Beinn Mhic-Mhonaidh

River Orchy falls at Eas Urchaidh

River Orchy at Eas Urchaidh

Beinn Mhic-Mhonaidh from south

Summit ridge and cairn of Beinn Mhic-Mhonaidh from south-west

Looking south west towards Beinn Eunaich

Looking East to ascent route and Beinn Chuirn

Wednesday, 29 October 2014

Ascent:      805 metres
Distance:     14 kilometres
Time:            4 hours 31 minutes

c    Beinn Mhic-Mhonaidh       796m        2hrs 39mins

It had been quite a while since I had been on the hills and a stubborn cold had restricted my activities and ebullience over the last week. I normally shake them off with a run or a decent walk and for the first time in a week, it was to be a dry day. Mark had recently retired and we agreed to climb Beinn Mhic-Mhonaidh, a shy Corbett in Glen Orchy. It is hidden beyond the forestry plantations that dominate this beautiful glen in Argyll. For whatever reason, I had never ventured down the glen before despite it being little more than an hour away from home. After the recent rains, the river Orchy was in spate and provided a wonderful spectacle as we travelled down the glen from Bridge of Orchy. I parked by the bridge at Eas Urchaidh and we were enthralled by the waterfalls just upriver from the bridge.

The guidebooks and walk guides had been disparaging about the walk-in, describing tough river crossings over the Allt Broighleachan and a boggy track through the forest. Mark confirmed these fears from his previous experience of the hill and we had just suffered three days of torrential rain that had closed several local roads through landslips. In practice, it was a good trail up to a meadow at 2 kilometres and a bridge here led to another less distinct trail leading westwards and crossing a couple of burns. We managed to get across these with dry feet and arrived at the stile by the remnants of shielings at Airigh Chailleach. From here there is little alternative but to slog up the steep south-east face of the long ridge of Beinn Mhic-Mhonaidh - 600 metres of unrelenting boggy grassy slopes. The damp conditions made defying gravity more of a trial than usual as did my cold. Normally I would put my head down and slog up the slopes but today I needed some breaks to stop, talk and relieve the tedium and aching legs.

Visibility was not as good as we had hoped with the surrounding hills coated in thin mists. Once on the southwest end of the ridge, it was a pleasant stroll to the significant summit cairn. There was little wind and it had been a hard sweat on the ascent but I soon cooled down whilst eating some lunch. We continued along the summit ridge to the lochan just north of the summit. Unfortunately, it was also bathed in mist, before turning south and heading down the challenging gradient of tussocky grass and bogs back to the shielings. I was drained of energy as we clambered the stile and began the final 5 kilometres down the trails through the plantations to the River Orchy and car park.

The highlight of the walk back was the sighting of a medium-sized dark brown mammal which could have been a polecat. It was the colour of a fox but about 40cm long, it crossed the track about 25 metres ahead of us and disappeared into the grassland adjoining the burn. The image below is a good likeness and apparently, Polecats have been seen in Argyll in recent years. Arriving at the bridge we were confronted with more non-native mammals in the shape of 30 or so young people viewing the waterfalls during the English school holidays.

Polecat

Craft Beers

My favourite under-age tipple

American Craft Beer Classification Chart in Durango

Durango Brewery, Colorado

One of the most welcome developments in recent years has been the emergence of microbreweries in most parts of the UK and, as I discovered last month, with equal vigour in the States. They provide a staggering array of alternative ales to the big brewers. The same big brewers who had decimated the local breweries in the 70's and 80's. The big four: Scottish and Newcastle, Ind Coupe, Watneys and Allied had replaced local beers with homogenised corporate products that were heavily marketed and lacked any distinctiveness. They duped a generation to drink lager and keg beers with brand names that bore no relationship to place or reason. They then tied pub landlords into selling their beers and drove many independent pubs into bankruptcy.

The only opposition came from CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) but in the 1970s it was mainly a protest organisation campaigning against the takeover, and inevitable closure, of town breweries. My favourite beers as an 18-year-old were Dutton's (Blackburn) and Mansfield Bitter both of which disappeared at the hands of the big four. CAMRA also promoted the ever-decreasing number of pubs that sold real ale. Microbreweries were perceived as uneconomical businesses for cranks and obsessives.

My beer drinking diminished from the 1970s as drink and drive legislation, family life, and a desire to keep fit for competitive running all conspired with the tasteless offerings from the big brewers to restrict my beer drinking to the occasional social event. I would occasionally discover a remaining brewery when on holiday. Hartleys of Ulverston before it was taken over, Jennings of Cockermouth, Timothy Taylor's in Yorkshire and Thwaites in Lancashire all made a trip to the pub worthwhile and some of these beers travelled to real ale pubs in the cities.

How very different things are today and not just in Britain. The recent holiday in the States was notable for the universal availability of craft beers, most communities were served by several microbreweries. What was really helpful in the States was the referencing systems for beers that measured the colour, bitterness and specific gravity of beers.

• The Standard Reference Method (SRM)is a system breweries use to measure the colour intensity, or darkness, of a beer. 
• The International Bittering Units Scale, (IBU) rates the relative bitterness of beer. The bitterness of beer is provided by compounds from hops used during brewing. 
• Alcohol by volume (abv) measures the specific gravity and is the same as in the UK 

Accordingly, the American beer drinker has a set of measures that allows the drinker to choose beer by some known parameters. It worked well and over three weeks I found myself selecting beers not just according to the locality, the nearer the better, but also to some standards that matched my preferences. The blackboard in the Durango Brewery enabled me to select a Third Eye Pale Ale and it was the perfect choice.

A couple of weeks later a friend invited me to the Ayrshire Beer Festival and along with 3000 others, including quite a high proportion of males and females in their twenties, we sampled some of the 150 real ales on sale from all parts of Scotland and England. The event is run by CAMRA volunteers and held in the Council offices in Troon. The beer was gushing from 11:00am until 11:00pm over three days. I managed 4 sessions and sampled about 10 beers. Each day you could vote for your favourite beer. Highland Brewing's Scapa Special and Mobberley Ales RoadRunner were my choices and I have already been thanked and invited to drop in at the breweries when next in the areas. Localism is reviving beer drinking, once again conjuring up the reality that small is beautiful.

Benign Floods

Goldcrest seeking refuge from the rains

Loch MacGregor

Loch MacGregor and Ben Lomond

Forth in full flow

Waterfall at the Trossachs Lodge

I was surprised to find a Goldcrest in the porch, it was seeking refuge from the non stop rains that had persisted for 48 hours. The Goldcrest  is the smallest British bird and could fit in a match box according to my bird book when I was a child. This fact had stuck in my mind ever since and now was the chance to test it but all we had was a box of Cooks Matches and you could get a blackbird in there with a bit of folding. We enticed the Goldcrest out of the porch and it took refuge from the downpour in the adjacent evergreen tree along with a couple of dozen other birds.

The next morning the floods had arrived but not before the children had got to school and then the rains abated and we were treated to a benign flood. The river had not risen to the extent that the roads were impassable but I was distraught when I discovered that there is now proposed a £12m flood protection scheme designed to cope with the 100 year flood. All that is needed for most years is a levee for about 200 metres that could be created by a man in a JCB in a couple of days. There would be no days lost from school, the traffic would get through and the consultants would not get their estimated £825,000 fee. What we need is a bit of common sense, the Aberfoyle and Loch Ard flood scheme is the local equivalent of HS2, a bonanza for the engineering companies and at a cost that will preclude any development taking place for many more years.

The positive take on this flood was that the 'set aside' fields were covered with a sheet of water, the ducks arrived and we had acquired a prime loch side view. I grabbed the camera and took an afternoon stroll around the new waterscapes, made friends with the lady with the bike and the greyhound and wandered up to the David Marshall lodge to see the waterfall. It had never looked as good and there were still plenty of families on the October holidays enjoying the walks in the forest. If floods could be made as benign as this, there would be no unnecessary school closures, no stream of vehicles trapped in the village and it could all be done for a fraction of the Rolls Royce solution that consultants seem to regard as de rigour when seeking to win public investment contracts. Or as a consultant reader of this blog pointed out, the client (the local Council) could be a whole lot smarter in specifying the brief so that the consultant's proposals could be both affordable and appropriate.

Jack Bruce

Jack Bruce with Ginger Baker (left0 and Eric Clapton (right)

The announcement by his family of the death of rock legend Jack Bruce at the age of 71 will be mourned by the thousands who were privileged to have seen and heard him play. It finally extinguished my hope to see Cream play live again. I had the great fortune as a student to to see Cream play live shortly after their formation at a gig in the Sheffield Student's Union. It was memorable for the truly amazing music performed with Jack Bruce on base guitar and vocals. He had written most of their material with Pete Brown, a Liverpool beat poet. Cream may have had a short life but they were the outstanding rock/blues group of the era. The event resonates in the memory as probably the best concert that I ever witnessed and that includes two Jimi Hendrix gigs and a stupendous Pink Floyd concert.

Ginger Baker dissolved in sweat as he played Toad, giving us a 15 minute drum solo. Eric Clapton played spine tingling riffs throughout the set in a way that only he could perform. But the abiding vibes are of the rhythm of Jack Bruce's base playing and his haunting vocals. NSU and I Feel Free had been their hit singles and were greeted with raucous cheers but they performed most of their first album, 'Fresh Cream'. The highlights were Jack Bruce's playing and vocals on I Feel Free and Spoonful which was similar to this live version from 1968. Even the light show captured on this video reflects the mood of the time. Listen to this with a spliff and after 5 pints of Mansfield bitter and you will be back in the summer of love.

In the late 1990's I heard that Jack Bruce lived locally and had rehearsed in hotel function room in Bannockburn. I made contact to see if he could be persuaded to perform at Stirling Castle esplanade for the Millennium celebrations. I was delighted to get a reply to the effect that he would be delighted but that Ginger was very difficult to pin down and Clapton was tentatively scheduled to perform in Wiltshire.  I had tried and was frankly surprised to get such a positive response. They did eventually come together for some concerts in London and New York in 2005.  The CD of the 2005 Albert Hall concerts is good but I enjoyed my Cream fresh and I'm So Glad that I saw them when they were sitting at the top of the world in 1967.

Jack Bruce also wrote some wise lyrics about Politicians in 1968, he was ahead of the curve in this take on them too.

I'm a political man and I practice what I preach.
I support the left, though I'm leaning, leaning to the right.
I support the left, though I'm leaning, leaning to the right.
But I'm not there when it's coming to a fight.

Hey now baby, get into my big black car.
I just want to show you what my politics are.