Creag Dhubh (NN823997; 445m; classification: sub-HUMP)

Saturday 12 October
Distance: 5.7 miles
Ascent: 240m
Weather: Dry with sunny intervals

We went anti-clockwise

We happened (by careful arrangement) to find ourselves in the same car park, in Inshriach Forest, as Louise and David on Saturday morning. As we don't get to see them very often the day got off to a chatty start, including a good period of admiration of their campervan Ellie, who we'd not met before. By then it was elevenses time and it would be negligent to go out for a walk without elevenses when elevenses time has passed. With a bit more chatting we then found that lunchtime was upon us, but with iron resolve managed to get out of the door with our lunches untouched in our bags.

The late start was of no matter on this occasion as the walk we had planned wasn't a long one. Somehow I had been nominated as 'responsible adult' so I had plotted the route (using Open Street Maps, so as to take advantage of paths not shown on my aged OS maps) and was in charge of keeping us on course. Mick forewarned everyone that when I say 'We need to turn right' it's wise to check whether I mean 'right' or 'the other right' (and vice versa). If you look carefully at the map snippet above you may spot a couple of minor backtracks that occurred when everyone was too polite to heed Mick's advice.

A pleasant walk past a large pond and variously through forest and cleared forest took us on tracks up to the trig point that was our objective*, where it appears that Mick and David were camera shy, but I got a nice snap (if you ignore the shadow, from my phone-holding arm, across my face) of the female half of the group:

A Vanessa Trig Point. Not an overly common design.

Being surrounded by trees, views were lacking, but the stones around the trig gave reasonable seating so we sat ourselves down for lunch. Am I right in recalling that a few drops of rain fell on us? If they did, it didn't amount to anything.

A fat-bike had come past whilst we were eating, but no alarm bells rang. Another bike came past shortly after we set back off (we watched him fall off about 20m before he reached us, and he admitted that he was watching us stepping well off the path, rather than where he was going). It was still a while later before I observed that the way our path was wiggling through the trees, it was clearly a mountain bike trail, rather than a walkers' path. Fortunately the evidence of our first 5 minutes on it proved to be atypical; we didn't meet a single other bike as we wiggled around all over t'shop to get back to the main forest tracks which took us back to Bertie and Ellie.

Walking down the mountain bike trail. See, Mick & David were present!

Views where the trees opened up

One of three ponds in the forest

It may not have been a long outing, but it was in good company, in pleasant surroundings and on the nicest day yet of the Scottish leg of our trip.

^{(*A check of lists of Relative Hills tells me that this summit has been demoted from HUMP to sub-HUMP as it is now known to only have 96m of prominence. For the avoidance of doubt I've not become a bagger of *really* obscure hills - it just looked a nice walk with the bonus of visiting a trig point.)}