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[Trail blog is here]

We had a long walk today through "the peat hags of despair" aka. The route into Shielin of Mark. The walking from Braemar through the Balmoral estate was very pretty. Lots of meandering trails through open forest with running rivers.

We had a nice lunch stop at Gelder Shiel Bothy (Queen’s bothy) – running water and toilets (again!)

As we left the bothy, we bumped into lots of people hiking down from Lochnagar which looked like a full on hike. We were already knackered and I was glad we’d taken the "low level route". We passed through Spittal of Glenmuick (pronounced Glen-mick) and stopped for a cup of soup from the vending machine in the visitors centre.   From there we headed up the valley towards Shielin of Mark. By this point I was extremely tired and would have stopped if we’d found a good campsite. Fortunately we pressed on and joined Andy and Richard who were looking a their GPS trying to find the bothy. We literally stumbled over it as it’s very well hidden in the peat hags.  The cheers of joy were shared by all.

We had a good time in the Bothy. John Handcock (camping with a tarp) had made himself a nice "nest" in the bothy; it was small but nice and dry so we cooked up dinner. Richard had extra Chicken Tikka from Expedition foods so we tried one and it was fantastic! Scarfed down dinner and then headed off to bed for a well earned rest.

Today was very wet and I noticed my sil-nylon pack cover from ULA pools water at the base getting the pack wet.   I think a grommet hole in the bottom would help to fix the problem.

Distance today was 27km making 206km to date

On to day 11