Wednesday – Golspie

Weather: sunshiney day

Miles:  10.16 (and another two thirds of a lap for the boys)

After breakfast we had a trip to Tescos to buy supplies for the trip into the wilderness then set off up north in convoy. The journey was quite interesting with seals and interesting bits of oil industry hardware in the Cromary Firth. After an hour and a bit we reached Golspie and parked up at the trail head in the town centre.

Golspie

Golspie is pretty short but doesn’t have much fireroad. The climb wiggles up for ages then rears up in the “lactic ladder” which isn’t too bad if you don’t go too slow.

Climbing through the trees

Lactic ladder

The only real bit of fireroad gets you to the top of the hill where there is an excuse for a shelter for lunch.

The top

There's also an interesting folly/monument and some free binoculars so you can check that nobody has nicked your car.

I can see the sea

The downhill starts off swoopy and gets progressively scarier and rockier, thankfully there was always a chicken line for people like me but it wasn’t always on the same side of the blind summits. Lower down there were a lot more slower speed obstacles and some challenging switchbacks before the trail turned into a red grade speedway, complete with a hidden pit of death that everyone only realised they’d flown over after they landed safely on the other side.

Down to the seaside

Tricky corner

We were soon back at the bottom so the boys went for another lap (well almost a lap, we didn’t go quite to the top) and the girls went for coffee and cake.

Cake...

...or death

Since this was the rest day we decided to go on a hunt for ice cream in the city of Dornoch. All we could find was Mr Whippy style rubbish, not the nice looking stuff the school kids were parading round (back at school in mid August!), eventually we accosted a gang and they pointed us to a very fine ice cream shop that met our demanding requirements (apart from the lack of chocolate plug at the bottom of the chocolate covered waffle cone). After our ice creams we had a pleasant drive down the Dornoch Firth to our accommodation for the night, Carbisdale Castle.

Carbisdale Castle SYHA

It’s more a turn of the century stately home than a castle, gifted to the SYHA by a handsome fellow (according to the girls) in the 70s. The place was falling to bits in places, had some dodgy plumbing, involved a massive hike between the rooms and the kitchen and didn’t have enough cookers for all the guests, although to its credit it had things most hostels don’t have like a statue gallery, leather sofas and a haunted room (which the girls ended up in). The night’s feasting was a glorious spread courtesy of Julia, followed by a stroll across the river to a very dark bar complete with bagpipe fusion soundtrack.