Route Map

It’s been about 3 months since our last mountain outing and we’d been doing a bit of research throughout the week to try and pick a pair of munros that weren’t overly difficult, but would give us a chance to stretch our legs and test our mountain stamina again.

Donna ended up finding Mayar and Driesh which seemed to be the winners in this game of chance. The weather forecast for them was dry with a 20% chance of precipitation and it was possible there would be snow at the top.

We’ve been excited to put the winter skills we picked up at the start of the year back to the test, however, this last weekend’s hike proved to be slightly too early in the winter season for us to see any real snow.

We ended up heading up to Glen Clova the night before after having dropped Skye, our elderly Collie, off at the luxurious holiday destination that is my parent’s house…

Our goal was to find a nice park-up close enough to the hike’s starting point to be there bright and early, and hopefully give us enough time to get up and down before the early sunset marooned us in the dark.

We ended up parking a few miles away in a car-park that just overlooked the river that runs through the glen.

This gave me a chance to try some astro-photography:

I still need to figure out how to make these images sharper, but the opportunities for astrophotography are few and far between. If anyone has suggestions as to how I can improve sharpness then let me know!

The Hike

We set off from our overnight camp spot early bells and headed up to the Glen Clova car park and got ourselves ready to start our hike. This entailed a lot of pheasant dodging as there seemed to have been hundreds, if not thousands, of them stoating about as if they owned the bloody place.

The road is effectively a single-tracked country road for a few miles and you’ll find yourself just admiring the beautiful landscapes all the way up ot the starting point of the hike.

We reached the Glen Clova car park, donned our hiking boots and our bags and set off.

The trail up is surprisingly well maintained and this remains true for the vast majority of the 16.25km hike. This fact alone makes it a fantastic pair of Munros for most beginners to tackle.

There’s none of those sketchier sections that test your climbing ability, which means the only real test this hike provides is of your fitness. I have to say, my overall hiking fitness isn’t quite where I’d want it just yet, but it’s definitely improving.

The tops of both of these mountains are relatively boring and we were unfortunate enough to be “clagged” in, but we hit the first summit of Mayar and had our sandwiches whilst sheltering from the bitingly cold wind and then made our way across to Driesh.

We were greeted by some snow flurries, but nothing really all that substantial. We’d wanted more snow to test our skills on, but unfortunately it just wasn’t to be on this outing.

Once we’d dropped out of the clag, we were treated to some exceptional views on our fairly straightforward hike back to the car park. At this point, Lewis had made his friends and was exhausted and ready to lie down in the van.

Anyway, thanks for following along on my latest adventure! If you’ve done Driesh or Mayar then I’d love to hear how you got on in the comments section below!