On Saturday – the last decent weather day before the rain started – we headed out to Loch Achray. Susan had stumbled on a little website with a nice 1.5 – 2hr walk around the loch and the surrounding woodland. It sounded ideal.

The walk starts out at the friendly Byre Inn (FK17 8HZ), heads up a farm road and then supposedly follows an old, sometimes narrow path through the woods to an observation point before returning along the edge of the loch. Unfortunately the site must be some years out of date because we couldn’t find any trace of the path we were meant to follow. It’s shown on current OS maps and is even present on the maps in my mobile phone, but it just ain’t there any more.

Somewhat disheartened by this early set back, we went back to the Byre Inn for an early lunch and a chance to work out our own route. I don’t know if the Inn is truly dog-friendly, but it does have outdoor seating which is good enough on a dry day. I’m happy to say that both our two hooligans were quite well behaved, though one or two cyclists did earn a stern woofing from Biggles. I didn’t really mind that – I’m not particularly fond of cyclists and if I were a little teenage Beagle boy I reckon I’d woof at ’em as well.

Anyway, by the time we’d eaten our nosh and Beanie and Biggles had dispatched their rawhide chews, we had a new route to follow. This is what we came up with, using cycle paths which are for the most part in pretty good shape:

So suitably refreshed we set off back down the farm track and rather than going left to do the woodland section, we carried straight on along the loch.

Here’s a panorama taken at the edge of the loch. You can see Ben A’an around the mid-point of the picture – that’ll be our next walk when the weather turns good again.

Click to view in a larger size

All too soon we left the loch behind us and headed into woodland, but there were still some fine views to be had:

A little more than half way through we came fairly close to the observation point advertised on the original walk. A narrow path would supposedly lead us off the cycle path and straight to it. Looking carefully around we did see what may have been the remains of an old path – it was badly overgrown, but it looked like we could follow it. And so we did.

It was not at all easy going – a machete would have come in very handy at times. After a few minutes the “path” kind of disappeared but we spotted white tape encouragingly tied to some of the trees. We pressed on, using my GPS mobile phone to ensure that we were still heading for the observation point. As we gained height the ground looked a little marshy, so I tried to stick to the drier areas. Unfortunately what looked like dry ground was actually just a thin covering of dried out dead foliage. My foot went straight through it and I ended up knee deep in brown bog water. It was surprisingly challenging to extract myself from this predicament and of course Biggles & Beanie – who’d both been quite happy to pull on their harnesses up to this point – now decided not to pull at all.

We went on a little further, clambering over trees and splashing through more brown foot spas before we called it quits and turned back. It had been a struggle to get to this point but the return journey was twice as hard. There was no path to follow, no footsteps to retrace and the ground was treacherous. After what seemed like an age we caught site of another white tape marker and knew we were close to the main path. One big obstacle stood in our way – a huge fallen tree. I wanted to go over it, while Susan and our two intrepid explorers favored a gap underneath it. The thing is, while Beagles can crawl under almost anything by spreading their legs and crawling on their bellies (I call this the “Spider-Beagle” technique), humans.. can’t. Susan got most of the way under the tree only to be stopped by the very thing that enables our species to walk erect while other primates just plod along on all fours: her arse. It took nearly two minutes of wriggling before she was free. As for me, well I did make it over the tree but there were a few close calls as I nearly impaled my own rear end on broken branches. It was only my determination not to have to explain how half a tree got stuck up my rectum to some spotty A&E doctor that gave me the strength to prevail.

Eventually we made it back to the main path and trudged back to the Byre Inn. The walk should have taken less than 2 hours, but our little excursion easily added another hour onto that.

Heading back.. at last!

Our feet were still soaking wet and we were both sweaty and smelling of bog water, but there was no way were going home until we’d had a sit down and another helping of quality pub grub.

The Byre Inn from the Beagle perspective

Next time if the weather is kind we’ll go up nearby Ben A’an, and I’ll just accept that somehow, somewhere along the walk my feet will end up drenched in bog water. It’s happened every time so far, and it’ll happen again.