The Island in the Loch

The island

Loch an Eilein means, unhelpfully, "loch of the island". The island in question carries the ruin of a small castle, and the ruin is a scheduled monument in the care of the estate. Landing on it is not permitted, and the cache never asks you to.

The castle was built in the fourteenth century, probably by a bishop of Moray, and it changed hands repeatedly in the long argument between the Mackintoshes, the Gordons and the Grants. What matters for the puzzle is its shape. The tower is at the south end of the island, on the highest point, and the curtain wall runs north from it along the spine of the island. The wall is not concentric: it follows the rock, which means the defended area faces the shore you are standing on rather than the water behind.

Stage one: the shore

At the published coordinate you are on the eastern shore of the circuit path, looking west across about a hundred metres of water. The stage one marker is a small tag under the bench that faces the island, and it gives you a number: the count of visible window openings in the tower.

Count carefully. Two of the openings are not windows. One is a garderobe outlet, which is smaller and set lower, and one is a broken section of wall that has fallen into a shape that reads like an opening from the shore. The number you want excludes both.

Stage two: the wall line

Take the count from stage one and walk that many hundreds of metres clockwise around the circuit. The circuit is marked and it is about five kilometres in total, so this is a real walk and not a shuffle.

Stage two is a small container under the root plate of a fallen pine at the inside edge of the path. It has been replaced once, after a gale took the original tree down entirely; the replacement sits under the root plate of the tree that fell on top of it, which is either tidy or ironic depending on your mood. It contains the bearing to stage three.

Stage three: the ice house

The bearing takes you off the circuit to a stone-built ice house set into a bank above the shore. It was built in the nineteenth century to store winter ice cut from the loch, packed in straw, for the estate's kitchens and for salmon.

The stage three container is a micro in the lintel above the ice house entrance. This is the only stage that involves a short scramble; the bank is steep and root-covered, and the entrance is low.

Stage four: the arithmetic

Stage three gives you four numbers, which are the dimensions of the island's visible rock platform in metres. Use them like this:

The result gives you a bearing in degrees and a distance in metres from the published coordinate. The final is a small clip-lock in a root hollow at the base of a Scots pine, on the shore side of the path, within sight of the water.

Access and terrain

• The circuit path is well made and mostly level. It is one of the most accessible walks in the Cairngorms and is popular with families, which is why the stages are placed off the main line or low down.
• Landing on the island is prohibited and the castle masonry is dangerous. Do not swim out.
• The forest is a working estate with red squirrels and capercaillie. Keep to the path in spring, when capercaillie are lekking and disturbance matters.
• Midges are severe on still summer evenings along this shore. The wind off the loch is usually enough.

After the find

The circuit itself is the best two hours in Rothiemurchus, and the northern end of the loch gives a view of the Lairig Ghru pass that explains why this forest was worth defending in the first place.