Ballintomb Wood

Scots pine woodland near Dulnain Bridge. There are numerous paths in the wood.

Standing dead timber on the edge of Gaich Wood.

Serving the television relay on Laggan Hill.

Serving the television relay mast.

A television relay above Grantown.

The path joins up with the road in Gaich Wood.

Further down Laggan Hill the woodland is more plantation like, rather than the scattered big pines further up. It is still a very open pine forest.

Scots pine plantation.

Wide spaced Scots pines with little windthrow for once.

Amongst the roches moutenees, ice smoothed exposed rock. The woodland here is recent, birches having colonised the site in the past 30 years.

The Cairngorm Mountains were covered to a depth of many hundreds of metres of ice during the last ice age. As the glaciers moved from southwest to northeast, they ground over the harder underlying rock leaving these "roche moutonnée" features. How the features got their name and their characteristic shape is described very well here on information stones which are built into a small scale moutonnée feature itself! Thousands of years ago, the whole area was covered by a vast sheet of glacier ice which was hundreds of metres thick. As the ice moved along, it ground down and shaped the underlying rock. As the ice melted, it left behind exposed rock in some places and deposited a mixture of boulders and clay in others. The exposed rocks have a distinctive shape with a gradual slope on the side of the ice advance and a steeper cliff like face on the lee side. The steeper sides are often shattered or “plucked” by the ice as it moved away. The rocks often occur in groups and were named by a Frenchman, H.B. De Saussure in 1787. He thought that the rounded rocks looked like the wavy wigs or “moutonnées” that were the fashion at the time. These were slicked down with mutton tallow – hence Roches Moutonnées or Rock Wigs with sheep fat! The rocks are oval in shape and show smooth grooves that were left by the ice flows. The way in which the whole group is aligned is south west to north east. This shows the direction of the glacier flow all those years ago.

A reconstruction of a roche moutonnée, with information explaining how they form, in front of the real thing behind. A detailed description can be found with Ralph Greig's image NJ0024 : Dulnain Bridge Roche Moutonnée, coincidently taken the same day.