foolfillment: the blog

A beach near Elphin, with Suilven, Cul Mor and Cul Beag in the distance (I think)

It seems like only the other day I last posted here but it turns out it was much longer than that, sorry to keep you waiting. I’ve been quite busy but I should be free for the next wee while to do nothing.

I was away at the weekend with GUPA to Castleton, Derbyshire. It was the first time I’ve been and it was great fun. Really really cold though. We went down two caves, one of them an easy one for beginners and the other at the back of a show cave. It’s a fantastic way to get really wet and muddy, and spend all of your money on kit, I thoroughly recommend it. I don’t have any photos and I can’t find many good sites for you to see so have a look at this instead.

Well, I’ve moved back into my flat in Glasgow and I’m slowly doing all the boring tidying up that goes with it, this evening I braved opening all the bookmarked blogs that I spent so much of my time reading last year. It’s quite a daunting task, almost as if I’m a new reader, some sites have changed design, and all have too much new content to catch up on but I’m sure I’ll get back into the swing of it when I start back at uni next week. There will also no doubt be more tales of summer holiday adventure along with the chance to win more prizes.

Today though you get to hear of my jaunt in the hills. I was walking for about 5 hours and driving for about the same amount of time which is rubbish. Leaving my flat in Knightswood at 7 and arriving at Stuart and Dan’s flat in Shawlands an hour later did not bode well for a fun day, but still we pushed on and were on the hill (Ben Narnain, near Arrochar) by a quarter to ten.

I’ve been up this hill once before and then as today the intention was to carry on and claim Ben Ime as well but on both occasions one of my companions found the going a bit harder than they had expected and we ended up only getting to the the summit of Ben Narnain, not even popping up The Cobbler as we passed. Even still it was a lovely day and I have lots of photos to prove it. Here’s one of The Cobbler from the top of Ben Narnain

We took loads of rests and were off the hill almost exactly five hours after leaving the car, five hours walking to five hours driving - not the best balance.

I’ve not been away walking since Christmas time (and I’ve just realised I didn’t make any mention of it here, Ben Vorlich if you’re interested, I didn’t get any good photos) and I’d like to get away again this term if I can. So I set about looking for a decent website that’ll tell me what hills I can get to by train from Glasgow but I couldn’t really find one, I couldn’t really find any websites that were actually any good. So, your task, should ou choose to accept it, is to tell me some hills I can get to (perhaps with an overnight camp) or the url to a good website that will tell me.

Or maybe an an invitation to the first blogmeet to be held above 3000 feet along with a lift there.

Or maybe I should go away and build a decent website myself, with the info you’re going to give me.

Waddya say?

I said last night my skin was really bad and I’ll not bore you with details of it, just tell you that I went to the doctors this morning, who prescribed me a interesting substance that is, she says, like vaseline but thicker and more greasy and on the whole, plain mingin.

I also went on a small adventure. Whan I say adventure, my definition may be slightly different to yours. When I say adventure I don’t mean I went for a trek through Africa, or I went hunting grizzly bears in Canada, or even took on a gang of neds and tried to take away their buckie. What I mean when I say I went on an adventure is that I went looking for Asda.

It’s not much I know but I enjoyed it, after all what I bought would have cost approximately 4327 times more at the nearest supermarkets to my flat, those being Sainsbury’s and Safeway. It also meant I got a nice walk along the canal.

I’ve edited this post far too much already, the original point of it has now been completely removed but the title still remains and I can’t think of anything else and if you don’t like it, then stick it. I’ll be walking alongside the canal if you want me.

I said I would write a wee account of the route we took but I haven’t really had time this week with work and other things but here is a brief summary.

We left Dunbar at about 7ish and drove up past Edinburgh, Perth, Dunkeld and a whole load more towns always getting smaller and smaller untill we got to Invergarry where we stopped for a quick pint before the pub closed and then pitched our tent at the side of the road. The next morning we awoke to find ourselves being eaten alive by midges so quickly broke the site and headed to Glenelg then on to a small farm called Balvraid where we parked. We started along the track at 8.30. The route was to take us along the side of a small burn (Abhanm a Ghline Bhig) then across a bridge but it turned out that the bridge was no more so we spent about 15 minutes trying to cross the burn, once over though it was an easy stroll along the bottom of a glen untill we reached the foot of the hill when it got a lot steeper and scree-e (and if that isn’t the right word then I don’t care!)

We gained a lot of height very quickly and then made our way along the top of the ridge to the summit where we met the only people we saw all day, so we had a nice wee chat with them, they’d been in Skye the day before and had just come back from Mexico or somewhere where they had been up at about 15000ft (not bad considering a scottish hill only has to be 3000ft to be a munro). At this time our hill was completely surrounded by cloud which really spoilt the whole day as it had been clear and sunny right up to then, what made it worse was that the views that were obscured would have been really spectacular (south to Knoydart, east to the Five Sisters of Kintail and west to the Cuillins on Skye).

All that was left was the descent, we took a slightly different route which took us round to the bealach between our hill and another top, Coire Min, and then gently back down to the burn and then - after further investigation of the bridge which crossed over two huge potholes cut in the riverbed that Mr Borthwick, my old geography teacher could have enthused about for weeks - along the track to Balvraid and the car. We finished by 3.

It was a really enjoyable walk, that was only spoilt by the bad weather at the top and the 4 hour drive. Well worth it if you’re in the area for a week or so and only in good weather - it looked like it would be a pretty boring hill in snow even with the views.