02 Aug 2017 – Undulations of Glenisla


It has been a typical Scottish summer this year, with lots of showery days and only the odd one with a usable amount of dry weather. I’m forgetting about the long stretch of fine weather in May, as I was stuck with a broken arm during that.

As a result, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the weather forecast, and found that if we went up north of Perth on Wednesday, we’d get a full morning of dry weather, and part of the afternoon too if we were lucky. So we got up early and headed off at 7am, aiming for Blairgowrie as our start point.

It was a lovely sunny morning, with barely a breath of breeze as we set off on our bikes from a car park in the centre of town. It was slightly chilly, but the first hill soon sorted that out. It wasn’t long before we had stopped to remove arm warmers in the sunshine.

The first hill went on for a mile or two, taking us through pretty, rolling farmland. When we started going downhill, we soon arrived at the small town of Alyth. Somehow I managed to take us off course, but there was an alternative way out of town, past a couple of busy golf courses, that took us back onto my intended route.

From there, we headed east, with a nice gentle freewheel taking us all the way to a bridge over the River Isla, where we turned left. Suddenly we were climbing again, fairly sharply, with a deep river gorge to our right. After about 3/4 of a mile, we reached a sharp bend in the road, after which the climb became very gentle. We continued climbing on the “false flat” for a good while after that, until the climb finally ended with a sharp push to the top. That was followed by a long and fast freewheel down the other side, taking us in the direction of Kirriemuir.

In my original route plan, we were going to stop at Kirriemuir for coffee, but then I read about Peel Farm near Bridge of Craigisla, which looked like a nice spot for lunch, so we decided to miss out Kirriemuir altogether. Instead, we took a left and cycled through Kirkton of Kingoldrum. We were heading into an area of gradually increasing hilliness, between the rolling farmland of Angus to the south and the Cairngorm mountains further to the north. The undulations were mostly fairly gradual, with the odd steeper gradient thrown in, which slowed us down a bit. But it was all new to us, and lovely in the warm sunshine.

Loch of Lintrathen

The turnoff for Peel Farm took us past Loch of Lintrathen, where we paused for some pictures and I helped myself to some wild raspberries at the side of the road. There were there in abundance all throughout our route, although most were a little past their best. You could easily pick as much as you could carry. On the other hand, if that was too much trouble, we also passed many roadside stalls selling strawberries, raspberries and rhubarb. We were cycling in soft fruit heaven!

A little further on, we found Peel Farm and stopped, just as another pair of cyclists were arriving and another was leaving. The farm shop has a busy little cafe, and though it was sunny, we decided to eat inside. Due to our early start we had arrived before 11.30am, meaning we could still choose from the breakfast menu, so we ordered bacon rolls and drank plenty of tea. I had brought in the water bottles to get them topped up, but Colette said not to bother, as she thought we had plenty left.

Maybe it was the saltiness of the bacon, but not long after we got going again, Colette found that she needed to drink more, and her supplies started to look like they might not last the course. We knew that the Glenisla Hotel was coming up in Kirkton of Glenisla, so we decided to stop there for a cold drink and to top up the bottles. When we arrived however, we found that the place had shut down permanently just a week or two before. That upped the ante on Colette’s water anxiety, meaning she didn’t enjoy the next part as much as I did.

Forter Castle. According to Wikipedia, built in 1560, burned down in 1640 and rebuilt in early 1990s!

All this time, we had been following the River Isla upstream, now taking us past heather-clad hillsides with lots uf ups and downs as we stuck with the B951. Finally, we looped round and after pausing to take some pictures of a nice pond near Cray, we stuggled up a steep little climb to reach the A93.

The A93 north from this junction keeps on climbing all the way up Glenshee, but luckily we were going south, back down to Blairgowrie. Although the overall effect was going to be downhill, there were still quite a few significant undulations on the way, which Colette was finding difficult.

We discovered that there was  a lot more traffic on this road, compared to just the occasional vehicle on the route to this point. We also saw a lot more cyclists, by that I mean dozens, all happily waving to us as we passed in the opposite direction. By the magic of Strava, we were able to work out that they were on day 11 of an organised Lands End to John O’Groats cycle, and they were headed up that big Glenshee hill.

After a while, we reached Bridge of Cally, where we stopped for refreshments at the hotel. That did the trick for Colette, setting her back to normal for the remainder of the ride back into Blairgowrie. The wind was getting up as we returned, and as I got the bikes on the car, the sun disappeared behind clouds. Then, after getting onto the A9, the rain started exactly as forecast. It’s nice when things go to plan.

 

 

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