I love the Cairngorms. My dream is to move up to Scotland one day – maybe highland Perthshire, with holidays in the Cairngorms national park? As we get ready for another year of UK adventures, I’m looking back at some of the walks I just couldn’t squeeze into my blog posts last year. One of these is a lovely short walk around Ellan Wood near Carrbridge – a perfect short walk if you’re recovering after a longer hill walk the day before.
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The route we followed was a three and a half kilometre circular from our Pocket Mountains guide to the Cairngorms (similar, slightly longer route on Walkhighlands). This is a lovely pleasant walk, mostly flat and using good trails (no bog fests here). You wind your way through the wood with plenty of light still filtering through the treetops, so at no point does it feel dark or oppressive like woodland walks can do.
Part of the reason I picked this walk was to see the iconic eighteenth century packhorse bridge in Carrbridge – the parapets were washed away during the Muckle Spate of 1829 and the end result is a very delicate looking bridge, which I wouldn’t fancy crossing but which makes for a great photo! The Pocket Mountains walk doesn’t take you past the bridge so you’ll need to detour if you want to visit it.
Parking at the start of the walk is free in a small parking area off Station Road – it was totally empty when we visited mid-week in early July, but it might be busier at weekends and during school holidays (it was also threatening rain which might have kept people away!). We were lucky enough to see hardly any other people on our walk (although sadly we didn’t spot any red squirrels).
It’s also worth noting that Carrbridge’s main attraction, the Landmark Forest Adventure park, is close by (you walk past it on the route) and it is also a dog friendly attraction, with dogs on leads being allowed pretty much everywhere on the site apart from the indoor areas. I wish I’d known this when we visited, but I think it would probably have been a bit much for Coal anyway!
Dog friendly rating – 5/5. This is a cracking dog walk and we were able the let ours enjoy off lead time for the whole walk. There is a section which walks along the Inverness/Edinburgh railway line which worried me when I first saw it, but it is so securely fenced off that we didn’t have any worries about leaving Coal off the lead here (Merry however went back on, because we knew that if there were any rabbit holes under the fence, he’d slip through just on principle).
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