Sat 16 April (0830-1710) (NE of Lauder to below Lothian Edge)
Distance: 19 (Tot: 497.5)
Weather: cloudy start, then sunny intervals, clearing late on to mainly blue sky; windy
It was a day that involved much yomping, some of it very colourful (even if a bit squelchy):
In between the colourful bogginess it was knee-deep heather:
Then, suddenly, we came across a motorway under construction. For access to the site of a new wind farm, we guessed.
Now that’s a sign you don’t expect when you’re up a glen, quite a distance away from the nearest road:
The route that we were on for much of the day was the Herring Road, which runs from Lauder to Dunbar. At times there were sign-posts:
Then we got to Crystal Rig wind farm and, just as waymarking would have been really handy, all signs disappeared (according to the sign at the entrance, we were supposed to be following the red posts; we saw one just after we entered and another just before we left). We were hampered even more by the fact that our map showed a sizeable chunk of forest ahead of us (the other side of which we had intended to camp), yet when we got into the wind farm we noticed that there wasn’t any hint of that forest – not even stumps.
Making rather a hash of navigating our way, as none of the wind farm tracks were shown on our map, I suddenly noticed that we were in the forest. See those bits of old branches on the ground? That’s all that remained.
If this map had been in our possession at the time our passage through the wind farm would have been smoother – but far less memorable.
By contrast, this is what we’d expected to find on the ground:
The original blog post for the day can be found here.
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