Nae haggis for me tonight: the Cairn O'Mount has been off limits to me for a month.
On a related note, I did manage to slightly convince a group of furrin visitors that there were ferral hippos on the moorland on the CoM.
Driving them in a Transit mini-bus from Montrose to the Deeside Activity Centre near Aboyne for a 'team-building' jolly, I took the CoM route. One of their number spotted a creature down in the moor, some distance off. It was just a deer. But I said it might have been a hippo; there was a small pod of ferral hippos living wild here. Back in the 1920s there was a former army type who had bought up Fasque Estates who own this land, and he's enjoyed hunting in Africa back in the day. He'd brought african wildlife here to hunt and the likes, but also just to have around. There had been a great storm one night, and the wildlife had broken loose of the fences. The big cats were found and captured or shot, but the hippos had managed to avoid capture, and remained wild to this day.
So it remains unclear whether there is actually a pod of ferral hippos living in the moorland between the CoM and the Bridge of Dye.
Mind how you go, especially in the dark.
They make a sound like someone laughing: "Ho Ho Ho"....