Ben Vorlich Loch Earn

Dinner Meet 2007

& Squirrel Nutkin
Sunday 18th November

Sunday saw our departure from the lodges - 'hastened along' by the reticent owner of the site.

Ben Vorlich on the south shore of Loch Earn was our hill today, the novelty being the short approach road from St Fillans, instead if our usual Lochearnhead approach.

Parking just over the old hump back bridge, Roni and Julie set off before the boys - they were well up the hill before being caught.

(Andy and Bill gave the feeble excuse that they were tired after a pre-breakfast run on the hill tracks above Comrie)

The 'backmarkers' had a close encounter with a Red Squirrel in the woods above Ardvorlich House.

'Feorag' showed no fear as he foraged in a trench by the track, quite possibly this was a ground cache site. It's common for Reds to store seed in pits in the ground by scatter-hoarding. This means that 1-4 seeds are cached in shallow pits, making for an extremely large number of caches. Most of these will be located in close proximity to each other. 

Great views were had and time was spent observing squirreling. 

No wonder it took time to catch the girls. 

The hill road has an easy gradient and we crossed a couple of wooden bridges to the road end, after which the next mile of pathway is a well made conservation track.


This track turned abruptly left, and all but disappeared due to erosion, as we clambered steeply up onto the north shoulder. 

No respite yet - no sooner had we reached the shoulder when we were faced with a couple of false summits before the final 600 foot slog to the trig point on the west summit.

The west summit with the trig point is the higher of the two by a matter of about 8 feet - the east summit is about 150 yards distant (due to mist we didn't see a thing!)

It was cold, so we didn't linger long for lunch

.
Our 2007 Dinner meet was a great success, with good company, excellent value accommodation and a welcoming hotel with a memorable meal.

Of course the walking was OK too!