I actually wasn’t supposed to go on the trip, because they only had about 50 spots on the bus and I was second on the waiting list, but some people dropped and I got to go. I was a little hesitant because this was right after my first two rowing workouts (the first circuit and technical session) and I was so sore I couldn’t walk, plus I had two rowing sessions the day after the trip, one of them at 7:15am and the other circuits. But how hard could walking around be? Breakaway trips are split into walks of different difficulties, easy, medium, high medium, high-high medium, and hard, so I figured I would just do the medium (thinking this would be 3-4 miles walking slowly).
The bus dropped the medium group off eight miles from the pub/hotel where all the groups would meet at the end of the day. Ack, a lot longer than I expected! And it was over steep hills at a very fast pace, with not a lot of breaks. Plus when we finally got to the end we realized that we still had several hours before the bus was going to take us back to St Andrews, so there was nothing to do but walk a few more miles down the valley and back! At least I got to see a lot. My feet thoroughly hurt after that and I had a full day of rowing the next day.
Even though Glen Clova is still very much in the south of Scotland, like St Andrews, it reminded me a lot of the Highlands. There were a couple things that could maybe be called 'mountains' (sort of, and by Eastern U.S. and not Montana standards), but even the hills looked pretty rugged. They were all covered with heather, which is a plant kind of like a really short sagebrush that's all over in the British Isles. I had seen it in England, but at a time of year when it was purple - in fall apparently it's brown, and I had to ask what it was. Most of the walk was along a high ridge (it was incredibly windy up there, but a sunny day) and you could see way back in the country away from the road. There were a few scattered farm buildings off in the distance in other valleys, but mostly it was very remote. We saw some free-range sheep that acted like they didn't see people very often. For a lot of the hike we went along an old dirt road that was near a rickety barbed wire fence; it actually reminded me a lot of Montana and Idaho, so the landscape wasn't altogether foreign. Still, the dominant image in my mind was of the Highlands when my dad and I drove through them a few years ago.
The view back towards the road from the steep hill we climbed to get to the ridge.
Ahhh, fresh air and mountains! The love of the countryside is one of the "things which I have won forever" through my experiences and education. I will never live in a city again!
Heather.
Landscape view, with heather all over. It's scenes like this that really reminded me of the Highlands.
The lighting in this turned out kind of cool, especially in the mud of the road that we were walking on.
As my dad will attest, two things I like to take pictures of while traveling are doorways and gates.
Climbing over a stile. After this we walked through a forest that has been carefully managed and harvested for many centuries. There were enclosures for raising pheasants, too. (Ooh, as we were driving back out on the bus I saw fields and fields full of big, fat wild rabbits. I had of course seen wild rabbits before but I had never seen actual rabbit warrens, like the ones in the book Watership Down. Whole cities of rabbits!)
Another stile. There are pine trees in Scotland!
The hikers' and backpackers' hotel/pub in the valley.
View down the valley on our second walk.
Caution: pheasant crossing.
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