Volunteer Mike shares his experience on the Lairig an Laoigh and the Lairig Ghru:

The Lairig Ghru is on thousands of bucket lists. Its cousin Heritage Path, a few miles East, the Lairig An Laoigh, isn’t. I’ve been walking the south and north approaches of both for a good fifty years, and the memories are vivid. I finally walked them both for the first time on a 2-day out-and-back trip from Derry Lodge, and it’s the return walk by the Laoigh I liked most.

You couldn’t get a better start-place than the Glenmore Youth Hostel. So, Richie and I set off before 9, up the lovely, easy track (though I think it includes a Thieves’ Road) to the Lochan Uaine.

Somewhere along that track was a memory from around 1990, on a late March ski mountaineering week at Glenmore Lodge. Our group had been up Bynack More from the Saddle, then crossed to Eagle’s Crag, Stac na h-Iolaire. All that was left was to ski back to the Lodge. And ski we did: all the way down to the forest, then through the trees, then along the track to our base. We didn’t think the snow cover was exceptional. My guess is that today it would be unheard of. But tell me I’m wrong and I’ll be delighted.

“A rough, unmade, mountain path, consisting of rough boulders and stones” is what ScotWays’ Heritage Paths tells you to expect on this lairig. Well, there are many worse. And it was so good not to have yesterday’s miserable hour of boglands from Derry Lodge to the Luibeg crossing. There had been dry enough weather, and we made good speed past the old Bynack Stable site, up the flank of Bynack More, and down to the Fords of Avon.

That was a shock. Despite the dry weather, the ford signalled boots off and wet legs. While I had a brew in the spotless new refuge hut, Richie scouted and found a spot 400m upstream where we crossed with a hop and a skip.

On then through 3km of what must be the remotest country, and at 745m the actual lairig. It’s a wonderful spot, at least on a calm sunny afternoon. We looked down to the pine-studded flats of the Derry, 8km or 2 hours’ walking away.  We duly did that, with just one rest by an old pine, looking up at Derry Cairngorm and Beinn Mheadhoin.

We unchained our bikes behind the Lodge, then I started thinking about Luibeg, Scott’s bothy, and other kinds of heritage.

I’d stopped at the bothy before, but never stayed there. Once, as I arrived, an elderly couple, arm in arm, were starting on their way back to the Linn. Then, in the visitors’ book, I saw that I’d just missed Sydney and Margaret Scroggie, who had visited “in memory of old Bob Scott”. Syd lost his sight and a leg in the last week of the war, then went to university, then back to the hills in the 1950s, and in 1989 published “The Cairngorms Scene and Unseen” (edited by Tom Weir).

One final Luibeg gem is in “Mountain Days and Bothy Nights”. Dave Brown and/or Ian Mitchell were in the bothy on a soaking afternoon. And: “there…was an old lady, ill-clad for the season, wielding a paintpot and a brush upon the Rights of Way Society pointers which indicated the two Cairngorm Lairigs”.

And that was it. Just a quick bike down to the Linn carpark, and drive to Braemar in time for a lovely fish supper.

Words and photos by Mike Merchant