After what feels like years of winter, summer is finally around the corner! I thought I’d share one of my favourite short walks from last summer – a woodland trail around Rogie Falls in the Scottish Highlands. It’s a walk which was really just intended to be a quick wee stop and leg stretch for the dogs, but which is definitely up there in the top walks that I’d recommend to people visiting this part of Scotland.
We did this walk on our drive up to Orkney from the Cairngorms – I was so paranoid that we’d miss the ferry that I booked a mid-afternoon crossing, and we ended up with lots of time to spare (it was only around a 3.5 hour drive and we set off at 8.30am). Not far from Dingwall (which has an enormous Tesco superstore and petrol station, which is usually the cheapest for some miles and worth stocking up) we left the main road and pulled in to the car park for Rogie Falls.
I have to admit that my heart sank a little when we arrived at 9.30am to find a coach parked up in the car park and dozens of people milling about. Still, we had plenty of time to kill, so we bravely set forth through the horde (of 15 people) and picked up one of the woodland trails.
There are two way marked woodland trails to choose from, the shorter Salmon route (yellow markers) which takes a more direct approach to the falls, and the blue Riverside route which is a little more circuitous, although it still only took us around 40 minutes to walk the whole trail. Happily, as soon as we branched off at the first blue way marker, all of the people immediately disappeared – and we didn’t actually see anyone else for the whole walk, other than at the times when we crossed paths with the yellow route.
The Riverside trail is certainly a little more wild and uneven underfoot than the Salmon trail, but I still wouldn’t classify it as strenuous – you just need to watch where you’re putting your feet on occasion. It was a lovely woodland walk, with plenty of sunlight able to filter down through the branches and heather springing up at the side of the path. As you may surmise from the name of the trail, it does indeed follow the riverbank for a short section right before you reach the falls – which were extremely pretty in their own right.
A bridge spans the river directly opposite the falls, which offers a great vantage point for admiring the view or snapping a photo. If you visit in August or September, this is also the best place to watch for salmon jumping up the falls – although we didn’t see any unfortunately. Salmon numbers have plummeted in recent years, and they are now classified as endangered in Great Britain, although some estates and organisations (including Forestry and Land Scotland, who manage Rogie Falls) are taking measures to try and protect their local populations.
Instead of following the Salmon trail back to the car park, we carried on along the Riverside trail which took us to a second, quieter view point looking back down over the falls and the bridge. Then, it’s a short walk back to the car, where we carried on our way up to John O’ Groats for another stop before hopping onto our ferry.
Dog friendly rating: 4/5. This is a lovely dog walk with no stiles or livestock. I’ve knocked a point off as while the river is accessible, when we visited it was flowing way too fast to be safe for dogs to jump in, and because the last section of the Riverside trail runs parallel to a busy A road – so leads need to be back on for this section.
If you’ve enjoyed reading this blog today, subscribe below so that you never miss a post:
