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Note #156: Bound for distant shores (2025.6.25)
I have just a short note for you today, as we are leaving this evening for the airport, where we will be boarding a flight to Scotland (well, Schiphol airport in Amsterdam first, and then on to Aberdeen). It’s hard to believe, but it has already been nine years since our last trip to Scotland. We will be visiting the same area and retracing our steps along the Speyside Way, but there are a few key differences between this trip and our last. Probably the biggest difference is that we are not actually going to be walking the Speyside Way this time, at least not most of it. We are also going to be traveling in the opposite direction, starting on the coast and ending inland; last time we followed the flow of the Spey River to the sea. Like last time, we will be ending our trip with a few days in the capital of Edinburgh, but this time we will not be there during the Fringe Festival. Fringe was fun, and the city certainly was lively during the festival, but I remember at the time thinking that I wanted to see what the city was like outside of the festival period, when it wasn’t swamped with people. I expect there will still be a lot of people, as it is summer, but it should be a little quieter, at least.
We’re looking forward to seeing some of the places we saw during our last trip, but since we won’t be walking the trail this time, we’re also looking forward to seeing some things we missed last time because we were walking. We never got to see the Speyside Viaduct outside of Buckie, for example, or the Gordon Castle walled gardens in Craigellachie, or Cairgorm Mountain and the RSPB preserve at Loch Garten, both near Aviemore. These will be on our itinerary this time around.
There will also be some walking, of course. We will be walking to the Speyside Viaduct from Buckie, which should take anywhere from two-and-a-half to three hours, but that walk is completely flat. This will take us along the very last section of the Speyside Way that we walked back in 2016; we passed by the turnoff to the viaduct on that walk, but we did not make the detour. We’ll also be walking from Craigellachie to Aberlour and back, but that’s a brief walk of only a half hour each way. It’s an important section of the trail for me, though, because it includes the only section of the mainline trail that I never walked. From Aberlour we took a bus to Dufftown, and I had intended to walk back from Dufftown to Aberlour and then onto Craigellachie, but I got lost along the way and ended up somewhere halfway between the two towns. So there has been this one fifteen-minute stretch of the trail that has been my bugbear for the past nine years, and this time I will finally put it to rest.
The longest walk, though, will be the 31-kilometer stretch of the Way from Aviemore to Newtonmore. We didn’t walk this last time because it wasn’t officially part of the Speyside Way, but it is now, so I plan to do it. This is also why we are going in the opposite direction—so I can end with this walk before we head on to Edinburgh. I was originally going to do the whole walk in one day, but we ultimately decided to spend the night in Kingussie, about five kilometers from Newtonmore. So, from Aviemore, I will make an early start on foot for Kingussie, and HJ will make a later start by bus to meet me there. We will then walk the remaining distance to Newtonmore together the following morning, stopping at the Highland Folk Museum and then having lunch in Newtonmore before boarding a train for Edinburgh.
And that’s about all I have time for today. It’s time to finish packing my backpack (because we will be walking for some stretches, we are taking our backpacks instead of suitcases) and get ready to head out to the airport. I’ll see you on the other side.