The final set of hills for my big trip to Braemar were to take me back into some of the remoter parts of the national park. It was a warm and clear day, and I set off with the bike one last time on the Linn of Dee Road, and then onwards to White Bridge. I left the bike around 500m past the bridge, and set off at a jog towards the hill, feeling my relative lack of fitness (I’d been nursing knee pain since the end of May which was still affecting me while running).
The climb towards the first summit, the top Càrn Cloich-Mhuilinn, was muddy and relatively pathless at first, and trying to find a good way up which wasn’t just scrambling through heather was non-trivial. At around 640m the ground started to dry out a bit however, and there was a faint path which ran just below some rocky outcrops to the right, and led clearly off towards the summit. The last 100m or so was across fairly loose boulder field, and the summit itself was just the highest point in the boulders, and wasn’t much of a place to stop. An ex-Munro, Càrn Cloich-Mhuillinn (the Cairn of the Mill-stone) was one of the two (as-then) Munros which Munro himself never managed to climb.
From here there was a small drop down to the beallach between the top and the main summit, and it was a short but quite steep climb up to the summit of Beinn Bhrotain (1157m), followed by a steep and quite loose descent to the bealach between Bhrotain and Monadh Mòr, and a steep ascent back up and on to the large plateau. I managed a rather uninspiring pace of jog across from here to the summit itself, where I bumped-in to the road biker I’d met when doing the Derry Cairngorm horseshoe. She’d come up from the Glen Feshie side, however, so had had the longer walk-in.
From here the walk back to the bike meant re-tracing my steps over both the first Munro and also the top; the only other plausible option was dropping down into the Glen, which was likely to be boggy, and this seemed like the faster approach. Despite the reasonable amount of reascent, and some unhappiness from my knee, I was back at the bike fairly soon, and called by the Linn of Dee itself on the way back to the village, having failed to do that so far in this trip!