South of here there is a huge stretch of wild country running almost to the
Tay. It is bounded by gentler lands on three sides and the A9 corridor on the
west and human intervention is limited to some tentative roads into deep glens
and the broad valley of the Spey with its outdoor industry, distilleries and
occasional farmlands. It would be wrong to call this land a true wilderness
since much of it is shaped by the hand of man. It is streaked with forestry and
grouse moor burnings and in place land rover tracks reach high on to the hill.
But in the main it is glorious country with rolling hills, big, brown rivers,
huge skies and it pretty much empty of humanity where you can travel for days
without meeting tarmac. All this makes it a grand place for adventure.
Right in the heart of this place lies a group of hills known as the Ring of
Tarf. While the name invokes Middle Earth the reality is a hard country of peat
and bog with few paths and little in the way of logical routes. We traversed
the Ring about a year ago and found it to be a real challenge and maybe not something
that you would choose to go back to more than once but during the trip we also
twice crossed the through route from Glen Feshie to Blair Atholl which looked a
fine way to travel. I hatched a plan to take the bike from the familiar tracks
of
Inshraich Forest through the full length of Glen Feshie and then to pick up
the old drove route from Speyside to Blair Atholl across the watershed of the
Geldie, Tarf and Tilt rivers. On the map it is an awesome inviting slice of
Scotland and a quick trawl on the web showed that it has been
done by bike. The
weather forecast showed three dry days. The only remaining question was whether
I was man enough....
I crossed the Feshie by the only remaining bridge south of Feshiebridge
itself and headed up the glen towards the small bothy of Ruigh-Aitcheachan. The
path was rough and required a fair amount of pushing - panniers just do not
lend themselves to anything technical. However, much of the route through the
middle part of the glen was sublimely beautiful with mixed pine and birch woods
and open meadows filled with clouds of rising butterflies taking flight as I
passed. This was to be the pattern - tough ground for biking amongst incredible
natural beauty. Equal parts inspiration and frustration.
The woodland thinned out beyond the point where the glen turned east just as
the track ran down and into the Feshie. The depth of the river required portaging
the panniers and bike separately across a short meander meaning 6 crossings of
the river in total. Luckily, it was reasonably dry and the river was low but in
spate conditions you would have to follow a slight path further up the hill.
From there the track continued through the open upper glen until it petered out
with around 4 miles still to go prior to Gelide Lodge. This proved the toughest
section since it crossed the watershed between the Feshie and Geldie. There was
a particularly tough section up and over the Eidart Bridge – it might be best
to cross the river where it meets the Feshie if condition are right. Eidart
Bridge itself has about six months to live and goes at severe with a bike and
panniers.....you have been warned.
Geldie Lodge is remote in anyone's book and would be a big disappointment to
anyone turning up expecting a full Scottish breakfast. Its roofless ruin looks
out towards the southern ramparts of the Cairngorms across a bleak desert of
peat and heather.
Today it was quite busy – 4 other tents and a resident population of a few
billion midges. The midges made dinner a challenge but by adopting a policy of
walking up and down the track while boiling, cooking and eating I managed to
get a few calories down. I also made
some tea but by then I had had enough of fighting the wee bastards and retired
to the tent. I needed to sleep with a midgie net on for the first time ever. It
was not a pleasant evening.
In the morning they were worse and I was up and away into the grey morning by
7am. The first stretch took me past the semi-ruin at Ruigh Easlaidh and onto
the complete ruin of Bynack Lodge, sited amongst some tall pines.
Bynack lodge – August 2012
Bynack and Geldie lodges mark a kind of reversed terminal moraine of human
activity in these remote glens. They were built after the retreat of the
crofter and during the brief re-advance of the sporting estate – a short window
between the croft and the motor car when these far flung outposts were needed
to reach the deer and the grouse.
The
decline and fall of these places are well enough recorded
elsewhere but for
this generation only the sad erratic remains are left high on their raised
banks. They lend much to the atmosphere of loneliness and isolation which is
found in Glen Geldie.
Beyond Bynack the track gradually deteriorated until it was only rideable in
parts. The upper part of the glen opened out into a large flat meadow ringed
with steep hills. Through a side glen I could see out to a misty Carn Bhac
which was just shrugging off the morning haar to bask in the August sun. From
the meadow the path turned westwards and into the narrow ravine of the upper
Tilt clinging to the steepening north bank. I traversed this with a lot more
pushing than riding before emerging on the flats beside the glorious Falls of
Tarf. This is worth the visit on a dry day – it must be biblical when in spate.
Once over the bridge it is a long but mostly downhill on good landy tracks to
Blair Atholl through gorgeous Glen Tilt with its policy woods giving deep
shade. The track follows the River Tilt which is fast, brown and bubbling. The
day was perfect August with high white clouds in a deep blue sky. Sheep bleated
high on the green hillsides stretching away up to Beinn a Ghlo – a pastoral
scene like a vertical England and a grand place to be on a day like this.
A tough route requiring real commitment even in gentle August but I am not
convinced about its suitability as a bike route. It might lend itself to a
solid one day push on a full suss unloaded bike by a better rider than me but
without solids skills you will be off and pushing for a fair distance as you
cross the two watersheds. The Empty Quarter is not the place to have a big off.
As a footnote there were proposals up until the sixties to drive a road
through Feshie and Geldie to Deeside and the plan was well advanced and widely
supported locally and in political circles. Some token opposition was raised by
what would now be called the outdoor lobby but I have not yet found out why the
route was never developed. The good news is that while you just can’t access
Glen Shee from Inverness for a day’s dodgy ski-ing, you can revel in a huge
stretch of wilderness I think that’s a
result.
