HOLE UP

The Highlands aren’t all about the high land: lots of you recommended a walk to a crater in the eastern Cairngorms called Burn O’ Vat, describing it as beautiful, stunning, magical. It’s a glacial pothole, where a rock got wedged in the riverbed and caused a whirlpool of meltwater to scour out an amphitheatre 60 feet wide and 40 feet deep. A tight squeeze along a stream, sometimes on stepping stones, sometimes splashing, opens into a bowl of granite, fern, and waterfall, where myth says famous outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor once laid low, and history says 17th-century cattle thief Patrick Gilroy MacGregor really did hole up.