GT Day 6: Huntly’s Cave Loop-ish Loop

Saturday 1 November 2014

There was no blog post on Day 5, as there was no blogable activity, although it is worth mentioning that late on Thursday night Mick flew into Inverness and has now joined Gayle’s Tour for a long weekend.

Last night we arrived with Louise and David and today they kindly provided the transport to the start of the walk which Louise had planned and named “Huntly’s Cave Loop-ish”. It was a bit of a misleading name, as a full circuit was walked.

Louise has a 100% record of choosing excellent walking routes for us, and she came up trumps again today. Onto Dava Moor we went, which was quite lovely, albeit a tad soggy under foot in places, boasting lots of open moorland, interesting craggy bits (see snap below) and quite a few ruined buildings.

You may notice that the weather was pretty fine too, although what you can’t see from the photos was that, after yesterday’s unseasonably mild weather (t-shirt weather), today was much cooler with a bit of a bite to the wind.

If you look carefully in this next snap, you’ll see a shooting hut, which gave us a table, chairs and shelter from the wind for lunch, 5.5 miles through the day:

Soon afterwards came the ford, of which we had been forewarned. It turned out to be straightforward enough, and everyone got across dry-shod:

The first three sides of the (approximate) square of the walk wiggled around a bit. Then we joined the Dava Way, which follows an old railway line, and suddenly straight was the order of the day:

I expect that in the absence of good company to distract along that section, it could feel treadmillesque.

Fortunately, we were in good company and much chatting meant that before too long a splash of red was seen ahead of us, and we knew that the chap in red was standing guarding the car:

The stats for this very pleasing outing were 12.4 miles walked with 1200’ of ascent.