Dufftown Highland Games

On 26th July we went over to Dufftown for the Highland Games, mainly because he wanted to run the Ben Rinnes race but also because we'd not been to a games before. I wasn't daft enough to try to run this one, so opted for tea and strawberries and watching the heavyweight and lightweight events in the games field.

The race takes about 2 hours for the winner. There was quite a collection of hillrunners other halves waiting for the winner - we'd all spotted that there were 4 guys up from Bowland and Calder Valley and I was wondering how good they must be to make the trip up. It turned out that one of them was rather good. As we were waiting in came reports of Sean Bolland, who held his lead to win. Last year's winner, Brian Marshall, came in third.

That night we went to Tomintoul. We stopped at the A'anside Studio and bought some prints then went to The Clockhouse for dinner. It was really nice food - I think we should go back.

On Sunday we went mountain biking from Cock Bridge to Fords of Avon. It was a 35 mile round trip, but wasn't too bad as we took our time. We had a lovely big portion of chips at the pub and watched the baby housemartins in the herb pots.

Glamaig

Right, I’ve finally got round to writing about Glamaig.

It was the first weekend in July and several (mad) Cosmics, including me, went off to Skye to run up and down a stupidly steep hill. Actually, there wasn’t much running done on the way up. As soon as you hit the bottom of the hill you’re walking. By half way up you’ve hit the scree and rocks and are mostly on all fours.

After the false summit, there’s a grassy rib then a path through the scree to the top. At the top were some nice chaps with water and a wee dram. Then there was the question of how to get down.

I took the immediately safer option and went back down the path and the rib. Unfortunately the rib ended in some rather steep crags and I really should have turned left on to the scree sooner. Once I was on the scree it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought and was the quicker way down. Earlier in the morning I’d picked out a big boulder and a couple of lochans as landmarks to aim for to get back towards the hotel from the bottom of the hill. I passed close to the boulder and ran into one of the lochans (lovely and cool). Eventually I picked up the path back to the road and ran as fast as I could to make my target time – with 40 seconds to spare.

After finishing we went back to the bunkhouse to celebrate a Cosmic’s birthday and then for the food and ceilidh included in the £3 (!) entry.

On the Sunday I went up Pinnacle Ridge to Sgurr nan Gillean with five other Cosmics. It was a really good scramble and I did my first proper abseil. Probably not the place to learn, but no one died…