24 Three minutes along that track I came across half a dozen trees recently blown down over the road as in the picture above. I scrambled through them and kept checking the compass. I was doing fine at first heading north east.
Now whether I missed a road going to the right or not I don't know but pretty soon the compass was telling me I was heading north west. So what do you do? Go back and see if you can find a lesser track going to the right would probably have been the thing to do but I ploughed on regardless and ended up at Loch Minnoch cursing forest roads vehemently - "I hate the damn things".
They channel your free spirit of the hills into where they want you to go, or, as in this case where you don't want to go, they offer nothing much to see and are really just industrial man-made scars in the natural environment. They are of course very necessary for the forest management and forests are great for fighting global warming - I know all that fine. So you just have to grin and bear them really when you have to use them to get onto the hill. Anyway the loop round by Loch Minnoch added a couple of extra kilometres to my day's walk but I did get these pictures of the loch that you see below. The second picture has North Gairy brooding over the loch.
This was not my most memorable day on the hill. It had taken me six and a quarter hours but I had spent half an hour on the top of Meikle Millyea waiting for the clouds to lift and added another 25 minutes or so doing the Loch Minnoch loop. So you could take at least an hour off that six and a quarter hours if you were in a hurry to do the route - and got it right! But not getting the spectacular views west from the Rhinns over to the rest of the Galloway Hills was the biggest disappointment. "I'll just need to get back soon again for that" is what I thought, and one week later I got the pictures I was looking for, shown in the Fore Bush 2 web gallery.

I have added an extra page to this web gallery with an explanation of where I went wrong.