OS Explorer map OL59, Aboyne, Alford & Strathdon – I do not own this map, and had not visited it before starting this blog. Visited for this post 5th July 2024.
Map area link. Google maps location links: Ballater, Morven, Loch Kinord, Dinnet, Aboyne, Kincardine O’Neill, Aberdeen
In my previous post, I told you about the week of hiking I did in the Cairngorms in July, as a practice hike to help me decide whether I’d like to do a longer long-distance walk in my career break in September/October. In that post – which I think may be the longest one on my blog so far, at just a sliver under 8000 words – I got up to the end of day 5, as I arrived in Ballater, on the edge of this map area. I’ll now continue on from there, to tell you about my last couple of days!
End of day 5
After my long day 4 when I went up Lochnagar, I had an easier day 5, with about 13.5 miles of downhill or flat walking to get me in to Ballater, where I’d be taking day 6 as a rest day. I arrived at about 4pm.
Ballater is nice! The streets are pretty, it’s surrounded by hills, and I was surprised, looking it up just now, to find it described as a village, and that it has a population of only 1400. It feels much more town-like, and there are a lot of little shops, cafés and so on – on a par, I’d say, with my home in Moreton-in-Marsh, population ~5000.
My acommodation for the next two nights was a nice little room above an Italian restaurant, which felt very luxurious after my camping, hostel and bothy nights! For dinner, I had some chip shop chips with cheese and curry sauce, and a Co-op samosa, and went to bed well satisfied.
Day 6: Rest day in Ballater
Day 6 was a rest day, and I did appropriately little. I lazed around in my room for a fair chunk of the morning, then went out and had brunch in a café.
Since I’m vegetarian-and-no-egg, it’s a bit of a mixed bag what I get if having a cooked breakfast. If I just get the veggie breakfast without the egg – usually veggie sausages, baked beans, hash brown, tomatoes and mushrooms – that’s okay, but it is nice when there’s something filling the egg slot. In some places that have a vegan cooked breakfast they’ll do scrambled tofu, which works well; I’ve also often seen half an avocado, which always feels a little odd – I do like avocado, but just half an avocado sitting on a plate I’m not sure about. Here, they had roasted vegetables in the “egg slot”, which I liked! It being Scotland, some veggie haggis would’ve been even better – I love veggie haggis and always buy some to cook with when I can get my hands on it at home – but no luck this time!
After hanging around in the café reading for a bit, I went for a poke around a few shops and buildings, including the old railway station. Ballater was the terminus of a a line heading westwards from Aberdeen until it closed in the sixties, and was notably the station for Balmoral, so had a lot of royal visitors. It’s been converted into a café, tourist information and visitor centre, with the old royal waiting room possible to go and look in.
There was also a little exhibition on in the station building about the Newfoundland Overseas Forestry Unit, namely Newfoundlander foresters who were brought over to Scotland and posted in the area during World War II to support the war effort. There were just little stories about their lives having moved to the area and so on, which was interesting!
After that, I went back to my room and lazed about for most of the rest of the day, with just a couple of trips out to get some dinner from the Co-op, and to drop off and collect my washing from the Ballater hostel, who had graciously agreed that I could pay for them to do a load of washing on the same basis as they do for their guests, even though I wasn’t staying there.
As a final adventure, back in my hotel room I found that I had a tick on my side – my first time! I’d been checking myself for them in the evenings, but clearly forgot to the previous night. Fortunately removing it with my little never-before-used tick remover card all went smoothly, and there were no further issues.
Day 7: Ballater to Aboyne via Morven
When I arrived in Ballater, I had a few choices about where to walk next. One option was to loop back westwards into the Cairngorms. Another was to go eastwards along the Deeside Way towards Aberdeen. After my rest day, it’d be Friday, and I wanted to travel home on Sunday, so I only really had two days to play with. I wasn’t really feeling like another two whole long days of mountainous hiking with my full pack, which is what the westwards option would be most likely to look like, and I didn’t find any highly appealing westwards options that were the right length, and ended at a good place for onward travel home.
So the Deeside Way, which parallels a bus route to Aberdeen so has easy transport, looked good in that regard. However, the Deeside Way also isn’t that interesting for a whole day or more of walking – it’s a “rail trail”, i.e. mostly consists of the old trackbed of the Ballater-to-Aberdeen railway converted into a footpath, so entirely flat, I wasn’t sure the views would be all that, it’s next to the A93 road for most of its length so there’d probably be traffic noise, and so on.
The option I came up with was to, on day seven, still head eastwards in the Aberdeen direction, but via a big northern loop to take me up the mountain Morven. I felt even better about this option after catching site of a map of Pictish stones on the wall in the hostel while there to do my washing, and seeing that I could visit the stones at Tullich and Loch Kinord. The hostel owner also gave me some very welcome tips about routes up Morven. The final appealing fact was that, with there being regular bus service between Aberdeen and Ballater, I could leave a bag of belongings at the Ballater hostel, do my walk with a lighter pack, get the bus back at the end of the day and stay in the hostel that night! It’d be another long day – more so at about 21 miles, since I ended up continuing to Aboyne rather than stopping in Dinnet as I’d considered doing – but with the ligher pack it was fine.
I set off at about 7:30am after buying some provisions in the Co-op, initially along the Deeside Way as far as the village of Tullich. Leaving Ballater, I entered areas unique to this map area for the first time, Ballater being in the overlap area with map OL53. At Tullich, I stopped to take a look at the ruined church and, especially, the collection of early medieval Pictish stones displayed in the churchyard.
They were very good! Some were cross slabs, which I’ve seen plenty of before (e.g. in Argyll in 2016 and 18) but were still good, and others, especially one, had the distinctive Pictish designs on – animals and so on.
From there, I turned north and started to ascend, walking up a pretty valley, which started out wooded and gradually turned into moorland.
I reached the top of Morven at about midday. There are no higher peaks to the east or north of Morven, and nothing higher to the west or south for a substantial distance, so there are long views in all directions on a clear day.
To the south, I could clearly see Lochnagar, where I was the day before, and the easternmost Munro, Mount Keen. To the west were the main bulk of the Cairngorms, and to the east just rolling, green, hilly countryside. I could just about make out the sea to the southeast.
There’s a little stone windbreak/shelter on top of the mountain, with a visitor book in a box, which I duly signed.
I had the peak to myself – and hadn’t seen other walkers since Tullich – until another group arrived at the mountaintop as I was leaving.
After that, I desdcended gradually in a southeastern direction, stopping for lunch part-way down with a view over the Aberdeenshire countryside.
My main landmarks in the afternoon came at and around Loch Kinord, where there’s another Pictish stone, this one being a cross slab with really distinct and impressive knotwork.
As well as Loch Kinord just being a pretty place – it’s a country park type thing which seemed to be popular for short walks – there’s the remains of a crannog in the lake. A crannog is a kind of prehistoric dwelling build on an artificial island. Since they were wooden, all one can see nowadays is the island itself, so if you ever see a small, circular island in a Scottish loch, it might well be one!
From there, I walked to my first intended end point at Dinnet, but, still feeling fairly energetic, decided to do a few extra miles along the Deeside Way to the western edge of the large village/small town of Aboyne, where I duly caught my bus back to Ballater.
I stayed that night in the hostel, which was nice! Unlike the one in Braemar where I’d stayed a few nights before, which is a Hostelling Scotland hostel, this one was independent; it felt nicely small and cosy.
Day 8 morning: Aboyne to Kincardine O’Neill
The weather was looking bad on the Saturday that’d be the penultimate day of my trip, with heavy rain forecast, so instead of planning a full day of walking along the Deeside Way towards Aberdeen, I decided that I’d just start travelling home a bit early, and took the opportunity to arrange to stay Saturday night with my friend Little S in Edinburgh.
In the end though, when Saturday arrived, the forecast had improved slightly, with the rain not expected to start until about 11am, so I decided to do just a little bit of walking before starting my travel back. I got the bus from Ballater to Aboyne to pick up where I left off the afternoon before, and headed east for about 7 miles, ending at Kincardine O’Neill.
Aboyne itself was okay, though nothing special and less nice than Ballater in my view. I stopped at the co-op there and bought some warm hash browns, which for breakfast I put in the bread roll I had left over from the last night’s dinner!
Interestingly, just after Aboyne, there’s a section of a mile or so where the Deeside Way doesn’t exist, i.e. there’s no marked path and I suppose the official advice must just be to walk along the road. However, the old railway route is still there and is a perfectly walkable informal path, and this being Scotland where there’s public right to access on nearly all land, it’s entirely fine to walk on it. I’m not sure exactly why this section isn’t maintained and signed as part of the Way; I assume probably some kind of dispute with the landowner. There were some muddy bits and a few fallen trees to duck under, but it wasn’t too bad – however, in one particularly challenging bit where I took my pack off to get through a smaller gap under a fallen tree, I managed to lose my rain poncho, which had been hanging off the outside – alas!
I was soon back on the Way itself, and had a fun encounter with some very friendly cows in a field adjoining the Way – they were very interested in me, running over when they saw me, then following me along their side of the fence as far as they could!
Just before Kincardine O’Neill, there’s a section where the Way leaves the old rail route, passing through some pretty woods with a little ascent and descent.
And that was it! I was soon in Kincardine O’Neill with the rain getting started. The end of my week’s hike!
Days 8-9: Edinburgh and the journey home
I got on the bus from Kincardine O’Neill into Aberdeen, thereby leaving this map area. This is the 201 bus, which runs hourly between Aberdeen and Ballater, continuing to Braemar in alternate hours, and running between 6am and 11pm, which I think is a really great service for an area that, at least west of Banchory, is pretty sparsely populated. I’d love it if the 801 bus, running between Cheltenham and Chipping Norton via Bourton-on-the-Water, Stow-on-the-Wold, and my home in Moreton-in-Marsh, so through a more densely populated region, ran until 11pm. The last bus in some directions is at about 6:30pm, which means an evening out, for example visiting my friends Ex-Linguistician and Unicorn in Cheltenham, or going to the theatre in Chipping Norton, just isn’t possible.
I did, though, have a bit of a surprise in my usage of the 201 on this trip, with the price! Since January 2023, England had had a £2 cap on bus fares (now £2.50, and rising to £3 soon), which I was used to, but Scotland didn’t have such a policy. My ticket from Ballater to Aberdeen was £14, which felt a little steep.
The train lines heading south from Aberdeen and Inverness both have a regular service from Scotrail, but also occasional LNER services that are extensions of the regular services between Edinburgh and London – one a day in each direction in the case of Inverness, and three for Aberdeen. These services, as well as being on nicer trains – in my opinion at least, though most rail enthusiasts might eat me for preferring an IET to an HST – have cheaper advance-purchase tickets, sufficiently so that a first-class ticket to Edinburgh on an LNER is actually often cheaper than a standard-class one on Scotrail. Justifying it to myself on that basis, I got myself a first-class LNER ticket, for what I think is the very reasonable price of £22.60 (with my 26-30 railcard, and using split-ticketing) from Aberdeen to Edinburgh.
I took advantage of that to sit in the first-class lounge at Aberdeen, have some tea and biscuits, and use the shower to make myself a little less smelly after my morning’s walk!
The journey was indeed nice and comfortable as well as scenic, and I got some tea, orange juice, water, a chickpea salad and a nice lemony dessert pot from the catering!
I met up with Little S, and we had a jolly time that evening and the next morning. We got dinner in a pub that, although rather noisy, did serve us some “veggie haggis bonbons” that I rather enjoyed.
We lazed around in her Little S’s flat chatting in the evening, and in the morning got a tram up to Leith for a bit of a wander, looking in some shops and having some brunch, before I left for home at lunchtime.
Closing remarks
That was it! The end of my trip, which I have to say I really enjoyed.
As discussed in my last post, I did the trip to see how comfortable I’d find doing a long-distance walk while camping (and carrying camping equipment). In terms of the camping, my comments in the “Thoughts on camping” section of that last post still stand – i.e. I can do it, it’s adequate, but it’s a lot of faff and a lot less comfortable than being in a real building, so I expect I’ll only do it where there’s a good reason, like letting me access somewhere I couldn’t get to otherwise.
In terms of the hiking, I feel like things went pretty well! I walked 7, 15, 14, 18, 14, 0, 21 and 7 miles on each day, having my full pack for all except the 21-mile one, and doing some fairly serious ascent and descent. While I decided to do a lighter pack on the penultimate day, it was out of just not really wanting to, rather than feeling like I couldn’t. I didn’t get any injuries or aggravate my joints as far as I know. So while I don’t know for certain whether a longer walk would cause me issues, I’d be willing to try out, say, a two week hike with a couple of rest days, and feel pretty optimistic that it’d go well. In the end, I didn’t do a long-distance walk during my career break, but I’d still like to try it sometime!
Visiting all the maps! 