Wigtownshire ramblers day out to the island of Arran. September 2015.

On the ferry

Looking down of Coire Fhionn Lochan

She always does this at the trig point

"A" walkers including me.

Some well earned fish and chips.

C group walk looking over the the Holy Isle

C group walkers

Yesterday Saturday September 26th I the deerstalker and I were extremely honoured to be asked to lead two walks on the island of Arran for the Wigtownshire ramblers. It was a cloudy morning when 18 of arrived in Brodick after our sail over for Ardrossan on the cal mac ferry. 8 of us were going on the "A" walk led by myself whilst the rest went with the deerstalker for a more leisurely low level walk. My group caught the bus to Thundergay on the West coast of the island. After we had journeyed past Lochranza the bus stopped on the crest of a hill to allow passengers a birds eye view of a basking shark displaying its swimming skills right in front of us. It was without doubt the best sighting of the worlds second largest fish we were ever liable to see and made a wonderful start to our day out.Arriving at Thunderguy we started out up the hills to our first stop at Coire Fhionn Lochan a small stretch of water at the base of a ridge we were about to climb. First benn on this walk is Meal Biorach (551M) and then onto Meal Donn(610M). At this point the mist was swirling about us giving only the occasional blink of sunshine but no worries our resident meteorologist assured the group that it would be full sunshine by 1.00PM . (it was now 1.30PM) Pressing on to our next summit of  Beinn Bhreac(711M) the mist started to lift giving us all some magnificent views of the Arran mountains. After a steep descent it was good climb up to Mullach Buidhe(721M) before the short challenging rocky ascent onto our final summit of Beinn Bharrain (717M). After a another short break we started the extremely difficult descent down to the village of Pirnmill where we caught the bus back to the ferry.

The other group did a very interesting walk from Brodick over the Clauchlands hills towards Lamlash where you get some of the best views over to the Holy Isle. In the afternoon and the welcome sunshine had arrived they walked along forestry tracks back to Brodick for some well earned refreshments.

My thanks to the deerstalker for all her help in reccies and planning for yesterdays extremely successful day out without her assistance it would not have been possible to do an "A" and "C" walk on the same day. Thanks pal.