Up North - Scotland

I’ve always wanted to go to boating in Scotland, so when an opportunity arose with my local club (Kingfisher) to go up to the Fort William area for a week, I jumped at the chance and booked myself a place.

The first stage of any boating trip is of course getting there, and based on previous experience this can often be the most challenging and dangerous bit! With an absence of car crashes, breakdowns, and with ten hours to kill; I made a start on finding out what my fellow boaters paddling abilities since I had not paddled with most of them before…

“Well of course Fred [Wondre], along with Shaun Baker pioneered the first decent
of Swallow Falls back in the 80s”, Neil my driver explained.

I was scared…

…and that was nothing to do with the Swallow falls story, but because Neil seemed to have too many similarities with Aston’s John Allen. Did he have a stash of knives in the boot? On reflection it may have just been the beard.

The Spean
So onto the Rivers. The first River we set about paddling was the Spean and Spean Gorge.

At the get in a scarily high amount of ribbed buoyancy aids, old school helmets and 90 degree Schlegel paddles emerged, and I began to worry that they might be “BCU types”.

Fortunately they were all a really great bunch, and for every dodgy bit of kit there was someone who had purchased their kit this century. It was a fairly mixed group with people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and even 60! Fair play to anyone whose still boating serious white water at that age.

So the Spean; it was fairly low water and pretty much all grade 3 stuff. We portaged a couple of the main featured rapids, one was dangerously undercut, and the other had little water running though it. A few from KayakoJackos group who were on the river behind us did both, so I think on reflection we could have perhaps run them, but probably best not to screw yourself over on the first day.

So how many well known boaters can I name in one article? Time for another one… That evening Mr UK Rivers Guide Book, AKA Mark Rainsley popped over. For those of you who I’ve now lost, Mark runs probably the most popular kayaking web site in the UK (www.ukriversguidebook.co.uk). His Web site is largely responsible for Potters low productivity on his placement year.

Mark only intended on staying for one night, but we instead we ended up paddling with him for the whole week. This allowed us to do some bigger rivers as Mark is a nice chap and a fairly sh*t hot boater.

The Orchy
The following day was cold, wet and windy and rather strangely for a kayaking trip I woke up and didn’t feel dog rough and have a hangover. Probably something to do with the absence of a Mr A Funnel and an Aston Canoe Club Chair.

We paddled the Orchy, there were a few swims, some bits that most of us portaged and that I need to go back and do with a Creek boat, but apart from that not much to mention.

The Roy & a ditch
The next day we did the Roy which was only up the road from where we were staying. The Upper Roy is mostly grade 3 before the Gorge, with a couple of named grade 4 rapids. After portaging some nasty stuff it’s then on to the Roy Gorge which is a great section of fairly continuous grade 4.

The Roy gave me my beating of the trip. I watched one of the group in a creak boat in front of me struggle to paddle through a stopper. The next minute I was paddling it in my booster, and getting sucked back into it, then staring at the sky, you get the idea… It gave me an excellent trashing, which I actually enjoyed in a strange kind of way. After numerous rolls, and mystery moves, I eventually played my way out of it much to everyone’s surprise. They had all thought they were looking at the first swim of the trip.

After finishing the Gorge the river calms down into some mundane grade 2, and you head off for a gentle paddle home. Well at least that’s what we had all thought. Mr Rainsley had other ideas.

He had noticed a ditch which feed to the Roy, he recalled reading about in a guide book and proceeded to convince a number of us that we wanted to paddle the ditch, “only 2k up that way” apparently. After climbing up a massive hill that seemed to go on forever we reached a track,walked ags and found the get in.


The ditch was a bit bump and scrape in places, and was generally an entertaining technical grade 4 run. “The tributary was a nightmare carry up (major hillside to negotiate first before you reached the 2 km track) but certainly interesting...the river itself was surprisingly tricky and gnarly”. According to Mr UKRGB.

The Pattack

This is a great grade 3 run with a few more interesting rapids approaching grade 4. It has an interesting get in situation which involves driving well of the beaten track and through some estate. The great thing about Scotland is that there are no crappy access restrictions and the locals are nice and friendly towards boaters.

Nevis
This was an excellent grade 4 run. Described in the Scottish Rivers guidebook as grade 4 overall, but every rapid mentioned in the write up seems to be graded 5! This was one of my favourite rivers in Scotland. There are many named rapids and we had many swims on this river, but not from me you’ll be pleased to hear. One surprising swim was from the man who ran swallow falls, who was very grateful of my rescue.

Many great photos were taken of the Nevis. There is a short grade 5 section which looked very doable (in a creak boat!) however in the end only Mr UKRGB did it. The Nevis also ends with a great waterfall (Lower Falls), it looks impressive, but no skill is required.


The Coe
This was the final days paddle. It requires lots of rain to work, and despite that fact we expected none there was loads of it. This is a great run, mostly grade 4, with a fantastic gorge section, which reminded me a little of Chateau Q on the Guil.

There was much carnage on this river, described as a repeat of the Kingfisher Canoe Club Glen Coe massacre. One of the group went for a swim in the gorge, her boat and paddles went on down the river. The boat was retrieved but the paddles sacrificed to river gods. Not content with losing one set of paddles, another member of the group got a thorough beating resulting in a broken paddle and a swim. If only he’d bought Werners… and I suppose at this stage I should confess to running one of the falls backwards, still I got a great line, which was probably just as well!
Despite the carnage (and as you know I love a bit of carnage) the Coe is a great run, so if you get the water paddle it.

We had originally planned to do the Etive on the final day, but the rain had meant that the Coe was the better option. It’s a bit disappointing not to have paddled Scotlands most talked about river, but I will do it next time I’m there.

Scotland is a fantastic paddling destination. One of the things that I noted was the sheer number of rivers. There are so many, and when you’ve run out of them, so many ditches to do.

I can’t wait to go back, hopefully on a Aston or Ex Aston trip.

OK, so I know at this point they’ll be some of you, who are only still reading because you want to know if I swum or not. Well if that’s you, go and wash your mouth out now, and we’ll hear less of that nasty ‘S’ word please. Now you’ll be pleased to know that I didn’t disgrace myself, or the good name of Aston Beavers by swimming.

Martyn Read
October 2005