Weather: high level cloud but windy
The wind got up last evening, and Bertie was in an exposed location.
It was still blowing this morning, with Bertie rocking to the extent that I thought twice about whether I wanted to do my entire planned route. At one point I decided against, saying I would just do an out-and-back from Aberdour beach, as my purpose for today was to see if it was possible to stick to the coast E of there and I already knew it was possible from Quarryhead to Rosehearty.
I’m glad, for a number of reasons that I finally opted to do the whole stretch (which is only around 8km, so it’s not like I was heading out to battle the wind for hours).
With such a short distance to cover, I only picked up one cakey-bread-thing snack. A bit like a kid on a school trip with a packed lunch, I’d eaten it within ten minutes of setting out. I’d barely even left the tarmac of Rosehearty’s streets.
The coast up to the Quarryhead track was every bit as nice as I remembered, and fortuitously I caught up with a chap along that section who was out walking his dog. He told me he had kept to the coast all the way to Aberdour Beach a few times, which was good reassurance that I wasn’t trying something infeasible.
A blog I’d read from 2014 (the year that we didn’t try to get from Aberdour to Quarryhead) told me that there were multiple barbed wire fences to get over, but I found all of them to either have gaps or sturdy stiles now. The most difficult (relatively*; in the grand scheme of things it was a little rough, but not overly taxing) ground came between the stiles, as those enclosed areas haven’t been grazed, and there’s enough footfall to see the vaguest hint of a trod, but not enough to make it an easy stroll.
Where the map shows the historic remains of Dundarg Castle, in reality there’s a much more modern, grand house. I followed the todden line around the front of its land, then soon came upon the only really troublesome 500m stretch of this bit of coast. A couple of landslips would have been passable on the cliff side of the fence, but I wasn’t happy being so exposed, so twice I hopped over a fence into the adjacent field for a stretch (actually, the second time I walked the entire length, as it was a grazing field and thus the going was much easier than on the other side of the fence). At the end of the second field yet another not-on-the-map section of engineered coast path, running between two fences, was before me, and that led me not just to the little beach road, but adjacent to it for half a kilometre.
I’m impressed with all of the new sections of path that have been put in, but why oh why did they not put in an access point where the minor road meets the B-road, so that you can get onto the path that runs on the opposite side of the B-road? I thought maybe I’d just missed the access yesterday, but today I confirmed that it doesn’t exist.
Mick was once again waiting for me, with the kettle on, in New Aberdour car park and after an early lunch back to Newtonmore we headed, away from the sunshine and wind, and into dark threatening skies and stillness.
It’s a pity that (through my own laziness) I didn’t check out the bit of coast E of Macduff, but I’m pretty confident that I would have found it still impassable. Even with that omission, it was a most worthwhile trip.
(*The chap with whom I’d chatted also disclosed that he’d done the walk with his wife last year and she declared it as the worst walk she’d ever done. Given that he’s chosen to do it a number of times, which would be odd behaviour if it was a bad route, I deduced that she’s not much of a walker. Having now walked it myself, my deduction stands.)