WALK 1 BY THE RIVER IN BEAULY 15th January 2024

Monday - the start of a new week. It is also just after the start of a new year - 2024. The time when people make all sorts of promises to themselves to improve their diet, their fitness, their frame of mind, all sorts, really.

Well, coincidentally, I needed to improve all sorts of things. I had a bit of a heart scare on the Christmas Day just past. I had also signed up with The Knee Mentor to try and improve the function of my arthritic left knee. My wife, Sharon and I, had been thinking that we were in a bit of a domestic rut - always cleaning the house on a Monday, she to Keep Fit on Tuesday, me to golf on Wednesday, and so on.

We like to walk, but I have been doing less and less of that as my knee got more and more sore. The medical advice was to get out and walk. The knee mentor's advice was to get out and walk. We rearranged our week and I got a new knee brace, which was all the motivation we needed to get out of the house on Mondays and find somewhere nice for a walk. You can fit a walk round the block into most days, but you need to make an effort to find somewhere nice and to make a bit of a day of it. If you do make something of the day, then, my theory is, it won't seem like so much of a chore or an imposition.

Monday 15th January was our second Monday in this new regime. The week before we had gone for a walk by the canal at Dochgarroch, but there were no plans to record these walks at that point. However, I like doing wee blogs, so I couldn't resist any longer. Hopefully, these will serve as a reminder of our walks together and they will act as a record of improving fitness and health.

It is early days for me and my brace, so I have been trying to get used to wearing it on walks - a couple of miles seemed like a good distance to start. Beauly seemed like a good place to start as well. I found a wee walk from the Priory to the river, so off we went.

Beauly Priory dates from about 1230. The ruins sit right in the centre of the village and they really are pretty atmospheric, especially on a fine blue sky day, such as we had.

Whilst the ruins of the Valliscaulian Priory, have been abandoned since the Reformation, we were not alone in the quiet grounds. There were a few ladies, sitting on the tombstones, painting different views of the grounds. They must have been chilled to the bone as it was Baltic, despite the sunny skies.

The roofless building is much larger than you expect and it must have been very impressive in its day. It was very peaceful today and I am sure it was like that most of the time.

Whilst it was tranquil and interesting, we were really out for a walk. In my experience, there are some people who walk to get fit and they are intent on getting from A to B and back to A again as quickly as they can. They wouldn't have gone into the Priory grounds and they would have missed that sense of serenity. Then there are the people who walk with others and spend most of their time talking to each other and not really noticing what is going on around them. They, too, are in danger of missing things, despite going into the Priory grounds. Then there are the people who walk with their eyes and ears open and who tend to lag behind because they are easily diverted. I belong to that last group. The exercise value is one thing, but then so is the being part of your environment. That cannot be underestimated.

Anyway, enough rumination on the art of walking. We left the Priory and walked down towards the river. We have never been here before and it turned out to be a little joy.

At this point the river is reasonably close to the Beauly Firth and it meanders and flows slowly on the way to the sea. It was flat calm and quite lovely.

The path leaves a track and deviates a bit from the river bank. The surface is a bit more rough than I have been used to over the last few weeks. It was also the first time I had walked on uneven surfaces with the brace on. I have to say I found it painful at times, albeit the brace is quite a reassuring presence.

Off the track, the path runs beside boggy ground that had frozen and then broken into shards, as if there had been some kind of earthquake.

The path rejoins the old track at the riverside. This was once a ferry crossing, which appears to have been in operation even after Thomas Telford built his new bridge across the river further upstream in 1814. The old track was the road into Beauly from the ferry crossing.

The river is unexpectedly (to me, at least) tidal here and the tide was sneaking up on us as we stood at the water's edge. The incoming water explained the existence of ice on the river bed under the water. I could not see how that was possible, but presumably it would soon melt as it became covered in water. Bizarre.

My ice cold heart!

From the river it was an easy walk along the fields back to the car. We drove on to Gilchrist, which is somewhere we have driven past countless times, but never visited. There is a tiny church there that I thought must be worth a look.

It is a little strange, in that the only windows seem to be in the far gable end and the building is not quite as old nor as simple as it first appears.

It was thought to have been built in1574 and then burnt in 1603. It was then restored and used as a mausoleum for the local MacKenzie family. The graveyard is still in occasional use.

There are fine views across to snow-covered Ben Wyvis from the tranquil churchyard. That tranquillity belies the history of the building. When it was burnt in 1603, legend has it that the church was actually full of the MacKenzie congregation who had been locked inside by MacDonalds. The MacDonald piper is said to have marched around the church playing loudly to cover up the screams from inside!

There is also a war grave within the cemetery, but I could not find it. However, I did find out that it belongs to Trooper Roderick William MacKenzie who was 19 years old when he died in April 1945, less than 6 months before the end of the Second World War.

I knew it was worth a visit.

From there we drove to Redcastle on the shores of the Beauly Firth and sat and had a wee picnic in the car, it being far too cold to sit outside. Smoked trout pate, biscuits and tomato soup were fabulous while the bright sun reflected off the sea.

This was the first of these walks designed to get us out of the house and having some fun exercise, somewhere interesting. It was also an opportunity to see what we could see while we were improving our knees. It really isn't just about physical improvements, but it is also about making some connections with the environment that we are walking through. To that end, I made a note of some birds that we saw aside from the usual rooks and blackbirds. The biggest birds we saw was a Red Kite. There are a lot of them about this part of the Black Isle. They are a magnificent spectacle to watch. At the other end of the scale were endless finches and tits and, most surprisingly, a treecreeper flitting about the tombstones at the Priory. There were the usual mallards on any available water, but there were also wigeon, mute swans and a solitary male goldeneye in his winter plumage.

This exercise was certainly all that I hoped it would be. A great combination of exercise and wellbeing for body and soul. I look forward to many more meandering Mondays as my knee and I get better.