Cathelle Houses (NO 312763, 863m)
Boustie Ley (NO 322759, 876m)
Benty Roads (NO 330765, 842m)
The Snub (NO 335757, 835m)

18 kilometres
890m of ascent

I’ve recently got into the habit of wandering along the plateau above Glen Clova—see my reports of traverses from Allan’s Hut to the Capel Mounth and my Brandy and Wharral circuit.

This one partially fills the gap between those previous expeditions. I’ve had my eye on a potential route to the plateau for a while—an apparently disused track that the map shows zig-zagging up through the trees on the north side of the road between Braedownie Farm and the Glen Doll car park.

I started from the car park just beyond the Clova Hotel, which would be handy for my planned descent from above Loch Brandy, but meant I had to walk about five kilometres up the single-track road before I started climbing.

Visible at the head of the glen are Craig Mellon and Cairn Broadlands, visited during another previous traverse. (The car with brake lights illuminated, mysteriously stopped and blocking the road in the middle distance, proved to have a small child vomiting into the ditch next to it. Which is about as good an excuse as you can get.)

Just beyond Braedownie, I found my overgrown access point.

The grass is now knee-high along parts of this track, and it’s obvious deer territory, so I paused to put on a pair of gaiters and spray them with Smidge. I normally carry this to deter the demonic Scottish midge, but it also seems to be pretty good at stopping deer ticks latching on to your clothing.

After a few zig-zags, I found an old view indicator that had largely lost its view as the forestry sprang up in front of it.

Then I reached a fallen tree, at about NO 28977675. The track showed signs of continuing straight on beyond the tree, but the OS map and my GPS told me that I should be turning right, straight up the hill.

Which looked like this:

I pushed dubiously under the low branches, and found myself on this track:

Which got darker and darker until a literal light appeared at the end of the literal tunnel, by which time my camera was defaulting to flash mode:

You’ll see from my map that I never deviated from the Ordnance Survey’s plot of the original track, but it certainly feels like it won’t remain passable for much longer.

If you’re trying to pick this route up for a descent, it emerges from the trees at an old stile, near NO 29327651.

The remnant of the track continues up the hill for a way, before fading out. I would cross remnants of it repeatedly as I worked my way along the plateau, but the continuous route plotted by OpenStreetMap, which I reproduce on my map at the head of the post, is something of a fantasy. It has presumably fallen into disuse along with the track I’d just climbed.

At the first rock, I stripped off my gaiters, brushed them down, slammed them on the rock vigorously a few times, and stowed them on top of my pack. Then I did a tick check of my trousers, boots and ankles. I’d emerged blessedly unparasitized.

Then I struck off in a direttissima towards the summit of Cairn Derg (which is Gaelic carn dearg, “red hill”).

On the way up, I avoided treading on this little fellow:

And, just below the summit, I encountered this, um, contraption:

That’s an FM radio antenna, I think, but the overall function of this piece of kit is obscure to me. Whatever it is, it’s been up here a while—thirteen years ago, it had a different set of solar panels, a little wind turbine on the empty mast at left, and a different aerial.

I’d anticipated that this would be a fine viewpoint, and I wasn’t disappointed:

I encourage you to enlarge that one. From left to right, the sky-line goes Hill of Strone, Sneck of Farchal, Driesh, Mayar, Corrie Fee, Glas Maol, Cairn of Claise, Broad Cairn, Lochnagar massif, Conachraig. And the pinkish hue of the rocks in the foreground tells you why this is a “red hill”.

From Cairn Derg, I crossed an almost subliminal dip to get to the grassy summit of White Bents, and then across to the slightly more rocky Cathelle Houses.

The toponymy up here is, you have probably decided, a bit weird. But it actually all hangs together, and tells us something about a bygone age, when livestock was moved to high pasture every summer. The old Ordnance Survey Name Book for Forfarshire tells us that Cathelle Houses is:

The name formerly applied to some Shielins [that is sheilings, high huts for summer accommodation] on the hill, but is now applied to the hill itself.

North of Cathelle Houses is a rounded ridge called Lair of Whitestone. I didn’t see many white stones, but that word lair is an old usage, implying a place for animals (generally) to lie down—for domestic animals it might be an enclosure, or just a pasture they prefer. A mile to the north, there’s the Lair of Aldararie.

So it seems this was once high pasture land. And this is backed up by the word bent, which is a Scots word for rough grass. The name White Bents refers to the sort of pale grass that emerges after the snow has gone. And Benty Roads, also on my list, means “grassy paths”. As for Boustie Ley, Dorward thinks this derives from Gaelic buailteach, which my Gaelic dictionary defines as “abounding in sheiling huts”, combined with Scots ley, a variant of lea, meaning “untilled ground” or “pasture land”.

So today’s empty, rolling upland was once a rather busier place:

I won’t bore you with pictures of the successive tiny cairns I passed as I wove from one rounded summit to the next. The only serious impediment to travel was this, between Boustie Ley and Benty Roads:

The area is dissected by very substantial peat-hags, and even after some dry weather, I was occasionally up to my knees in the boggy ground.

Eventually, I connected with the ascent route of my Brandy-Wharral circuit, and sat down at the large cairn on The Snub to have lunch.

At which point an extraordinary racket kicked off. At first I thought this was coming from squabbling gulls of some sort, but it proved to be coming from not one, not two, but three peregrine falcons, who were having a major airborne tiff that swept continuously over and around me for several minutes. It looked as if a nesting pair were seeing off a trespasser. To give you an impression of the drama, here’s what one irate peregrine sounds like:

Then it was time to descend the steep, but well-engineered path into the glen.

Loch Brandy, in its corrie, is tucked away to left of frame, above. So, as I picked my way down, I got Tennyson’s lovely lines from Morte d’Arthur stuck in my head*:

He, stepping down
By zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock,
Came on the shining levels of the lake.

So I made a slight diversion just so I could show you the shining levels of this particular lake:

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* I think Tennyson works a kind of synaesthetic magic, here.
In the first two lines of my quotation, the combination of iambic pentameter and frequent stop consonants gives us the jerky rhythm of Bedivere’s steep descent. Then, in the last line, he breaks step with a single trochee (“Came on…”), after which he strides smoothly, on level ground, without encountering another stop consonant until he comes to a halt with the final syllable of “… the shining levels of the lake”.
Isn’t that clever?