A sunny day in the Angus glens (Really!)

That rare event this summer, a guaranteed sunny day had us reaching for the map, where can we get to, have a nice walk and then get back in time for a good barbecue!  Glen Isla is just a 50 minute drive so seemed to fit the bill and Mealna Letter (also called Duchray hill) fitted the bill and is one we haven't done for quite a while.  It's a SOTA GM/ES043, WAB NO16 and also a flora fauna being in the Cairngorms national park so GMFF0001.

It's a nice walk starting out at the east end of the map below at 300m, heading north west up Glen Beanie until you reach the saddle or bealach at 440m, thence you turn south south west and grit your teeth as the remaining 260m happens in a km or less with some quite steep sections.  So, it's a mere 400m total in a round trip of 12km so a pleasant little walk.

Leaving the car it seemed a nice day and the gentle start up Glen Beanie is always pleasant with loads of butterflies to see and pleasantly warm

At the saddle you get nice views of Loch Beanie and a proper look at the hill and the steep bit!

The steep bit doesn't look actually that bad on the ones of us going up

But when you come to look at one of the ones, going down, it gives a better idea

Still, we survived

And even managed to get setup to do a bit of radio

Considering you can't get anyone anymore, it was pretty ok.  Many of the usual culprits are in the log, as usual.  g7lmf, g0rql, ea2ckx, g0gwy,g0fex, m3feh, g4iar, g4sqa, dl3hxx, pa0b, pa0ina plus a few more on 40m.  20m yielded no USA this time but an s2s with hb9sqm/p, and frequent callers hb9agh, Marius sp9amh, oe7fmh, eu2mm, sa4blm, Manuel ea2dt, hb9mkv, a couple of FF park to park contacts and a few others.   A trip to 2m gained Robin gm7pkt/p on gm/es033 but we completely failed with gi0aza&b in the Mourne mountains despite the GI beacon being quite a good signal.  We'd waited up there especially expecting it to be easy.  Ian, my walking assistant and carrier of the "heavy thing"  comments that the GI contingent should get up and set off earlier (like we do) so we dont have to wait,  hint hint.  (Not that he was particularly inconvenienced as he went to sleep and got sunburn)

One of the reasons why the GI signals weren't really there on VHF is that this lot is in the way:

Still, it's a nice enough spot to spend a couple of hours and it looked quite nice back towards home for that promised barbecue

There were nice views of last weeks jaunt up Mount Blair ES045 just to the south

Even our hill looked quite nice as we headed down, but I was happy enough to call it a day knowing that there was a load of diced  pork for kebabs marinading in the fridge in thyme lemon juice and olive oil.

The kebabs were amazing.