Expedition 250, 26th March 2011
Ardnish

 

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



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