I initially wanted to name this blog post something like “Double, double, toil and trouble”, purely because the weather was so dreich and the fog so oppressive that I half expected to stumble upon the three Witches from the famous “Scottish Play” . But Cairnwell 3 they are named, and in the absence of any newts, “Cairnwell 3” it is. As I mentioned in a previous blog, we aren’t getting any younger, so we decided to triple-threat our first addition to the Munro bagging total for 2021. We chose this cluster due to yet another Google search of “easiest Munros to do in the same day” and it threw up these little beauties in Glenshee. I’ll be honest, the fact that we knew we would be setting off from an already reasonably high altitude sealed the deal.
We decided to drive up to Glenshee Ski Centre on the Saturday morning really early, complete the walk in around 5-6 hours and pitch our tent at the bottom of the hill where we planned to get a chippy locally and spend Sunday reading and generally chilling. So car bursting at the seams, we enjoyed what was actually a very picturesque drive through a really pretty part of God’s Country. We noticed the dark clouds when we were about 40 mins from our destination but agreed that if we were going to bag all Munros, we were going to have to put our big girl and boy pants on and accept that living in Scotland means there are bound to be rainy hikes.
Now I realise the photo above at the start of our voyage is an unusual one, you might even say it goes against nature… no I don’t mean all the infrastructure, I’m talking about Chris’s jeans. However this interesting choice of Munro attire was purely a result of the weather being colder than either of us had anticipated due to being so high up so he accessorised his outfit at the last minute to stay warm. The first leg of the climb was steep and unforgiving; straight up and we reached summit 1 within the first 40 mins. At the top of the hill, there is a track that curves round to the right and we just naturally followed it but don’t be fooled, the summit is right in front of you at the fork – we had to double back when we cottoned on to our mistake.
This is when the rain started. Not the usual Scottish biblical “heavens opening” but that fine rain your Granny warned you about that soaks you through to the skin instantly. We hadn’t brought gloves which we bitterly regretted and I realised quickly that my new, expensive Rab jacket, which was marketed as “showerproof” was not designed with Scottish showers in mind. Luckily the next leg of our journey was fairly flat with a few meandering uphill sections and was really a rather pleasant walk despite the rain. We blethered about the usual nonsense, e.g. who is more physically strong (him), mentally strong (him), emotionally strong (me)… and who would make a better Rob Roy/ Clan Chieftain etc. This is still our favourite part of Munro bagging together – we get to talk and no one is mindlessly scrolling through Instagram.
The top of Carn a Gheoidh was really quite cold and miserable. It’s a really exposed top and we ate our lunch hunkered against the south facing wall of the decent sized cairn. It didn’t help I had lost all feeling in my fingers. This was also our first experience of teaching the top of a mountain and being rewarded with a blanket of fog, the allegedly magnificent view wrapped up in it out of sight.
It’s also worth mentioning that the path to this one wasn’t always an obvious path so we relied heavily on our navigation app. We used ViewRanger but are planning on testing out AllTrails next time on the advice of a fellow walker, not that I’m planning on sharing that with the die hard explorers on the Facebook groups who believe OS maps are the only way to go and if you can’t navigate your way out of a paper bag you don’t belong on a hill. However we love the app just fine and as long as you remember a couple of fully charged portable chargers you’ll be just grand because it does suck the life out of your phone battery.
After our lunch al fresco, we set off for The Cairnwell, our final summit of the day. You have to retrace your steps back down and then rejoin a new path that makes a complete circuit which will eventually finish at the ski centre again. We knew from researching the route that people were disappointed at the top by the ugly imposition of electricity towers and a maintenance hut but luckily the visibility was so poor, it wasn’t like they spoiled an otherwise breathtaking view. The climb was quick, not overly steep and the top was just bizarre.
The cairn consisted of lots of rocks piled on top of a shed. Genuinely. It had the eerie feeling of a deserted fairground, particularly with the creak of the still functioning ski lift carrying across the wind. We roamed round for a bit, took some photos that in no way resemble the summits of any Munros we’ve climbed before and then set off on our very anti climactic descent.
This was the only part of the journey that became terse. There didn’t appear to be a path back down to the ski centre on our app so we ended up cutting across the field parallel to the chair lift which I found incredibly difficult. I can only liken it to trying to walk down a steep gradient of bubble wrap covered in springy heather; it didn’t seem to matter where I put my foot, my ankles were wobbling all over the place and I didn’t end up on my bottom more than once. The saving grace was the fact it wasn’t a long descent and we were at the bottom with a decent walking time of just under 4 hours for the whole circuit.
We had a lovely hot chocolate and cake at the ski centre at the bottom after changing out of our wet shoes and taking stock of the weather decided to take the hit and just head back home so we could get a takeaway, a hot shower and our own bed. Lessons learned: I need more supportive shoes, particularly for the descent which I seem to find challenging every time; it is entirely possible to bag Munros in a day and come back home again at night; showerproof is a lot of nonsense and I suspect a clever marketing ploy; gloves are always essential; and the frequently repeated motto of today’s hike was “I bet this would be lovely on a sunny day” which I suspect will become a common theme.
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