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We left Braemar around 9am after a lovely breakfast of porridge with ‘the full Scottish’ cooked breakfast. To Lynn’s delight this B&B (Calleter Lodge) served real (even by Seattle standards) coffee. We left the B&B fully caffeinated and took a path up and over the Lions Face. It was named this because of a limestone rock face that is supposed to resemble… a lion’s face. I think I might have been able to see it too with the help of LSD.

From the footpath we headed into the lands of Balmoral (old Queenie’s estate) towards our lunch stop at Gelder Shield bothy. There are two bothies here in a beautiful panoramic setting. The Queen’s bothy looved quite nice but was padlocked :-(. The other bothy was great – yet another maintained by the MBA (mountain bothys association). The one even had a nice squat toilet with running water to flush with. After lunch and a recheck of Lynn’s feet we headed out to out next stop, our planned camp at Shielin of Mark. This turned our to be a bit of a slog due to distance and the fact the bothy was ‘hidden’ in peat hags. We ended up finding it with four other challengers using GPS and a compass bearing. I was told ‘you won’t find it until you drop down the chimney’ – totally true. We made camp here totally exhausted but glad to have the peat hag slog behind us.

We caught us with some familiar challenger friends here including John, Andy, Richard and Gordon. Richard gave me a chicken tikka masala meal from expedition foods. Wow! It was amazing nice and spicy, much better than anything else I’ve had in camp.

The next morning the fair skies departed and we hiked throughout the day in driving rain, low cloud with the occasional tease of sunshine. Our planned stop was Tarfside where some TGO volunteers run a temporary hostel. I’d read of joys of this place in prior TGO trip diaries. Today was one of the wetter days leaving me feeling like a bag of Uncle Ben’s boil in the bag rice. It was so wet we had water under our goretex jackets and pants.

We arrived at St Drogan’s Lodge at 1:30 and were lucky to get two floor spaces in a large room. The rest of the day was sheer bliss accomanied with gallons of tea, plates of ‘proper’ bacon butties and what seemed like endless flats of beer. The ladies staffing the lodge were all volunteers all associated with ‘the walk’ in some way The festivities went on late but I hit the hay at 7:30pm. I’ve been sleeping early and asking around 5:30 for our planned early starts.

Today’s plan was to hike from Tarfside to the campsite at Northwater Bridge stepping in at Edzell for lunch. We left the lodge at 8:20 and immediately hit rain. Again the sun shone occasionally while the rains kept coming. Thankfully there were no winds today so while we were wet and soggy we were able to keep warn. We got into Edzell (18km) at 1pm without any major steps. Lynn’s ankles were giving here grief from yesterday’s peat hag hopping so we decided to cut the day short and get a hotel in Edzell. It feels good to be dry but bad that well miss out on the inevitable socializing at the camp tonight.

Tomorrow is our last day of hiking. By staying in Edzell we’ve added about 5km to tomorrow’s planned route of 18km. We aim to be on the beach at St Cyrus by mid-afternoon bringing to a end our little walk across Scotland.