walkwithdinosaurs: 13 GO OFF THE RAILS ON THE SPEYSIDE WAY

For this month's walk we decided to do something a little different. The walk was one way, but instead of having cars at both ends of the walk, we took the Strathspey Railway to Boat of Garten and walked back along the Speyside Way to Aviemore.

Everyone loves a steam engine and Susan and Robin are no exceptions to this. Here they are posing with E V Cooper Engineer. E V Cooper was the engineer who led the restoration of the engine after it was purchased from a scrap yard. The engine is only slightly older than either Susan or Robin.

Here are the rest of the Dinosaurs in front of the same engine. The engine is younger then a significant proportion of the people in the photograph!

You may have noticed that Neil and Ann were on this walk. They had agreed to come on the basis that we had a carriage on the train to ourselves, and so we did.

Oddly, when we got off the Iron Horse at Boat of Garten, there was an Iron Horse (and cart) waiting for us.

After a degree of confusion about the route we were off. We have to take the blame for the confusion as we had not recce'd the way beforehand. So we started on a way that was completely in the opposite direction from what we had originally intended. It was still very nice though and avoided us having to cast too many envious glances at large, smart houses and gardens on the original route.

The train whistled farewell as it too left the station.

We were soon in walking past pastoral scenes which were considerably more pleasant than those we walked through in the snow and mud at Glenlivet.

Eventually we had to risk life and limb and cross back over the railway line into the woods. Given that we had been on the train and knew where it was going, the risk was actually slim, unless of course there was another train we didn't know about.....

There wasn't. The train we were on did, however, pass us later on.

Having crossed over the line, we had to then go back under it - it was getting a bit like an eightsome reel. So much so that Ann spontaneously started her pas de bas.

Once under the rails we got good views of the Cairngorms.

From the bucolic byways to the pine forest and then into the deciduous sylvan glades, this walk had it all.

We even had Narrow-headed Wood ants. I wonder whether these ants are narrow minded as well as narrow headed. Certainly the reverse seems to be true in humans - look at Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, for instance.

It was still quite early in Spring.

The delicate, barely formed, leaves of the birch had not yet hidden the starkness of the tree trunks and this seemingly contradictory paradoxical arrangement of hard and soft is fleetingly caught in this spare, but somehow, sensual, image.

In the second of this astonishing and thoughtful series of images of the birch woodland, one can see how Boab the artist has manged to capture the sparse skeletal elegance of the tree against the chaotic and anarchic growth of heather and shrub. It is as if the trees are the structure that the landscape will knit itself to in time.

In the final canvas of this collection of surprising and delightful images he has managed to counterpoint the hard, straight, but organic lines of the birch trunks with the even harder straight mechanistic lines of the diesel engine.

Can you tell that it is pouring with rain and I was filling in time before the next cup of tea, or did you think I had provided and erudite elucidation of the thought process behind the photographs? I'm not taking bets on the more popular view here.

In fact, the most popular view around here was over the birch towards the hills.

The pace being set was such that there was a real danger we might be back at the cars before it was time for lunch. So we stopped for refreshment as soon as Bob could catch up to Sharon and tell her to stop running.

Everyone sat looking at the view and I was behind them, so I only got photos of the back of their heads. Some would say that was their best side.

The charitable point of view here is that Mac was contemplating the infinity of the Universe and not, in fact, his eyelids.

I decided that it was worth trying to see their faces and leaped onto the path, only to find that Sharon, Neil and Ann had better things to look at. Hugh and Sandra just looked the wrong way.

Eventually lunch was over and it was time for the old dears to help each other down the slope ......

...and onto the path.

Susan had taken so many photos, that her phone had burst into flames.

Wooh, Wooh!!

We passed the Spey Valley golf course, where, the weekend before, Dave had managed to find refuge in 9 bunkers on the second day of play.

As we neared Aviemore we found this little grove of sculptures of local Flora. I was thinking of waxing lyrical about the artistic meaning behind these, but I have decided that that might be too much for whatever small audience there might be left.