The walkers, to appear here

The 2006 walkers

Ewen Swinton, Lyal Purves, John Laing, Tony Hamilton, Ian Wilson, Derek Turnbull, Keith Johnston, Jim Milne, Roger Glenfield, Michelle Brownlee and sister, Ford Renton

I'm awaiting the correct list of names, the above is a guess. My apologies to anybody missed out, a correction will follow

Also awaiting some photographs. If you have any, digital or paper (I can scan them) let me have a copy and they'll get published here.

Click on the map to download a bigger picture.

for .pdf format click here

We bunched up for the group photo, however I'd forgotten to change the camera batteries so no photograph was taken. This proved to be an omen for worse to come. Most of the walkers got fed up of my camera fumbling and shot off up the hill.

The weather forecast was reasonable but with a chance of showers and moderate winds.

As I'd done no training I was determined to take it easy on the first climb. Within about 15 minutes the vast majority of walkers were at least a mile in front. By the time most were at the top I was only approaching the wee bothy half way up Brown Knowe. Ewen, sensing something wasn't right, stayed behind until I'd caught up.

To cut a long story short, I simply didn't have the energy for a walk of this magnitude. Stupidly I'd been on an Atkins type diet for the previous month and although I felt OK there was obviously no charge left the batteries. Ok, I'm always last but this time it was a struggle just to get to the Three Brethren. Good old Ewen stuck with me to the end though, which in my case was Yair Bridge. Peter Croan gave me a lift to The Salmon from there, the last 3 miles or so.

Everybody else did well though and apart form a few altercations with cows above Fairnilee there were no casualties We all met up again at The Salmon Inn, Galashiels to replace lost fluids

NB: I'll be doing part of the walk again next week (June 11th) to make up for the part I didn't finish. But this time "Bring on the pies" and S*d Atkins, GI and the lot of them.

In addition to raising funds for the Pumas I was also raising money for The Royal hospital for Neuro-Disability in London who did sterling work looking after a friends daughter following her tragic accident.