Camping in Scotlands Ancient Forest
This post is based on a YouTube video, so if you want to see what this all looked like, I've linked the video at the bottom.
The Caledonian pine forests of the Scottish Highlands are very unique places. These ancient forest have a history going back 10,000 years and once were home to wolves, lynx and brown bears.
Today their biggest predators are eagles, foxes and of course, people.
The Scots pine trees that make up the majority of the trees in this forest are quite unique too with a huge variation between them. Rough trunks covered in thick knobbly bark with lichens and moss growing on them. Some are tall, thin and proud, others broad, with limbs so heavy that they look like the trees gave up trying to hold them aloft long ago.
I even found a tree with a young tree growing out of a pile of dirt on its outstretched arm. They have character.
It's a place I've always wanted to visit and so in January, I took a ferry from Belfast to Cairnryan to travel to Aviemore in the Cairngorms National Park to visit Rothiemurchus Forest, one of the finest examples in Scotland of this ancient woodland.
The Ferry from Belfast with a van cost £375 return. I took the 19:30 sailing and was in Scotland by 10pm. After driving 3hours north I parked for the night in a service area just north of Perth.
Link: https://maps.app.goo.gl/L1ror8ZLQr3SVPGf7
Another 90mins the next morning took me into the heart of the Cairngorms and to Glenmore Campsite where I had booked my Van in for 3 nights at a cost of £93 with an electric hookup. (It's more expensive in summer)
If I hadn't been staying at the campsite, there is other parking nearby.
Top tip: If staying in a van in winter and you are in a campsite that has an option between a beautiful forest hard stand or a hard stand out in the open, take the open one every time.
I felt rather smug on my exposed hard pitch a couple of nights later when stormy weather hit and everyone under the trees were being hammered by falling twigs all night.
Setting out immediately after parking up, I walked across the highest beach in the UK on the shores of Loch Morlich before plunging into Glenmore Forest on my way to Rothiemurchus, a 3mile walk away.
The pine trees even grow on the beach
It was a mostly flat walk so I didn't mind the 20kg of kit I was carrying. If it's an easy hike, I bring everything.
Here’s my route, I don’t want to make public the exact place I camped so the trail ends short about half a mile. I use Hiiker for planning.
Immediately the landscape was novel to me. The tall pines with the lichen on their bark, always silvery in colour, widely spaced with heather, bilberry and gorse growing between. Bright green and alive. A far cry from the Sitka spruce forest plantations most common in Northern Ireland. And where the forests at home are open and spaced, Scots pines are rare and the undergrowth tends more towards ferns and brambles.
I'd never been anywhere quite like this.
My goal for the night was simple. Find a huge pine tree, in a sheltered area, near a water source and spend the night.
And that's exactly what I did.
Pitched up beneath a huge old pine tree, its huge limbs stretching overhead like my own personal forest guardian. This ended up being maybe one of my top 10 camping experiences. Perfect location, near perfect conditions, comfortable, warm, great food, good sleep and importantly for Scotland, not a midge or tick in sight!
I’ll remember this one for a long time.
Find out what happened when you watch the video from this trip: https://youtu.be/0YA1OmuNrOE?si=jmAxUfgKWnhnqFw3
