A woman completing a charity trek with two horses and a dog had to be rescued after getting lost up a mountain near Blair Atholl.
Leanne McDonald was walking from Spey Bay in Moray to the Highland Show in Edinburgh to raise awareness of a condition called Equine Grass Sickness.
After becoming lost she walked the horses – Candyfloss and Tinkerbell to a height of 770m up Glen Tilt in an attempt to find a phone signal.
She then raised the alarm by contacting the police via mobile phone, who asked Braemar and Tayside mountain rescue teams to attend.
A helicopter was scrambled on Sunday evening to find Mrs McDonald, with Braemar Mountain Rescue Team reporting it was a cold night with snow on the tops down to 500m.When she was finally located the horses were tethered while Mrs McDonald was taken on foot to Pitlochry.
A Braemar MRT spokesman said: “It’s a unique situation to get to the top of a 770m hill and find a walker, two ponies and a large dog up there all needing recovered off the hill.”
Mrs McDonald was undertaking the month-long trip to raise awareness of grass sickness, a disease which affects the nervous systems of ponies and horses. The illness causes gut paralysis and is frequently fatal.
Grass sickness remains a major cause of mortality in horses and ponies in Britain with more than 95 per cent of cases proving fatal.