Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009: Pitlochry Volksmarch

Having breakfast in the hotel we watched all the school children congregate in the village square to be transported by busses to the local schools. They seemed well behaved but their future in Alyth, at least, would appear to be problematic as our proprietor said that the town had been contracting for the last few decades and jobs were very hard to find. We thought that was a pity as it seemed to us to be a town with a lot of charm. Finishing breakfast, we checked out and drove generally westward until we joined the major A9 road heading North to Pitlochry.

Arriving in Pitlochry after about an hour and a half of driving, I found I was quite ready to stop for a break; in general when driving in Scotland and England I was far more weary than I would have been driving the same time or distance in the U.S. As it turned out, there was a Volksmarch in Pitlochry and I thought that taking a nice, relaxing hike would be just the ticket to recover from road weariness. Parking in a lot next to the train station, we started out walking westward a bit down the main street of the town, which boasted nice old stone buildings with steeply pitched roofs. The presence of several tour busses in the town parking lot, plus the wide array of shops and restaurants on the main street, plus the fact that we had to pay 2 pounds sterling for just 4 hours of parking, all indicated to me that Pitlochry is quite a tourist destination.

Turning northward, we walked pretty much straight uphill until we came to Culic Brae, a pretty little pond at the base of a hill with a farmhouse perched above. A pair of swans and a family of ducks were paddling around and I tried to call them over to us. The swans and most of the older, more experienced ducks, completely ignored me either because I had the wrong accent or because I didn't have any food for them in my hands. But one duckling, probably the youngest and least experienced of the lot, did trouble himself to swim all the way over to me and ask for a hand out, making me feel guilty that I had lured him over under false pretences, so to speak. I would have fed him if we had any duck-friendly snacks but as it turned out we had neglected to bring any snacks at all for our walk, just water.

So, after apologizing profusely to the duckling I continued our walk which gradually curved eastward uphill past a golf course. There we spied some enthusiastic duffers eagerly getting clubs out of car boots (American: car trunks) and donning their golfing gear. As the road crested a hill and turned toward a small house with clothes drying on the washline outside, we had a magnificent panoramic view of the valley below us. The farms and fields formed an aesthetically pleasing mosaic of light and dark areas, and we could easily spot the small white shapes of sheep grazing in a couple of the green pastures.

From the farmhouse the road proceeded underneath a beautiful green colonnade of oak trees on both our right and left. The bushy oaks were old enough and large enough to have grown together over the country lane in a beautifully green, leafy archway. That's when I had the epiphany that once again I was having one of life's peak experiences: Here I was having a beautiful walk on a gorgeous day in fascinating countryside around a pretty little town. The experience was almost identical to when we walked around Rothenburg, Germany, during Wanderung 15. It just doesn't get any better than that to my way of thinking, and it is quite heaven enough for me.

Turning right at a T intersection, we walked downhill a bit and suddenly saw a very suspicious-looking carved stone standing bolt upright in the middle of a farmer's field. I later found it that it was called the "Dane's Stone", so it probably was a Viking rune stone rather than a Pictish stone. I didn't feel like I could walk across the field to inspect it more closely as it belonged to a farmer and there were sheep in the field whom I would have disturbed, but I surely wish I had been able to make a closer examination.

Ziz-zagging down the hill to a highway, we continued to walk eastward out of town. For a while we had a muddy path beside the road, but finally that petered out and we had to choose between walking on the grass verge or in the roadway itself. We did a bit of each depending on the traffic situation as the road crossed a slope toward the next small town. Across the sweeping vistas of the valley we saw a mysterious but striking mix of sun and gray clouds hovering at the upper reaches of the valley spread before us. The upper slopes and tops of the hills at the sides of the valley were covered with a dark coniferous forest while the towns nestled in the broad, fertile bottomlands, and we were both struck by how much this particular area of Scotland looked like the Black Forest of Germany. The only difference that I could see is that the steeply pitched roofs of the houses in the town were covered with gray pieces of slate rather than the reddish-brown glazed tile roofs of Germany. Curiously, the scene made me feel nostalgic for the Black Forest, but it was odd to feel nostalgic for a place that I had only seen once.

At the house just past the lay by (American: pullover or parking area on the side of the road), we found a gate into the farmer's field that our directions mentioned and started walking downhill following some tractor tracks in the muddy ground. It was fun, but occasionally challenging, to cross the styles from one field to the next as we tramped across the farm fields in a northerly direction. It became progressively muddier as we reached the bottomlands alongside the stream, and at one point where the pasture had been churned up by the sheep or cattle we had to make a rather broad detour to avoid sinking into "the Slough of Despond". By precariously balancing on a line of rocks we did manage to cross the field, but not without getting our boots and pant cuffs muddy.

Climbing slowly back up a hillside, we crossed several small rills or streams, and as it had been raining in the last few days, they were full of water and happily burbling along. Leaving the fields and bottomlands, our trail led us through some deciduous forest, mostly oak and ash, I think, that was in the lush dark green foliage of late summer. Stray rays of golden sunlight penetrating the canopy above lit sections of the carpet of moss and ferns that lined both sides of our path, and except for the twittering of the occasional bird it was wonderfully hushed and quiet.

Our Volksmarch directions mentioned that we would pass a waterfall, and finally I started to hear the unmistakable low, swishing rumble of a waterfall not too far off. Seeing a path that cut over to a nearby river, I followed that a bit and found, indeed a small cascade churning away. I was a bit disappointed as it was not really much of a waterfall, but it also seemed too small to be producing the magnitude of low rumbling that I was feeling, so we continued downhill to see if we could find another one. Curling around we finally came to an observation platform courteously provided by the Rotary Club of Pitlochry.

From that platform we saw the magnificent Black Spout Waterfall! The brilliantly white, frothy cascade of water dropped at least 100 feet (I estimated 30 meters) straight down the face of a black, basaltic looking rock cliff into a small pool of water. Beautiful, and quite noisy. Monika and I both tried to take movies to capture the noise and tumultuous cascade of the water down the cliff as well as still pictures.

From the waterfall we were guided by my GPS back down the hill into Pitlochry. At the local Visitor Information center we made reservations at a hotel in Aviemore for the next 3 nights. After we had lunch, we hopped into the car to drive on into the Scottish Highlands to the Mackenzies Pub and Inn in Aviemore.