The first fish I ever caught was a mackerel, off Tighnabruaich Pier, where the Waverley comes in.

That was with a two-bob rod from the newsagents in the village, with lures made of coloured feathers.

My granny had the fish in her freezer for years and used to show it to folk like it was a hunting trophy.

Auchendrain

I’ve done that, big push up(particuraly with tents!), soggy up top, though would be ridable on the dry, on the down was basically a decent on a grassy gap in the tree’s till you hit the massive forest access road, lot of tree carnage, i couldn’t find the rest of the path down due to the carnage. had to head along the fireroad to catch on to the main forest drive(which you can take a car on) then down over to loch awe to kilmartin.

http://www.mapmyride.com/routes/view/401256198

Would be better doing the ardgarten loop i think if yer driving.

push up: (my m8 never really has got the concept of attaching stuff to yer bike) 😆 views were good though.

Down was mostly like this: which was great while it lasted , broken up by felled trees though.

soggy otb! 😆 my landing was good! and I still think my lidl bike bags were awesome! 😆

That’s a quite different route up over from Furnace that the Auchendrain loop takes Joe, although I believe it’s not worth doing any more anyway due to the good bits being sanitised and the forestry work wrecking lots of it too.

Shame, used to be a Scottish classic.

Ahh, cool fair doo’s, I did just cobble together the route from hearsay on the interweb mind you, so I can appreciate i could be out. Once up, I kinda just went where the path lead us tbh which was largely correct from what I planned till I hit the forest works and couldn’t find the rest of the down. Never really got much of a down though, and when we hit the forest road, I’d no gps at the time, so really just had to use a bit of faith that it would actually take us somewhere!

Yep, auchendrain no more 🙁