Stronend
Drive by summit
We were driving down to family for Christmas, and needed to take two cars. I was in the electric and on my own. Managed to make it to Perth to the fast chargers there and assumed I’d be having lunch on my own whilst the others went out when they arrived. I had thought of doing Craigowl Hill on the way down but decided it wasn’t worth it as it was raining on the way past. Plus I’m not sure I would’ve had enough charge for the detour. Whilst charging I looked at sotlas and decided I’d do Stronend as I drove by. It has a reasonable walk in, estimated at 1.5 hours, but I thought I could shave a bit of time off that. It was very convenient browsing the summits on sotlas and then downloading someone’s GPS track and opening it in OS Maps.
The route follows a farm track for quite a while, you go back on yourself from the layby parking, up to the farm, and then along the track. It takes you up between the two hills, and then across a stream and on towards the summit. The track is decent at the bottom but the higher you go the wetter it seems to get!
My boots were pretty soaked as I squelched along. It wasn’t raining but the air was damp and the cloud was low, so not much of a view. The path is pretty clear the whole way to the summit, although with a few forks that I had to check the map to make sure I was taking the right one. The summit cairn came into sight and I was pleased to have reach the top.
It has a nice cairn at the top, offering plenty of shelter from the wind. There’s a trig point that is covered, or maybe built?, with cobbles. Conveniently the top was open and so I used that for my mast support. I setup the slim G for 2m, spotted and called CQ. Not quite a HF pile up but several folks returned my call at once, and in about 2 minutes I had five in the log and was satisfied. Given it was now 2pm, I thought I’d better make a move and packed up. I jogged down most of the way to try and make up some time. I was soon back to the main track, however, it felt slow going to get back to the car. I was pretty soaked, my boots aren’t particularly waterproof, and the dampness had seeped into my top layers. I got changed and then headed to the house.
