M&G Go For A Walk: TGOC25 Day 11

Sunday 18 May

Distance and ascent: 54.5km, 500m

Weather: glorious sunny start, then it clouded over and got windy. By the time I finished I had a fleece and a jacket on!

I fell into bed at around 2030 and was asleep in approximately 30 seconds. My alarm woke me at 2100, bringing me to just enough to take my last antibiotic of the day, then I knew absolutely nothing until 0350.

I could have happily laid there contemplating everything and nothing, but instead I sprang out of bed and seized the day. I was walking just before 0515.

The downside of my chosen route this year was the amount of road walking at the end, and today was going to almost entirely on road, save for a 7.5k section between Kirkton of Airlie and Kirriemuir. First, though, I needed to get to Kirkton of Airlie (just less than 10k into my day) and that looked in doubt when I reached a turn in my route to find a sign telling me the bridge ahead was closed. My mind jumped to the destruction in this area in storms in 2022/2023, and the possibility that the bridge no longer existed. What to do? I looked at how far it was to walk around and decided to plough on, hope the bridge was there and passable on foot, or that otherwise the water would be fordable (likely, I reckoned given the lack of rain lately).

Thanks to modern technology, I gained reassurance as I continued the 3.5k to the bridge: Google told me that the bridge had been closed since January 2023, but that a tender had just been issued for its repair with the damage being described as a partially collapsed carriageway one side of the bridge.

The bridge was fine. After it I had a choice: 1) in the interests of vetting research, to try to cut 700m across fields, involving six or seven field boundaries; or 2) an extra 1.5km (& 75m ascent) going three sides of a square on road. I have always been dubious that the shortcut would go, and I decided this wasn't the day for me to explore. Going around would take at most 15 minutes longer, and I could easily lose 15 minutes with rough ground, troublesome field boundaries and water crossings.

Then came my only real off-road section of the day, which turned into something of an adventure. My route was on a Core Path, but I can safely say that not many people walk the W end of that path – it wasn’t overgrown, just through untrodden long grass. Then came the section with the cows…

On the map, this entire path looks like an enclosed old lane, but it is now only fenced on one side, with the other side open to a large field. In that field was a large herd of cows with very young calves. To make matters worse, whilst the line of the old lane was perfectly visible, it was also periodically blocked by gorse and/or broom, meaning I had to keep diverting into the field to bypass the blocked sections, and one of those diversions was just where quite a few of the cows were. At first they were quite calm about my presence, but just as I thought I’d got comfortably past them, and was able to get out of their sight behind the gorse, they decided that maybe I was quite interesting. Suddenly I had an entire herd bellowing behind me, with both adults and young running, not immediately behind me, but slightly offset, causing me concern that they were going to run in front and cut me off.

So, when I saw a gate ahead of me, I happily hopped over it, relieved then to see that there were no cow pats in this field. Maybe the herd hadn’t been on this particular pasture for long, but the absence of cow pats was misleading. As I went over a rise, there they were in the far corner. They didn’t have young and were far less interested in me, so I escaped that field without any additional drama and was most pleased to see sheep in the next field. The gorse/broom there was even more overgrown, creating a maze that required a few backtracks to find a route through.

Arriving on the edge of Kirriemuir, I skirted the town and headed towards Brechin, with my onwards route being entirely on minor roads.

Two remarkable things happened along the road: someone stopped to offer me a lift (a rare occurrence) and a pop-up café appeared before me (which is to say that Ali was on her way from Challenge duties in Newtonmore to Challenge Control in Montrose, and swung by to offer me some cake, which I gratefully consumed).

I’d covered 42km when I got to Brechin, and that had been my initial aiming point for the day. But the day was still relatively young, and I felt absolutely fine, so I thought I may as well continue on to reach the inland edge of Montrose Basin. It doesn’t count as a finish point, but I thought it would be nice to effectively reach the coast.

A riverside park gave me a bit of road avoidance through Brechin, then more road took me to Kinnaird Park – a gated, private estate, with so many residences that it has more of a spread-out village feel. They are walker friendly, and will happily give out the code for the entrance gate if you phone the estate to ask in advance. I hadn’t asked in advance, because this hadn’t been on my route until the previous evening when I’d decided to go via Brechin rather than Forfar*. So, I climbed the gate and walked through using the route that the estate requests. All the ‘tracks’ are really roads, albeit private ones, but it was still nicer surroundings than any of the public roads I’d used.

As I exited the estate on the S side, nothing was hurting, but my body was starting to suggest, quite gently, that maybe it would like to stop soon. It was about the same time that I remembered that I had three packets of Mini Cheddars in my pack. I perched on a wall and quickly despatched those, then had to put both my fleece and my windshirt on! After all that hot weather, it had clouded over earlier in the afternoon, with a N wind really picking up (it was blowing me across the road at regular intervals). Those layers stayed on as I walked my final 5k to Maryton. From there Ali came and gave me a lift to the Park Hotel.

With just 5k left to walk, I perhaps should have made the effort to finish, but equally, why push myself beyond comfort? 55km was quite enough for one day.

(*The campsite at Forfar doesn’t have a backpacker rate and is £22.80. Alternatively there’s a bus direct from Forfar to Montrose that only takes 30 minutes, so I thought that I would jump on the bus, spend the night in my own bed and bus back in the morning. The fly in that ointment was that the bus only runs on school days, and I was going to arrive on a Sunday. By rerouting via Brechin, I would not only be nearer to Montrose (shorter bus journey) but the buses run on a Sunday.)