned originally.
None of us will make that mistake again.
As we crossed the hill we got a fine view of the new road
to Arisaig and we saw a train going over the Loch nan Uamh
viaduct. Around this point the sun came out and it got quite
warm for the last climb back up to the road. I thought the
effort would have left our explorers exhausted but two of
them expressed a desire to go swimming instead of returning
to the Blue Parrot.
We were a fairly quiet group at lunch but some good drawings
were turned out, I picked out Robert’s view of the explorers
climbing the steep slope past a fallen tree, we a piece of
vegetation rolling down the slope towards Billy. Two ticks
are also shown and there was much talk of ticks but I didn’t
see any myself although we did see a fine toad which didn’t
make it onto any of the drawings.
John
Dye
|
|