Flow country

Fording a river in Flow Country

Orkney

The weather and tides make kayaking rather challenging on Orkney, but the prehistory is amazing

Cape Wrath

Tom on the beach near the fantastic bothy at Kearvaig near Cape Wrath

Glen Feshie

After a few days wild camping, and with a wet night forecast, we drove up to Kingussie and installed ourselves in a B&B. We'd plannned to take the train back to Blair Athol and cycle back up Glen Gaick but discovered that we should have booked spaces for the bikes days ago. In a rapid change of plan we cycled up Glen Feshie instead: another classic. The head of the valley is a wonderful parkland of mature scots pines.

Glen Tilt

Having driven up from Cambridge, we camped on a hillside above Blair Athol on the southern edge of the Cairngorms, with a great view of Cairn Liath. We then spent a day and a half cycling round Beinn a Glho: up Glen Tilt, over the tops to wild camp near Glen Loch,then back for lunch in the Blair Athol chippie. A super ride.

We discover that we can use our bikes to tension our basha!

Finishing repairs

We decided to assemble the kayak frame to makes sure it all went together OK after the repairs following our Cornish epic last year..... Good thing we did, because some little plastic plugs needed a little fettling with the sander before the frame could be assembled without the muscles of a gorilla.

Thank goodness we weren't trying to do this on some midge infested scottish beach, while racing to catch the tide.

To scotland again!

After a year without scottish kayaking, we'll soon be off up north again. This year we've decided to explore Orkney and northern Scotland.

We'll decide precisely what we do depending on the weather, but this year we're taking the bikes as well as the kayak.. Orkney is very exposed to the weather and there are strong tidal streams, but it looks like there will be some great mountain biking to do, even on days when if its too windy for kayaking.


As usual we're finding that Pesda press have published a great kayaking guide to the area: This one is The Northern Isles: Orkney and shetland sea kayaking by Tom Smith and Chris Jex