Christine's walking & birds blog

Creag Rainich

The weather was windy and showery as we set off on a 6 kilometre walk-in along Loch a' Bhraoin. A cuckoo called distantly beyond the plantation, and a willow warbler sang from the conifers. Along the loch our companions were pied wagtails and common sandpipers.


The white house at Lochivraon (part of the Inverbroom Estate) has bars on the windows and doors, but the paintwork is kept up. The red roof just showing behind the house is a bothy.


We sat down on a grassy bank for a drink and were serenaded by the hollow drumming of snipe. At first we weren't sure if the sound was a bird or the thrumming of fence wires in the wind. Then two snipe were seen flying high above and plummeting to the marshy ground at the head of the loch. We left the track here, skirting the fence and beginning the long, tiring plod up rough boggy ground behind the house. As we gained height, so the loveliness and the loneliness of Lochivraon's setting became more apparent.


At around the 690m contour, Greger heard a golden plover. Just after this he stopped and pointed to a grassy hummock just ahead; and as we walked on carefully, a dunlin emerged. This was only my second dunlin on a hill-walk.



As the dunlin walked away a golden plover was seen on the skyline, his mate also showing herself briefly.


Cheered by these sightings, we toiled on. At last the terrain began to change from muddy bogs to dry, firm vegetation on rock, and we gained the first top. It was a bit disheartening to see that the dip between here and the main top was deeper than I'd realised, but at least we could now see the summit.


As Greger forged ahead, I peeped into a small pool - and made a macabre discovery. Several frogs were visible on the bottom, but even before closer inspection, their absolute stillness indicated that they were dead. Their eyes were a milky blue. There was some frogspawn in the pool, but that didn't look healthy either. (Later: there is a photo on the internet from 2010 of dead frogs resembling these, all at the bottom of a dew pond in Derbyshire; that pond was iced over, and the cause of death was reckoned to be either intense cold or lack of oxygen. My blog entries both sides of this post contain the phrases "ice cold", "freezing cold", "freezing cold wind" - and this was at sea-level. This pool lay at 720m, or 2,362ft.)


In hill-walking days gone by, I was often the one ahead; but what with encroaching age and having to investigate the wildlife, the following picture has become a familiar sight to me - Greger reaching the top first.


But I made it at last - with the bonus of a new trig point to bag.


The trig point stands on the summit at 807m (2,647ft).


The showers stopped and there were some sunny spells, so we stayed on the top and had our lunch, looking across a snow patch to An Teallach (pic from Greger's mobile) with the sea mistily visible beyond.


Walking out onto a western spur we looked across the Fisherfield Forest - home to some of the most remote Munros in Scotland. The high tops here are Mullach Coire Mhic Fhearchair and, to the right of the deep col, Sgurr Ban. Meallan an Laoigh is the small hill in the foreground with a buttress-like appearance. What caught the eye however was the vast slabs of quartzite, sloping down to the unseen Loch an Nid and looking (as Greger said) like a flow of hardened volcanic lava.


And in the foreground, presumably unimpressed by all this stunning scenery, was a female wheatear, doing what wheatears do wherever they find themselves; standing upright and motionless - and then making short, stooping runs across the grass.


We set off back to the east, but following high ground for as long as possible to cut out some of the stony track along the loch-side. Meadow pipits foraged at the edge of snow patches.


I noted some ptarmigan droppings, but it was Greger once again who got onto the birds themselves - a male and a female, scuttling reluctantly away - at around 600m. The female hid behind a rock, while the male walked a little way uphill, keeping us in sight before dropping down until only his head was showing - and then nothing.




After a lot of steep, boggy work we eventually reached the track where we sat down for a rest and a chocolate bar (we still had 4 kilometres to go). Midges were a bother but for once the insect repellant seemed to work. It was a beautiful sunny evening. The water on the loch was calmer than in the morning, and common sandpipers were still zooming about.



The walk was over 16 kilometres long and by the time we reached the car, we were pretty tired. At the end of the loch we converged with happy Munro-baggers coming down from the Fannichs. But I wouldn't have swapped. Our hill might be a bit of a boggy pudding and "only" a Corbett, but we'd had it to ourselves, the birds had been brilliant - and the summit views were second to none.