Skinflats

A local walk (at least for me!) with Cumbernauld & Kilsyth Ramblers today.

Our Wednesday walks usually take us slightly farther afield than Falkirk, and they are usually slightly longer than today's 10.5km, but no-one was complaining as we made our third attempt at a walk around the Helix Park, the Kelpies and Skinflats Local Nature Reserve (pictured).

A few years ago, we had to abandon the walk within the first hour due to near-horizontal rain, blown in by high winds. We've coped with bad weather before, but this walk offers very little shelter and we made a unanimous decision to cut our losses on that occasion. The walk reappeared on last year's programme but fell foul of the 'Beast from the East' which made driving hazardous and walking difficult. Undeterred, however, we put it onto this year's programme and hoped it would be third-time-lucky. It was!

Although the forecast was for frequent showers, possibly with some heavy ones thrown in, and we were all dressed accordingly, we only had one brief, and not too heavy, shower of rain near the start - and, fortunately, as we were passing the Visitor Centre at the Kelpies - and dry, not-too-cold weather for the rest of our walk. The sun even tried to make an appearance on a couple of occasions.

Not only was it a pleasant day's walking, the leader decided to drop a couple of short 'there-and-back' sections from the original route, so we were back in the Kelpies Visitor Centre enjoying a coffee around 1.30pm, about 45 minutes to an hour earlier than we had anticipated. Result!