New Year bothy trip

Up to about 15 years ago, most of my New Years were spent in a bothy somewhere in the Highlands. This fell away rather recently, what with people having children, moving away to jobs and suchlike. But myself and some friends decided to revisit the bothy experience this year.

We walked in to Cadderlie on Hogmanay. This is a faintly odd walk-in, starting as it does in a quarry, but soon the view looks more like Argyll, with dripping birch and alder woods. We needed the headtorches by the time we arrived to find an empty bothy. Later, two other parties arrived, also from Edinburgh, and took up residence in the other room. We joined them for the bells and some refreshment was had.

On the 1st, we mostly gathered wood for the fire. This was possibly the best day and I took some photos.

Just after taking this I walked down to the shore and saw an otter run into the loch (too fast for the camera, unfortunately). It surfaced some way out and watched me for a while. In other wildlife action, the bothy mice had chewed up a pair of Crocs.

The morning of the 2nd must have been one of the grimmest I have experienced. Mid-morning it started getting darker again, then there was a peal of thunder and it sleeted for a while. The green-grey scene outside was like a definition of the word "bleak". Later, things improved a little and we went for a walk along the loch a bit.

This looks like being the winter of the high winds, after two winters of snow and ice. On the way back, we had snow from Tyndrum to Glen Ogle, then an increasing number of fallen trees, a field full of water at Callander that was emptying over the road, and two lorries on their sides on the road just outside Stirling. This all felt very ominous, but although there had been high winds in Edinburgh too, my flat seemed to be in one piece.