01 This walk over the Rig of the Jarkness onto Craiglee, done clockwise and shown in green, is like many others in the Galloway Hills started from the car park by Bruce's Stone at Glentrool. It is a sister walk to the Lamachan route (shown in blue above) in that it is possible to combine the two routes as I have shown with the red dashes - to make a longish but very satisfying day on the hill. You could also come down from Craiglee and take the Southern Upland Way back to Glentrool as shown by the simple blue dashes going down the valley.
Notice that the green route along the Jarkness twists and turns. It does not have to be that way - you could walk right along the top of the ridge pretty well straight and not see much down either side. But I wanted the shots for this web gallery and I criss-crossed the ridge from time to time to get them. I would recommend that, both to really enjoy the strange ice age erratic-filled landscape of the Jarkness, and to get the views doing so allows you to savour in all directions. I spent 3 hours going along the rig from the west end to Craiglee - a distance of around 3 kilometers which you would normally expect to do in roughly 36 minutes.
However, I took 264 picture in the course of the day! The whole walk took me six and a half hours - which is probably at least 2 hours more than it should take if you were pushing on..
I did this route on my own on 14th May 2008. My pal Sandy and I had had it in mind to do this for several weeks but for one reason or another we could not find a Wednesday when we were both free - we usually go walking on Wednesdays these days. We had had an excellent spell of weather leading up to this and I knew it was going to break - and it did on the 15th - so I just had to take it on on my own while the going was so good - sorry Sandy - but it was a spectacular day.