11/18/2023 0 Comments Waterfall glen bike path![]() ![]() The tiny refuge I hoped to stay in, known as Davy’s Bourach, was built a few years later – in memory of the walkers – as an emergency shelter just before the long descent towards Glen Clova. Attempting the long crossing through an atrocious storm, the men were unable to reach the relative safety of Glen Clova on the other side, and one by one succumbed to Arctic-like conditions – at the time, Britain’s worst mountaineering disaster. Indeed, it was extreme weather on New Year’s Day in 1959 that condemned the five members of a Glasgow hill-walking club. I was glad to be journeying in late summer, remembering the ominous description of the route in winter I had read in the Scottish Hill Tracks guide: “At that time of the year the path over the plateau is likely to be covered by snow and completely invisible for several months.” Trying to find landmarks for a compass bearing was hopeless, but hearing and touch became heightened to compensate. Once on the high ground of the Mounth plateau, a recalibrating of senses was needed as I walked into thick cloud. It felt a far cry from my dehydrated, high-energy trail food. For additional sustenance, the drovers would bleed their animals, mixing this with oatmeal to make black pudding. Walter Scott described the typical drover’s diet as just “a few handfuls of oatmeal and two or three onions, renewed from time to time, and a ram’s horn filled with whisky”. Provisions were limited to what could be carried. The men would sleep in the open air with their cattle, fully exposed to the mountain weather and wrapped only in blankets, or (more commonly) just the plaids they wore during the day. “Knowledge of the country had to be extensive and intimate, while endurance and ability to face great hardships were essential,” wrote the historian ARB Haldane in his 1952 book, The Drove Roads of Scotland. To bring cattle through this terrain and over the mountainous expanse required skill and fortitude. Colours had also changed: the yellow-green of moor grass had ceded to the purple-browns of old heather and the deep black of peat hags. ![]() The surrounding slopes were now closer, and the vistas of the early part of my walk were replaced by narrow sightlines: sharp, overlapping angles and the falling diagonals of converging ridges. Moving on to the upper reaches of Glen Callater felt significant, as if I were crossing a marker point as the landscape became rougher, more elemental. ![]()
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