After my week up north – and its paddleboarding trips to Loch Insh and Loch Ruthven – I had one night in my own bed before I was off again. Galloway beckoned! Its as long a drive as the Highlands and, without any munros, had never quite had the same appeal. I could count previous visits on the finger of one hand, including our new year a decade or so ago, so the paddleboard was already helping me explore new places.

The detour through the Borders to pick up E added to the travel time, as did a twisty road past St Mary’s Loch. A late-ish lunch in busy Moffat broke the journey. We were equally amused and frustrated watching a couple of people struggle to figure out how to inflate their tyres as we waited to do the same. It was late afternoon before we reached our caravan in Cree. We arrived without a serious plan for the weekend, other than we had paddleboards, bikes, boots and reasonable weather forecast.

Clatteringshaws Loch is roughly in the middle of Galloway Forest Park, surrounded by walks, drives and trees. It has a visitors centre, where we parked on a sunny Saturday morning. Our first problem was paying for parking without any change. The staff seemed relaxed, but fortunately managed to assuage my guilt: the cafe opened early and allowed us to make sure we could leave the car legally.

The paddling commences

The adjacent beach was stony, so we inflated our boards in the car park and carried them them down. A quick change and slap on of suncream (for me) and we were ready to go. A line of rocks made an effective pier and I managed to get on board with dry feet. We set off in a clockwise direction around the loch, which took us towards the dam first.

The dam felt quite long, maybe half a km. Its height made me think the water was quite low. However, while there were some beaches, the vegetation came down much lower, suggesting the water hadn’t approached the top of the dam for a long time.

As we reached the far side and turned right we felt the gentlest of breezes. It didn’t make it hard to paddle, but was enough to discourage us from standing up. The extra cloud that had appeared as we started drifted away, and we enjoyed the warmth of the sun on our backs. We passed a tent, a farm and, most dramatically, storm damaged trees.

As we approached the top of the loch, we started to see some large birds in the sky. Red kites! Having never knowingly seen these before, I was quite excited. Not so excited that I fell off my board though! It looked like three different ones gliding over the trees and the loch. They got close enough that I could appreciate how big they are and it was good to have their company.

We didn’t hug the coastline, which sometimes meandered more than a drunk at closing time, but took a straighter line up towards the inflowing river. We carefully avoided a shallow looking area punctuated by a large round boulder and entered the river mouth. This was broken into two channels by some rocky outcrops, with a falls visible at bend in the river. We paddled towards it, finding the current wasn’t very strong. The falls were slightly more than head height and we didn’t get too close. On the far side of the rocks, the current helped as we paddled out.

We’d planned to cycle in the afternoon, it was time for lunch and I was already started to feel the exertion a little so we decided to head back. We went straight across the loch to the centre. With the slight breeze now behind us, I stood for much of the way. Not sure I got much benefit and, after a while, the effort started to tire my feet. The last few hundred metres were back on my knees.

As we approached the centre, we saw a couple of canoeists paddling inflatables. Other than that, we had been alone on the water all morning. Landing proved as straightforward as launching. It wasn’t quite warm enough to dry the boards before packing up, but nice enough for us to sit outside the handy cafe which provided a nice, and very welcome lunch.