Tea and Cake at Revack Lodge

You may gather from the location of today’s walk, that we’re not local to home at the moment. Revack Lodge is just outside of Grantown-on-Spey and as we were to be up in this neck of the woods for a few days we suggested that it would be nice to meet up with Louise and David for a bit of a walk. It turns out that Laura’s not as far away as I thought either (although she was on the road to join us this morning before Mick and I were even awake!), so it was as a party of five that that gathered (and faffed at some length) in the car park at the Lodge.

Louise had come up with a good route which, at six miles, we had agreed was the perfect length of give us a stretch of the legs whilst still leaving enough time to enjoy coffee and cake at the Lodge’s cafe afterwards.

The GPS faff. Four of us recorded today’s route. Only Mick let the side down on the recording front (allegedly for battery conservation purposes).

Uphill went the path, warming us all up nicely, but I confess that I was somewhat dubious about how good the view point at the top would be. Being so hemmed in by trees, it just didn’t look like there was going to be a miraculous view, but then we came to the top and to the clearing, and sure enough we could see lumpiness for some distance in front of us.

The bench, combined with the view, screamed ‘stop for cake’, but we really had only been going for ten minutes so the cake stayed in my pack to wait for a more appropriate time of day.

I would write a bit of a description about the rest of the walk, but concentrating on the company and conversation, as I was, I really can’t recount much of the route we took. I do remember this stile, which was designed for people with longer legs that the majority of today’s party boasted.

The weather forecast showers for today and it wasn’t wrong, but it was during a dry interlude that we paused for lunch. It was under leaking skies that we finished lunch, having all dived into our waterproofs as another shower passed.

I do recall that we joined the Speyside Way and that shortly afterwards we left it. Then I nearly trod on a frog. I thought it was a beetle at first, but beetles don’t generally jump like that and on close inspection I found it to be this tiny chap:

A significant pause was had in the last half a mile, to try to identify a bird of prey which was flying along with a whole pack of buzzards, circling and mewing above us. After much consideration the consensus was that the bird which didn’t look quite like a buzzard was in fact another buzzard. There were a lot of them around.

Back at our start point coffees and cakes became the focus and jolly good they were too, as we sat, compared the recorded route distances, and watched the red squirrels out on the bird feeders.

The stats for the day were 6 miles walked with around 900 feet of up. Unless any late entries are made, Mick won the award for the most ticks found about his person (although he was wearing shorts). Some time after the walk, I found that two had crawled their way up my trouser-clad legs too.

Here’s the route we took (we didn’t walk along the B road, even though the recorded track makes it look like we did – there’s actually a path which runs first one side of the road, then the other: