Autumn Years: Abandoned A93 Road, Craighall Gorge

On a recent excursion elsewhere, a friend tipped me off to the existence of the gorge at Craighall, through which runs the remains of the abandoned A93 road from Blairgowrie to Glenshee.

It’s funny to think that the bridge was constructed in 1994 and the road decommissioned in 2008, both of which are well within my lifetime – and given how I visited Glenshee several times in my early years having just moved up to Perth in 2004/5, it’s entirely possible I might have used the old road unawares.

These days it’s little more than a 40-minute saunter for dog walkers – almost like wandering through a woodland but with crash-barriers beside and the occasional painted stripe of a white line former road marking peeking through the inch-deep mud and moss.

With the leaves turning gold in autumn, it’s a post-urban delight in its own way.

Around Binnend

After serendipitously discovering a lot of heritage information about the abandoned former village of Binnend, on The Binn outside Burntisland in Fife, I spent much of Sunday afternoon exploring the area.

It was smaller than I expected from the maps – about 30x30m or so – and very overgrown. The central region is a mix of thick gorse and fallen boulders, so not really accessible by foot. Use of the drone was hampered by several factors: being immediately adjacent to the Alcan landfill waste processing site, still an active commercial operation; by being a few hundred yards away from Craigkelly transmitter which caused significant radio interference (warnings in the DJI Go app and actual loss of video signal above a few meters’ altitude), so I did not get the fly-over video I’d intended.

Still. Herewith, a few still photos instead:

Approaching Binnend:

Within Binnend itself:

Above Binnend: