Falling from Dunkeld to Bankfoot: 21st February 2015

After a bit of a hiatus caused by some family commitments and the 6-Nations rugby, it was good to be able to plan a weekend walk out in the winter countryside. This Saturday I decided to head out to lovely Perthshire where I could combine a walk around some woodlands & waterfalls in The Hermitage, just outside Dunkeld, with a sampling of some Dunkeld pubs and a return visit to the nearby Bankfoot Inn.

Outward travel was as follows:-
  Train: Glasgow Queen St. to Dunkeld & Birnam (10:10 & every ~2 hours)

I couldn't see any direct walking route from Dunkeld & Birnam station to The Hermitage area and so I had to start off by taking the A9 underpass into the centre of Birnam. At the bottom of the station road there's a large hotel (the Birnam Hotel, recently sold to a Chinese tour operator firm so it'll be interesting what that does to the adjacent Scots Bar) and also the Beatrix Potter exhibition and garden (Ms Potter was a summer visitor to Dunkeld), complete with sculptures of cute bunnies & hedgehogs frolicking amongst the flower beds.

I walked the short distance along the main road to the roundabout just before Dunkeld and then took the signposted Inver Path along the River Braan. This took me back under the A9 and then to the Inver Bridge over the Braan, currently looking serene & tranquil in the crisp winter sunlight.

Just up from here is a car park and the start of the one of the trails to The Hermitage, but there was a pretty serious sign at the far end of the car park indicating that a land slip had occurred and there was no access possible to the Hermitage Bridge - drats! I therefore backtracked to Inver Bridge, followed the signposts through Inver village and alongside the A9 for a small distance, before reaching the larger main car park for The Hermitage. This really was busy today (possibly due to the glorious weather) with people of all ages out for a walk along the river and in amongst the trees. The first stage of this was to take the underpass under the main railway line (the whole network of paths, underpasses and bridges is very clearly setup and signposted).

I followed the trail closest to the now choppier River Braan and it wasn't long before I was in the midst of a forest of tall Douglas Fir trees. Some are meant to be close on 60metres in height and amongst the tallest trees in the UK and they certainly were neck-stretching and quite spectacular.

The river then made a sharp right angle turn and it was here that I first caught sight of the Hermitage Bridge through the trees & debris just before the Black Linn waterfalls on the Braan.

As I got up to the bridge I could see that it was still walkable, but the far end was bricked-off with another set of notices about a landslide (presumably the same one I'd read about at the first car park I'd walked to).

And just downriver from the bridge I could see a definite landslip which had taken away most of the path - I don't think that there would be any way past that point without some serious climbing equipment.

The were some great views of the Black Linn waterfalls from the Hermitage Bridge but the late 18th Century landowners of the area thought they could go one better and built a viewing-house, Ossian's Hall of Mirrors, just upstream of the Hermitage Bridge.

Having been enhanced by the Victorians into a part folly and part viewing platform, it was eventually restored by the National Trust for Scotland with metallic pictures of Ossian and other heroic figures attached to the walls...

...before opening up to the balcony platform in front of the Black Linn falls.

There hadn't been too much rain in the couple of weeks before my visit so the falls weren't as impressive as I perhaps expected, so I went in search of the next set of falls further upstream of the River Braan. This took me out of the woodland and into the glorious Perthshire countryside...

...before reaching a minor road and descending again to the River Braan. The bridge here is aptly named Rumbling Bridge and there is a long stretch of rapids followed by a sharp drop into a deep gorge giving a deep bass, unceasing roar (just be careful, you can get very close to the unprotected edge here and it's pretty slippery).

I was then happy to head back to The Hermitage area, walk through those fantastic Douglas Firs again and eventually back through Inver village to the outskirts of Dunkeld. The River Braan joins the River Tay here and I took (another) signposted path along the south bank of the Tay. By following this path I just about managed to spot Dunkeld Cathedral through the trees...

...and the Thomas Telford Bridge across the River Tay into Dunkeld itself...

...but it also continued along the Tay until reaching a number of large trees. One of these is the Birnam Oak, prophesied by the 3 Witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth, and which was meant to have been part of Birnam Wood which allowed the enemy army to march undetected on Macbeth's stronghold. The sprawling, gnarled tree certainly appeared ancient enough, and with the bottom section effectively hollow, it now has to be supported by 3 timber frames.

I eventually climbed some steep steps up to the Thomas Telford Bridge, crossed the Tay and decided to go looking for lunch and some beer. There are a couple of hotels/pubs along the north bank of the River Tay with beer gardens and what must be fantastic views of the river. The Taybank has a reputation for live music and was undergoing some serious renovation work by its new owners, but it was still open for business. I did head inside and saw that there were 2 beers from the local Strathbraan Brewery available, but it was very busy indeed (there wasn't a spare table to be had and I didn't really want to eat from the bar counter).

Next I tried the bar of the Atholl Arms Hotel, The Meeting Place, and although there was a Strathbraan beer and an Orkney beer available, food mainly consisted of pizzas or burgers (which I didn't really fancy waiting for today - I must be getting picky).

I therefore eventually decided on the Perth Arms Hotel, situated on the High Street on the road to the cathedral, and with a menu which included toasties & paninis as well as standard pub fare.

Available at the bar were a couple more Strathbraan beers (True North and Due South, nice to see Mark from Strathbraan getting support from local establishments) and so I decided on a pint of the silky smooth, porter-like True North, ordered a couple of toasties and sat down at one of the large tables opposite the bar. As per the other hotels/pubs it's a nice bar with a real fire blazing away in the centre of the room, a partitioned off games area with pool table & darts board and a beer garden out the back (actually almost usable today) and the place is very dog friendly (almost everyone that came in today had an accompanying canine friend).

The 2 toasties that I'd ordered came pretty quickly, ham & cheese and tuna & cheese with a small salad, and I must have wolfed them down in no time at all to the consternation of the nearby dogs (treats were handed out for them).

The largest hotel in Dunkeld is the Royal Dunkeld Hotel and I had just about enough time to pop into the bar on the left side of the building.

It was a bit quieter in here than in the other places I'd visited (there is also a restaurant/brasserie on the other side of the building), but it's a nice enough place with a number of tables set opposite the bar, most with some quirky hanging wooden carvings near the wall lights.

On at the dark wood panelled bar bar were Cairngorm Stag (a decent enough malty Scottish bitter), Stewart Brewing's Pentland IPA...

...and also a Vintage Cider from Cairn o' Mohr, a winery located between Perth and Dundee. They mostly specialise in some fairly wacky varieties of fruit wine but they've also been branching out into ciders recently, so it was interesting to give this a try. It did start off quite hazy, but cleared nicely and was quite tart upfront, a bit flat (no bad thing), and had a dry, very appley(!) finish - not bad at all.

The bus service connecting Dunkeld, Bankfoot and Perth is hourly, and not wanting to miss it I had to rush to the car park at the north of the town to get my bus to Bankfoot (there didn't seem to be a decent walking route, but cycling along the minor roads would probably be fairly safe). The journey to Bankfoot only took ~15 minutes and the bus dropped me off in the centre of the village at the Atholl Hotel (which looks like it could be opening up again after being recently bought) meaning that a walk of only a minute or so took me to The Bankfoot Inn.

I'd been here about 18 months ago for their impressive summer beer festival, and this time it was their smaller winter festival with 18 casks available on 6 hand-pulls over the long weekend. It was fairly quiet in the 'locals' bar with the sport on TV being watching by just a solitary drinker...

...but a lot more 'rowdy' in the comfy lounge bar where I joined a number of Tayside CAMRA beer drinkers of my acquaintance (and also one from Ayrshire CAMRA) to drink beer and talk beer (and probably some other nonsense).

It's always good to return to an impressive, friendly & welcoming pub, and the Bankfoot Inn certainly is that nowadays (and is the current Tayside CAMRA Pub-of-the-Year) and drinking some nice beers (the Speyside Dark Sky Stout was a tad cold, but really lovely as it warmed up, as was the Top Out Winter 2014) definitely helped to round off a more than satisfactory day out.

Return travel:-
  Bus: Dunkeld to Bankfoot (23, 05 on the hour)
  Bus: Bankfoot to Perth (23, 24 on the hour)
  Train: Perth to Glasgow Queen St. (13 on the hour + others)

A loop around Perth and Bankfoot: 3rd August 2013

I decided I was going to risk the intermittently thundery/scorching weather this weekend and head out for another cycle between some country pubs (I think that if this keeps up I may have to contemplate purchasing my own bike or at least investing in some lycra, with the former seeming more likely). So my plan was to travel to Perth, loop around the small Perthshire village of Bankfoot, home to the eponymously named Bankfoot Inn, and look out for the new Strathbraan Brewery beer which was hopefully appearing at some point over the long holiday weekend at their local Beer Festival.


View Bankfoot in a larger map

Outward journey was as follows:-
  Train: Glasgow Queen St to Perth (41 on the hour)

After alighting at Perth station I walked the short distance along King/Marshall Place and up Princess Street until I found Perth City Cycles, a popular place located behind a set of stone archways.

I'd pre-booked a hire bike from them (tel. 01738 639346) so I knew I was getting something a bit out of the ordinary - in this case a hybrid bike with a drive shaft and not a chain. It certainly looked a bit different, but apart from the fact that it only had 7 gears I found it more than acceptable for cycling along paths and minor roads (and the fact that you could change gear when stationary was great). Fully kitted out I then headed east to the River Tay to join National Cycle Route 77 which follows the river north and cuts a path through the North Inch golf course. After 15 minutes or so I took the turning marked for Luncarty which crosses the River Almond and then double backs to run alongside the busy A9 route to Inverness and the Highlands. Thankfully this only lasted for a mile or so before I followed a minor road and entered Luncarty. Here I had to join the more busy B9099 road for a couple of miles until I reached the small town of Stanley (which was really quite great/strange in that I am currently an employee of Stanley UK!). The town is situated on sharp bend in the River Tay where the river flows extremely fast, and it's here, at the bottom of a steep hill, that the huge Stanley Mills buildings were constructed in the 18th & 19th Centuries to process cotton and other raw material - it and New Lanark are probably the best preserved Mills complexes in Scotland.

At one time the huge Mills employed 2000 people from a town population of only 2500, but it eventually closed in 1989 and is now a combination of an interactive museum telling the story of life in the Mills through the ages and also a large number residential homes (with great terraced views of the River Tay).

I climbed back up the hill to Stanley and all around I could see the old cottages for the Mills workers, although I don't think they had satellite TV back in those days.

On the road out of Stanley I came to the Tayside Hotel, and since it was almost dead on 12noon, a perfect place to stop for lunch and a beer.

I locked the bike in the large car park and entered the hotel through the main foyer. On the right hand side was a bookcase laden corridor leading to a large dining room, and on the left was the main lounge bar, full of natural light and soft upholstery, with the walls covered with photos of salmon fisherman and their catches, and lots of animal & bird figures and other bric-a-brac dotted about.

The was a nice polished wooden bar at the far end of the room, with taps for Tennents, Caledonian Best, Magners and Heverlee 'Belgian Ale' (so purely C&C beers then), and although there were 2 hand-pulls there was nothing on them (and not likely to be anything this weekend, sigh...). However there were at least bottles of Inveralmond beers to be had and so I took a bottle of Lia Fail, ordered lunch, and tried to count the number of salmon photos on the walls (I gave up at 27).

Lunch was a plate of nachos, complete with spicy salsa, jalapenos, masses of cheese and seriously thick sour cream, very good indeed, but they also do sandwiches, wraps and the standard range of pub lunches.

After leaving Stanley and the Tayside Hotel I was able to get off the busy B9099 road and head north on a narrow minor road passing some through some small farms until another cross-junction. This was all slightly uphill and then when I got onto this more south-westerly running road I was heading back into the teeth of a strengthening wind; at times it seemed as if I was hardly making more than walking pace and I was getting pretty tired (and disheartened). Thankfully out of the rolling hills & fields came the sight of Stewart Tower Dairy Ice Cream Parlour & Café, a welcome oasis in the middle of the Perthshire countryside and somewhere I hadn't known about at all beforehand (I don't like this new Google Maps incarnation).

There's a deli here selling all manner of organic fruit & veg, meat, preserves, cheeses etc..., but more important (to me) were the café in the round building and the fabulous choice of ice cream in the ice cream parlour. This is all made on-site with milk from cows from their own herd and there are normally 18 or so flavours to choose from - the 'staples' and some more interesting ones. Scanning though them the 'Jammie Dodger' caught my eye today - vanilla & strawberry with crushed jammie dodger biscuits. To say this was sweet, sticky & chewy was an absolute understatement but it was also fantastic & creamy and up there with some of the best ice creams I've had.

I went to sit outside (no-one else was brave enough to do so for some unknown reason) and enjoyed consuming probably my daily amount of calories in a single ice cream. Now fully energised I was able to finish the last part of this leg into the wind and headed under the A9 underpass to Bankfoot. Before settling down at the Bankfoot Inn I decided that a detour to the Perthshire Visitor Centre only a few hundred metres down the road was probably worthwhile. This has the normal selection of touristy shops & restaurants, but there's a pretty decent choice of bottled beer (including those from Strathbraan)...

...and a number of whisky-based liqueurs from the nearby Scottish Liquer Centre, so I purchased a couple of miniatures that I hadn't seen before.

Now it was time to head to the centre of Bankfoot and pitch up at The Bankfoot Inn for an hour or so before the first of the afternoon's showers swept in from the darkening horizon.

It's a traditional coaching inn dating back to Jacobean times and from what I could gather there's been a lot of time and money spent on the place over the last few years by the current owners. The lounge bar is all exposed brickwork, wooden gantry & flooring with 3 hand-pulls available at all times from the small bar.

The dining area is more of the same - half a dozen or so tables with a book case full of spirits and old books; it looked like a really nice place to have something to eat.

I met some of the Tayside CAMRA people (including ex-Angus Ales brewer, Alan Lawson) in the larger main bar on the other side of the building; there are no hand-pulls here but it seems to be where the locals congregate in the evenings. However it wasn't long before we decided that the rain was off and so we headed out into the lovely courtyard beer garden where the casks were being lovingly kept in a perfectly formed serving area.

I think this was their first ever Beer Festival and someone had definitely made an effort to get some interesting beers - Scottish beers from local breweries Strathbraan, Inveralmond & Cairngorm as well as those from Windswept & Speyside Craft, and then also English/Welsh beers from Adnams, Liverpool Craft, Lytham and some others I hadn't heard of at all; a really nice selection indeed, and the pump-clips of those that were available were all 'displayed' on the large mirror in the courtyard serving area.

I managed 1/2s of quite a few beers - Strathbraan's new Look West was there (blond, refreshing & citrusy), and I also enjoyed the lovely malty/bitter balance of Red Duke from Privateer Beers (a new micro from Manchester) and the 'Olde English Ale' that was T'owd Navigation by Nobby's (Northampton), but it was also great just to chat to some fellow enthusiasts, the more than helpful staff and some of the local residents out for the afternoon. It would have been really quite easy to stay in the courtyard for the rest of the afternoon, have a BBQ burger or 2, listen to the live music in the evening and then stagger back home, but unfortunately home was ~80 miles away. So I bade my farewells and got back on the bike, this time to follow Cycle Route 77 all the way back to Perth. Thankfully this was now mostly downhill and over some very quiet back-roads through the Perthshire countryside. After 45 minutes or so of cycling I came to the small village of Pitcairngreen and the location of the stunning picturesque Pitcairngreen Inn.

I lent the bike against one of the outside tables and noted the open door with the Strathbraan Brewery sign, an arrow pointing inside and the tag line 'Look No Further'; about as good a welcome as you can get for a pub.

And there was indeed a Strathbraan beer available, their new Look West (again), as well as Cairngorm Sheepshagers Gold (obviously not an offensive sign hereabouts) and Wylam Gold Tankard. All 3 are pretty good beers, but when in doubt I normally go for the local beer, so a pint of citrusy Look West it was.

I think there's a lounge and dining area on the left hand side of the Inn (the food is meant to be excellent), but I only managed the bar on the right hand side. It's one of those old fashioned large, cavern-like bars - lots of seats at the actual bar counter, lots of standing room and then a number of tables & chairs on the opposite far wall; you would almost need a loudspeaker to talk to the the bar staff when sitting at the tables opposite.

I decided that this would have to be my last stop if I was going to get the train I wanted back to Glasgow. I therefore sped through the village of Almondbank without stopping, decided against trying to gatecrash the Inveralmond Brewery staff BBQ, and followed the Cycle Path alongside the River Tay back to the centre of Perth. I did make some good time here so once I had returned my bike to Perth City Cycles, I just had enough leeway to drop into Greyfriars on South Street (it was vaguely on my way back to the train station).

It's a fairly small place (although there is seating upstairs for lunch), with lots of exposed brickwork and a dark wooden bar, but the welcome is always very warm. I managed a very quick half of Strathbraan Head East before actually having to head west to the station and further on to Glasgow. I'll definitely have to pay a more extended visit to Perth at some point in the future.

Return journey:-
  Train: Perth to Glasgow Queen St (11 on the hour)