cairngorms high camping

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

At long last our mutual diaries were clear and I met up with my oldest and bestest friend Allan, aka The Penguin, at the wee car park on the ski road and headed off into the wilds for a high camp on Braeriach. So it was down to the river, swollen with the interminable summer rain this year and up past Lapland, the reindeer station and along the excellent path to the Chalamain Gap. It’s an interesting name is Chalamain. Calman is the Gaelic for dove but it’s pronounced with the svarahbakti vowel, which means it sounds like calaman and I suspect it’s just been named after the peak directly above it, Creag a’Chalamain or rock of the dove, as Chalamain isn’t a real word on its own, meaning “of the dove”. So there must have been a colony of rock doves here at some point and rocky it certainly is.

reindeer in the cairngorms

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

We were over at Glenmore Lodge for the MCofS AGM at the weekend. Well we were there for the mountain birds seminar, hog roast and ceilidh but we popped along to the business end of the AGM and listened to the Alladale talk, which I’ll blog about later. The mountain bird seminar began with a slide show and talk about what to see in the mountains followed by a wild and wet walk up past Coire an Lochain and up to Lurcher’s Crag. We only managed to spot a couple of Meadow Pipits being whisked along in the gale and the clag was down to tree top level, so that was that! But we learned about the Bird Atlas, which is an interesting winter bird survey run by the BTO and hillwalkers are especially useful for recording species in less frequented areas. On the Sunday it was another washout so we spent an hour or two with the reindeer at the feeding station on the Lairig Ghru path.

Reindeer on eBothy Blog

cairngorms high camping

reindeer in the cairngorms