The Lactic Ladder

The Lactic Ladder is one of the few mountain bike trails which leads up from the Beinn Bhraggie forestry....

....onto the open moorland, passing though a gate in the deer fence and across a cattle grid. It's presumably so-called because....

....it rises in a series of ten hairpin bends to reach the 300m contour. The name, a reference to the use by the muscles of lactic acid when energy runs low, makes it sound steep but to walkers like us it seemed a gentle stroll compared to the more direct route to the summit which we've followed before. For a start, much of it is paved with big blocks of sandstone, some of them....

....showing interesting ripple marks, reminders that the original sands were laid down in a river or delta during the Devonian period some 400 million years ago.

As always on these walks there was lots to interest us, including some very pretty little moths, blueberry flowers, tormentil, the first cotton grass and, high above us, three buzzards wheeling and calling.

The route looks across the Golspie Glen, in which cuckoos were calling as they were when we last came this way, to Beinn Horn. At bottom left is a camper van with a tent pitched against it, with a surf board on its roof.

The cycle route meets the track that circles round the back of Beinn Bhraggie, along which the stone was brought up to build the Duke of Sutherland's statue and its plinth, down which we turned to make our way home.