As it was only 14 kilometres today I planned a leisurely day, not rushing out of my sleeping bag. It proved a bit more difficult than I imagined. At one point, after some lines of tumble down stones where houses once were, I lost where the trail was intended to go. The guidebook and the gpx track I downloaded for my GPS did not agree and the field boundaries in the guide did not seem to match those I was seeing on the ground. I walked up and down fields looking for a waymark, which I eventually found. I again got into trouble in an overgrown field. Although I failed to find the path, I knew from the guide it exited the field in the north east corner. To get there I pushed my way through shoulder high bracken, fortunately in the autumnal process of dying back, but I had to watch for unseen trip hazards, hidden dips and brambles.
On the plus side the sun was shining in the morning, highlighting stacks off the cliffs and waves crashing over reefs below me. At times the path, or the uneven ground where the path was meant to be, seemed rather too close to steep drops, squeezed between a fence or dry stone wall and a steep slope to the sea, and on occasions, discarded wire from the fencing work threatened to trip me.
There were a few ruins, Forse Castle was one and an old fish processing factory another, the latter with more walls still standing. Also a couple of harbours, one at Lotheronwheel and a more active one at Lybster. Built for the herring trade at the start of the 19th century, there were a few vessels at Lybster harbour, maybe used for catching lobsters.
By the afternoon it was raining, fortunately the showers were not heavy, but after climbing up and down many steep little valleys I was glad to reach my hotel, an old building by the main road in Lybster.
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