Cairngorms weekend day 1: Burma Road, Findhorn River and Dava Moor

Apologies if you frequent Strava or any Facebook gravel pages, you might already have seen this! I’m posting again though as still buzzing from an incredible weekend in Glenmore.

We were blessed with the spectacular heat bubble that seemed to exist just over the Cairngorms, so I broke out a couple of the silliest and/or more ambitious gravel routes I had on my list and took full advantage!

Day 1 was the classic Burma Road loop as far as the Slugain Bridge before we headed to Tomatin via some old Military roads (this became a theme of the weekend…).

From Tomatin we headed north along the west bank of the Findhorn River. I had asked on here before about the ‘crux’ of this route which was the apparently impassable section beyond the Shenachie sheep trolley. The verdict was either a sketchy 500m sheep track traverse above the river or one or two fordings of the river would be required. Since I’m a massive wimp when it comes to getting my feet wet we chose the former, but after a week or two’s reasonably dry weather (any locals able to confirm?) it looked like the Findhorn was reasonably low so fording it didn’t look too bad.

Even taking the sheep track might have required fording the remains of an old channel of the river if levels were higher so frankly I’d just keep this route for late summer!

After this was more rolling and fast landrover tracks before the steep climb up from the river on to the high moorland immediately north of Carrbridge. Unfortunately we hit fog here bizarrely so couldn’t appreciate much more than the high quality and continuous gravel track that took us to our final descent back down to the road near Carrbridge. This descent was a loose sandy landrover track which has been heavily bermed by quad bikes, I think even the hardcore MTBers would enjoy it.

I would have liked to return to Glenmore via Nethy Bridge and Ryvoan from this point but two major mechanicals during the ride had put us way behind schedule so we just limped home via the road and the old logging way. Route below is how I would have liked to finish.

Check out this route on Strava: https://strava.app.link/uX7Hac5HcNb — Burma Findhorn Ryvoan

Sound like you had an amazing time.

Awesome photos too, sums up riding in Scotland perfectly (at least the nice side of it when the weather is good!).

but after a week or two’s reasonably dry weather (any locals able to confirm?)

We’ve not actually had a lot of rain this summer. It’s been consistently damp rather than full-on wet. The Findhorn does fill up fast though, so any plan to ford it needs to be carefully considered.

There’s gravel for days across the breadth of Dava Moor, including the more easterly reaches north of Grantown and the old Via Regia to Forres.