Where was Bertie? Fri: Torvean Car Park, Inverness (£5 donation); Sat & Sun: Layby near Dalwhinnie; Mon: Ardgualich Farm Campsite (Loch Tummel) (£21)
Weather: A mixture of overcast, sunshine and showers each day, with varying quantities of each (but mainly overcast or raining). Daytime highs of between 9 and 12 degrees.
A lazy start was had on Friday, before we tootled down to Inverness mid-morning. There we parked Bertie at Morrison’s where they have a Pay & Display car park, but with refunds given based on how much you spend in store.
As we were slightly abusing their car park (i.e. we did also go into the city), we thought we would eat in their café, as well as doing a bit of shopping, thus legitimising our visit. Knowing our ability to loiter in supermarket cafes (our record was 5 hours in Morrison’s in Fort William during one particularly rainy visit), we erred on the side of caution and bought a 3-hour ticket, even though we knew we would only spend enough to get a refund for 2 hours. Except, it turns out that they don’t give partial refunds. If you buy a 3-hour ticket you have to spend £50 or you get nothing back. We could see various flaws in this policy, and mostly annoyingly, it had become clear that we were going to be done within 2 hours of arrival*, so if we’d just bought the 2-hour ticket, we would get a refund, but because we erred on the side of caution, we got nothing. The ending to this story was surprising. After our meal, I took my rant to the customer service desk who, rather than meeting my request of refunding 2 hours, surprised me by giving me the whole £4 back.
The rest of our day involved praise rather than censure. In response to the realisation that the number of motorhomes touring the Highlands far exceeds the number of campsite spaces available, Highland Council has started a process to allow overnight parking in some of its car parks. The newly created Torvean Car Park is one of the first to have dropped the ‘No parking of vehicles manufactured or adapted for the purpose of sleeping’ clause, allowing us legitimately to stay there. It was a happy coincidence that the car park also happens to be metres away from the location of Torvean parkrun, meaning for the second week in a row that we could roll out of bed and run.
I don’t know why boy racers don’t frequent that car park (maybe they haven’t noticed its existence yet?), but we had the 200 spaces entirely to ourselves on Friday night. On Saturday morning it became besieged, as this wasn’t just any parkrun morning; this was the parkrun the day before the Loch Ness Marathon, giving an influx of parkrun tourists. It was an early influx too, as it seems that quite a number of the English contingent weren’t aware that parkruns start at 0930 in Scotland (it’s 0900 in England).
The course (which we’d vaguely recce’d on Friday afternoon, until it rained just as we were at the far end of the park, causing us to scurry back to Bertie) isn’t going to go down as one of my favourites, but it does have the pleasing feature that you can see almost the whole course at all times. With it being a 2.5 lapper, that meant that by the second lap there was a trail of people spread out across every bit of path in the park.
As the car park emptied afterwards, we showered and I repeatedly stuck my head into the cavity between Bertie’s two floors (having taken a screwdriver to a divider the previous evening so as to give access). We’ve had a couple or three incidents of water where water shouldn’t be under the floor (the first being in Spain in early 2020, but Bertie didn’t have much use for the next 12 months for any repetitions), and I’ve been trying to work out where it’s coming from. I thought last week that I’d finally sussed it, and that we had a crack in the foremost of the two drains in the shower. Alas, if it is that, then the exact conditions required to cause the leak weren’t present on Saturday.
It was just after lunch by the time we arrived in Newtonmore for the TGO Challenge Scottish Reunion (a happy coincidence that it was scheduled when we were in the area) and our first priority was to return the Munro and Corbett guides that I’d borrowed from Sue (at Newtonmore Hostel) on our way north. A cup of tea with Sue & Neil, then a walk up the road for a cup of tea with Ali & Adrian, then a walk back to Bertie, and it was time to head down the road to the Balavil Hotel.
In spite of the unanswered question as to why you would serve haggis, neeps and tatties in a giant Yorkshire Pudding, a good meal was had, together with much chatting and the winning of a book in the raffle.
With 11pm approaching, it was time for us to absent ourselves and decide where we were going to spend the night. There were various possibilities around Newtonmore, but none of them were overly satisfactory, so in the end we chose to drive the 15 minutes down the road to the location north of Dalwhinnie. It was only on Sunday morning that I realised the flaw in this plan: with the tea-tea-reunion activities occurring without a break on Saturday afternoon, I’d failed to visit the Co-op. We were now 9 miles from the Co-op, had no bread and only one more day’s worth of porridge oats.
Fortunately, thanks to my aborted Pennine Way trip at the beginning of August, I did have a whole package of noodles, flavoured cous-cous and the like, which (with the addition of a few vegetables) gave us perfectly acceptable lunches (albeit late lunches, given we didn’t take the noodles up the hills with us).
On Sunday after an extended period of poring over electronic maps, a road atlas and hill-bagging.co.uk, I came up with some semblance of a plan for the next few days, starting with the bagging of a hill just down the road from where we were parked. With that being the only thing on our agenda for Sunday, we thought we may as well spend another night in the same layby, as we knew there was nowhere better to stay between there and Monday morning’s hill.
Monday morning dawned reasonably bright, but unfortunately didn’t stay that way, so for the second consecutive day Bertie’s shower room got festooned with dripping outerwear as soon as we got back from our hill. Lunchtime was by then upon us, and we were very much in need of cups of tea, but with Bertie parked on a slope we opted to drive down to Blair Atholl before addressing those needs.
Parking across the road from the campsite in Blair Atholl, it would have made sense to go there, but we’ve never been fans of that site, and I’d become aware of this one on the shore of Loch Tummel. It was a few miles out of our way, but the reviews were excellent and the photos enticing.
So, after lunch and a quick trip to the Spar shop to resolve the bread and oats shortage, along a windy road we came. My verdict was that it was worth coming here to see if it’s a better stop-over than Blair Atholl, but we won’t be returning. The location is impressive, but the facilities are unfinished and dirty, and the site (on a farm) is far from well presented with all sorts of tat, that really should have been disposed of, scattered around the buildings. Compared to other sites, it’s overpriced for what it is.
(*In the end we went over 2 hours, because it took the café 35 minutes to serve our food, serving first everyone around us, even thought they’d arrived later, and when my burger did finally arrive it was cold. Somehow we managed to resist eating the huge slab of chocolate cake we’d bought for pudding whilst we were waiting, which then delayed us further.)
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