These pleasant grassy hills are guarded to the south by the big plantation of Kidland Forest. According to my old Nuttalls’ guide to the 2000 footers you can drive two mile north up the unsurfaced forestry track from Clennel Hall right to the forest’s edge. You could once. But now you quickly meet a sign: Private Road: No unauthorised vehicle access. Adding four miles to the walk means, the Nuttalls’ suggestion to incorporate Windy Gyle into a circuit of Cushat Law and Bloodybush Edge becomes a daunting prospect. Having climbed Windy Gyle on its own quite recently (see 89) I thought I’d settled for just Cushat Law and Bloodybush Edge but take in the easily included trig pint on Wether Cairn. After trudging up the track to the weeds there is soon a clear trackbranches off right that leads up along the edge of the woods below Ravens Crag. The track marked on the map turns off into the woods about half way up but there is a path on the ground keeps following the edge of the wood and carries on past it to the top of Wether Hill. It was hard work getting here on a really hot sultry June day. I had a long lie down by the trig point. I may even have had a little sleep.
From here it’s a straightforward walk on a decent little path over Cushat Law to Bloodybush Edge but hard work in this heat, without the faintest breeze to cool me down a little. From the top of Bloodybush Edge I headed south, tough going on no path, to the edge of the fiorest where the map show a right of way working its way through the woods, roughly east then south. Things got confusing here. The right of way is in places obliterated by trees and tree-feeling activity but I went more or less where it was supposed to go with a view to picking up one of the forestry tracks marked on the map. I did found a forestry track but suspect it was not one marked on the map as none of them seemed consistent with the course it took me. Eventually however it did take me back to the original point where I had enter the forest and so back down the track to where I was parked near the Hall. All these forestry tracks are a bore. If I do these hills again I’ll try them from Linhope to the north.
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