Drow 'n' Smirr

9.2 miles 3h 30m ascent 283m

This was a straightforward there and back route from Craigencallie, along forestry tracks past Loch Dee, over the Laggan Burn and up the slopes of White Hill/Curleywee to the Loch Dee Rosnes Benches. On the return leg we went down to the loch itself and the dogs washed away the worst of the mud.

The weather and the experience were glorious.

Malcom Harper walked here in the nineteenth century without the benefit of forestry tracks and was stirred by the place.

Loch Dee is a lonely mountain lake, in a treeless waste, about five miles north-east of Loch Trool, and is only approachable by the pedestrian, or by very rough bridle roads. Heath and moss, rocks and stones without end, and jagged hills, with here and there bright verdant patches on their rugged sides, form the chief features of the landscape.
Agriculture is nowhere to be seen, and the traveller might in a day’s walk not alight on a human habitation. The whole region being one vast sheep farm, only here and there a solitary shepherd’s sheiling is to be found in low sheltered places. The district is not opened up by roads, and its interesting character is but little known — its solitudes
being seldom trodden save by the shepherd, the sportsman, and the student of nature.

The mountains, which in proud and sullen majesty rise round the source of the Dee, are rendered spirit-stirring by the memories of other times, and are calculated to arouse in the breast of the rambler feelings of patriotism and admiration of our ancestors. Being ” the birthplace and cradle of our country’s independence “under the patriot king, and as having afforded a safe retreat to our Covenanting forefathers from the fury of the persecutor, this district ought to be interesting to every lover of his country.

Our visual cortices like his were well stimulated, the views bathed in a deliciously full light. The hills on show were: the Rhinns of Kells from Darrou to Corserine, with Carlin’s Cairn just peeping over from behind Corserine and Meikle Mulltaggart, the wilder southern hills of the range climbing into the smooth grassy northern summits; the grey rocks of the Dungeon Hills with Craignaw and Dungeon Hill guarding the Nick of the Dungeon, and a terrain designed for breaking legs; Craiglee  (Craig Liath), the grey hill, which has to share its name with another grey at the northern end of the range,  was still sporting its straw coloured Winter livery; Curleywee, a wonderfully strange name to us but really just a simple description, Cor le gaeith (pron. gwee) the peak in the wind, in its green Spring livery, the slopes from a distance a siren call to the unwary, looking to be an easy, albeit steep,  ascent but on closer examination, actually knee deep dense undergrowth.

The Dungeon Hills from dr Borthwick’s bench

Competing with the hills for aesthetic effect was water, which could I suppose lay claim to have shaped the hills themselves. Loch Dee itself was deep blue when first glimpsed from below Cairngarroch and when looking east from the Rosnes benches, but rendered brown by the reflection of Craiglee on its surface when seen from between the 272m spot height and the Laggan hollow. Standing by the Loch itself, with waves touching my boots, the water took on a recognisably darker hue. Laggan Burn, Green Burn and Dargall Lane flow into Loch Dee and the aptly named Black Water of Dee issues from it. Dargall is said to derive from dobhar (water) gall (literally a foreigner but also a name for standing stones). A lane being a stream that is so slow that the movement of water is almost imperceptible. Dargall Lane is a relatively short waterway, certainly less than a mile in length so it is easy enough to look over its surroundings. The only man-made constructions I could see by the Dargall are the dry stone dyke and a ruined sheep ree. There were no ancient standing stones, the Giant’s Axe Head to the west being a modern addition. This land is though littered with erratics, so perhaps, long ago, some prominent rock was used to indicate this stream. Or perhaps a band of foreigners camped in the valley.

Droughandruie Strand

The forestry track took us over three burns and gave me pause for thought about their nomenclature. Such waterways in my youth would have been brooks, whereas Audrey recalls them as becks, but here we were in the land of burns. The Droughandruie Strand,
drochaidh an druidhe, named for the druid’s bridge, tumbled over rocks and waterfalls amongst the heather and tussocks of Cairngarroch’s northern slopes then flattened when it plunged into the forest before joining the Black Water of Dee. The Green Burn was perhaps named by the inhabitants of the hollow in the hills, the Laggan, to differentiate it from the Black Laggan and the White Laggan burns.

Droughandruie Strand

The water of this Green Burn was much slower, its surface smooth and the rocks of its bed easily seen though through water rendered brown by the peat particles it carried. The Laggan Burn had much the same appearance though when I have seen it running higher it carried black water. Perhaps one day we should explore the valley and compare the water to the White and Black Laggan Burns.

Beside the forestry track, particularly on the side nearer the hills was a shallow drainage ditch. Before the Laggan Burn this was filled with moss and held muddy, peaty water. The dogs kept their paws, and indeed their whole undercarriage, wet and muddy by running through this and they were happy to share this cooling liquid with us with the odd well timed shake. I can’t say that these episodes were unexpected but they did catch me, and the camera lens unawares a few times. After the Laggan Burn the ditches contained crystal clear water with sand rather than peat for their beds.

Cloud above Cairngarroch

And while we consider water we should not forget the sky. We were spared rain and what clouds we had were low level wispy affairs that did not obscure the sun. The day was hot but without the shimmering that can sometimes distort the views.

The middle distance offered us woodland and moorland. Birds flitted from tree to tree, one staying long enough for a careful examination. It looked to me as though it had been grasped about its waist and plunged head first into a pot of yellow paint. Audrey, whose eyesight is better than mine, picked out some more subtle features and back at the car we found it best matched the drawing of a wood warbler.

The forestry had been a’felling in the area so in places the curtains of green had been drawn aside revealing the chaos of felled forest but allowing us views of the more distant landscape. I feel a mixture of wonder and perhaps satisfaction with most natural sights, be they trees, heathland, bog, water (standing, running, falling or suspended in the air), rocks, hills and even paths, but I am still searching for the aesthetic pleasure in recently felled forest. Perhaps I need to spend more time in its contemplation.

Looking up the valley between the hills of the Dungeon and of the Kells we had the green and straw colours of cleared forest and darker ground between that and the Black Water of Dee. That land there must have been too boggy even for Forestry use. Even with binoculars I could not tell if its brown colouring was heather or bog myrtle, but I suspect the latter. Beyond the river the higher ground of Ellergower Knowe with its dense forest hides the distant the Silver Flowe.

The forests here are mostly conifer but with splashes of deciduous, and mostly younger, trees. These look to be natural growths but having seen the deciduous saplings ready for planting on our last walk I wonder if this natural growth has had a helping hand. More obviously natural though are the trees bordering the conifer forests, many of those along our route were eared willow, I think.

Spring is here

Finally, calling in to use the lower section of my varifocals were flowers, blossom, leaves, rocks and artefacts: a rocky arrow pointing towards White Laggan, a national cycleway sign overlooking the loch, southern upland way marker posts, and Dr Borthwick’s memorial bench. Audrey pointed out that the things I had thought were new cones on pines were in fact a brown skin covering new green growth.

We left the forestry track briefly to climb the small knoll with a 272m spot height on the OS map. This gave us both a view of the Loch and its surrounding hills as well as a taste of the off track terrain: rocky and boggy with tussocks and deep heather. Exhilarating.

We noticed the Rosnes Benches which looked like two grey surfboards floating on the moors ready to ride the slopes down to the loch. W were intending to walk up to the Giant’s Axe Head, but noticed sheep on the path up ahead. They would almost certainly have left the path for the hillside as we drew closer but it was lambing time so we would have had to put the dogs on leads, so the the Giant’s Axe Head was removed from our itinerary. But we have visited it before. (PS the pup is in a phase of rapid eye movement sleep beside me as I write, his nose and legs twitching as he dreams of chasing birds across the moors. Unless of course his dreams hark back to a lupine time when his ancestors ran down their prey as a pack).

Rosnes Benches at Loch Dee

The Rosnes benches overlook the loch and its surrounding hills and with the glorious weather were an ideal spot for lunch. On the down side, the ground was boggy in places and something activated the dogs’ digging reflexes so our idyllic lunch break was disturbed as we were showered with globules of wet peat.

Walking back we passed a small group who had stopped for a picnic. They called to the dogs and might I suspect have given them some treats but Sweep doesn’t like strangers and kept his distance. Eddie bounded excitedly towards them then got frightened and ran away, but encouraged by them, repeated the cycle several times getting closer each time. Eventually though, at about 2m from them he couldn’t bring himself to get any closer and instead barked, jumped away, jumped back, barked again etc. much to the group’s amusement.

But sight is not everything.

Sound is so easily overlooked, but two sounds on the walk were important enough to make me wish I could have captured them in my photos. Firstly, birdsong was with us throughout the day. Cuckoos were calling throughout the day and we heard a greenfinch from a stand of trees then heard it from the same trees on the way back. Of the bird songs I could not identify one was pyu-pyu-pyu which I think could be a wood warbler. We saw a bird that would fit the bill but wasn’t making any calls itself. Most of the bird calls we heard were thin with a quality similar to that from a small radio but sometimes the birdsong sounded as though it had come from a top end sound system, with a much fuller quality. Perhaps it was a different bird, or perhaps it was the weather/wind/air pressure. One bird early in the walk kept calling “Swee” to Sweep. I was trying to mimic this so I could remember it for later and each time I said it Sweep would turn to look at me. My research tells me that Chiffchaffs call “Hweep” and listening to recordings I’m pretty sure that was it.

The second sound was water, the sound of running water from the Droughanduie Burn and the lapping of the waves on the shores of Loch Dee, the latter spiced by the call of a distant waterbird.

As we approached the Laggan on our return journey, looking down to the burn itself with some distant sheep, we heard the chirrup of crickets/grasshoppers. The sound was not as prolonged as that of a grasshopper warbler and was just like the sound of cicadas from mediterranean holidays. I can’t say I’ve ever heard one up here before and on hearing them my mind was transported instantly to Portugal. But apparently they are pretty common. Perhaps my ears haven’t been tuned in to them before.

But there is a more powerful and pervasive sound that is so easily ignored. The silence of a forest is not the silence of an upland moor or the silence on the banks of a still loch. Each place, and each time, will have its own noises, the lapping of waves on a shore, or the creaking of trees in the wind, and to these we bring our own: the tread of a boot on heather, the panting of a dog, the creak of a rucksack strap, or the rustle of clothing, and each is modulated by the environment rendering them subtlety different when heard amongst trees, in heather or at a loch-side. These differences are difficult to appreciate but we are I think aware of them at a subconscious level.

Another sensory dimension will have been experienced more vividly by the dogs, the scent-scape, which to our human perception seems hardly evident.  Sweep and Eddie investigated many areas closely with their noses as well as standing, snout in the air, sampling the chemical messages carried on the air. They would at times stop, gazing intently into the trees, presumably having caught a scent too faint for the human nose. I don’t recall many specific scents other than a whiff of pine by recently cut logs, but I suspect the overall scent milieu of open moorland, forest and loch registers differently in my brain. Could I identify these places by smell alone? Perhaps. Unlike the dogs, we did not purposely leave a scent trail behind.

Taste is perhaps the sense which contributed least to my experience of the walk. The main opportunity would have been to taste the water with peat and that with sand. The dogs drank from burns, muddy pools, clear pools and the loch whereas we, fearing gastrointestinal pathogens, brought tap water in plastic bottles. I hadn’t come across any vegetation I would recognise as edible so my only taste experience from the walk, other than a ham and mustard bagel, was salt tasted when licking my lips after a slug of the imported tap water. Perhaps I should walk out with heather honey on future walks.

Without a sense of touch and proprioception I would have been unable to complete this walk but the importance of touch is a rarely acknowledged aspect of the walk’s sensory experience. On reflection, most of my touch experience was through my feet and legs. I could feel both the gradient and the terrain. The forestry track was always firm but in places smooth, in others uneven with small mobile rocks. The moorland offered the bounciness of heather or peat, the watery give of boggy grasses, and the rocky firmness of granite. I had consciously registered the climb away from the car, glad that the return would be downhill but had not remembered the descents as carefully so was surprised how much ascent we had when returning. My lower limbs had the hard graft of sensation on the walk whereas touch using my hands was more of a luxury, and often an unthinking use. When I looked closely at a rock, flower or leaf I would hold it and while doing so experience its physical characteristics. It took a conscious effort however to do this consciously. I had sat upon the Rosnes bench looking out to the Loch while at my side I was running a hand over the surface of the bench. Did this alter my experience? I don’t know but I suspect those perceptions are now linked in my mind. Only occasionally was touching the main purpose of an examination but it showed me that similar looking leaves can feel quite different.

Easily missed unless you tread on it

And staying with skin as a sensory organ, since I had forgotten to apply my SPF50, the sun has left me with a warmth of my head and arms. It might have been worse but I had brought the suncream in my bag and applied the protection after lunch.

And other senses?

What of Chronoception? My perception of the passage of time during the walk was I think suspended. I had no sense of time passing which perhaps reflects an absence of boredom. Each moment was filled with sensory experience. To look ahead to a destination fixes a distance to travel, either in space or time and travelling that route will have a temporal dimension. Perhaps experiencing each moment of the journey for itself can remove that perception of passing time.

On paper this looked to be a rather commonplace walk, but it proved to be anything but commonplace. The recognition that sound was an aspect of my outdoor experience that I had previously overlooked had opened my eyes, or more accurately my other senses to a fuller experience.

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5.1 miles 3h 50m ascent 112m

Another Rosnes Bench outing. I was keen this time to find the Covenanter’s Memorial that I had missed on the previous visit to Caldons when we were walking the SUW. We didn’t realise it when we set off but this was to be the Glentrool yellow waymarked route so there were no navigation problems.

The day started a little overcast and looking up to the sky with the wind to my back, the clouds were moving left to right so I predicted rain. Wind on your back, clouds left to right, weather’s not right. My walking partner dismissed this as an old wives’ tale, preferring to put her trust in the met office. Predicting rain in D&G is rarely wrong.

Crossing the Water of Trool bridge we turned west along the SUW, and almost immediately spotted three Rosnes Benches among the oaks, hazel and birch. I hadn’t really had time to get into “looking for the benches” mode and could easily have walked on past them. It was a bit too chilly to lounge on the benches so we took the necessary photos and moved on.

Next on my list of things to find was the Covenanters’ graves. I had not found these at the end of this SUW leg so I presumed they were a little way off the SUW, perhaps hidden in the woods. Imagine my surprise therefore to come upon a large sign “Martyrs Grave” by the path, and a very visible 1.4m high stone enclosure just a stone’s throw away. How we can have missed this I don’t know. I suppose back then we would have been walking for 6 hours and the bracken would have been higher, but all the same it was a bit of an observation failure. Perhaps it says something about me that I did notice the lack of an apostrophe on the sign.

The walls of the enclosure were a little high for us to see over easily but there are plinths to allow the vertically challenged to get a view of the inside. A gravestone inscribed with the names of the dead stands within the enclosure and a plaque on the surrounding wall reads:

“In memory of six martyrs who suffered at this spot for their attachment to the covenanted cause of Christ in Scotland Jan 23 1685”

Malcolm Harper in Rambles in Galloway (1876) gives the story. “In the quiet of a Sabbath morn of January 1685, a few of the persecuted, undeterred by the rigour of the season, had assembled in the seclusion of this retreat to worship God according to the dictates of their conscience, when they were suddenly surprised by a troop of dragoons, under the command of Colonel Douglas, and after a brief resistance, six persons, James and Robert Dun, Alex. McAulay, John McLude, Thomas and John Stevenson, were killed. One of the party, by plunging into the lake, and keeping his head above water, covered by a heath bush, managed to conceal himself from the infuriated soldiers, and had a remarkable escape. Of the dragoons two were killed, one of whom. Captain Urquhart, was shot under rather peculiar circumstances. As tradition narrates, he had that morning, exasperated by the difficulties of the road, sworn a dreadful oath that he would be revenged upon the unoffending Covenanters. He had dreamed that he would be killed at a place called the ” Caldons,” and while approaching the cottage of a shepherd in search of fugitives, he inquired the name of the place, on learning which he gave utterance to a fearful oath, and drew up his horse, uncertain whether to advance or retire. At that moment a shot fired from the window brought him to the ground.”

It is a peaceful place now, among the oaks and birch of Caldons Wood, silent but for wind rustling the trees and birdsong.

We continued along the SUW, over several mossy knolls with oaks in bud, their autumn leaves still on the ground. The woods then gave way to a more fen like terrain. The SUW here is a man-made path giving easy dry walking. The land beside it though was very boggy indeed. The dogs as ever felt the need to take a dip in the pools we passed. Some of these were black whereas others had crystal clear water.

Last week we had identified a shrub as bog myrtle and we now saw that large swathes of land were covered in this, with catkins but as yet no leaves. I look forward to seeing what this plant looks like later in the year.

Water of Trool, bog myrtle in the foreground

As we made our way through the bog/fen safely on the artificial path we noticed a walker on the far side of the Water of Trool, his large rucksack marking him as an SUW walker. He shouted across to ask how far it was to a bridge. When told it was at least half a mile, perhaps further and he looked dejected. He had followed what he had thought was the correct route, and when the path petered out he had persisted and was now walking through very unpleasant terrain. I suggested he leave the river and strike out for the nearby road and he agreed.

This reminded me of our own SUW experiences.  Beguiled from the true route by the SUW’s version of sirens. Paths that take you into increasingly difficult terrain and then fade away often leaving you able to see where you should be, but with something preventing you getting there. We can laugh about our own SUW experiences now but I know how that walker felt.

When we got to the footbridge over the Water of Trool just short of where it joins the Water of Minnoch I had a look at the signs to see how easy it might have been to mistakenly cross the bridge if one was following the SUW, and the waymarker posts seemed pretty clear. But then we did walk right past the graves at Caldons without noticing them. The SUW experience wouldn’t be the same without some route errors.

The next section was the same riverside track we had walked the previous week, but now the bluebells and wood anenome were coming into there own. Sweep went in for some major undergrowth snuffling here but came away with nothing more than a muddy face.

We had another look at the waterfalls near Stroan Bridge then rejoined the yellow route on the far side of the visitor centre car park. The return section which is initially through felled forestry but on a very easy path, then zig-zags down through deciduous trees and back to Caldons. It passes just below the Spout Head Waterfall on Torr Lane. Why this wee burn is named a lane I don’t know. Lanes are waterways “of which the motion is so slow as to be scarcely perceptible” and that does not describe this stream.

The county flower of Wigtonshire is Yellow Flag, but not the type of yellow flag we found along the route.

Not the right yellow flag

We came upon a sign of things to come in this area recently cleared of conifers: several dozen deciduous saplings: maple, sycamore etc.

Loch Trool, the photo at the top of the post is twenty minutes later

Once back at Caldons we headed into Kenmure Woods along the Loch Trool trail and found a couple of large boulders beside the loch to sit on for lunch. A couple of dozen swallows were skimming the water and we watched them through binoculars. Once we sat down though, they came much closer and their jumbled chattering was our lunch soundtrack.

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