Total Motorcycle Community Forums

The Journey Plan.

The idea was to raise some sponsorship money for charity by doing a bike ride through the entire island of Great Britain. It sounded good but when I sat down to think about it, I wondered what exactly did it mean – ‘the entire island of Great Britain’? The traditional route is to ride/run/cycle/drive from Land’s End (the most south-westerly point in England) to John O’Groats (the most north-easterly point in Scotland), the longest distance by road between two points in mainland Britain. But everyone who wants to raise money does this. The Mayor of Stevenage (I work for Stevenage Borough Council) had just done it on his bicycle. His trip was all over the council staff website. If I did it so soon after him, I would just look as though I were running second in the race. That was no good. As the idea was to raise money, I would have to do something that would grab people's imagination. I had to think of something else…

Someone in the bike club suggested an interesting variation on this plan: to ride to the most northerly, easterly, westerly and southerly points of GB. It’s not an original idea but it has a sort of iconic feel to it. I liked it. My ‘Four Corners’ ride became an immediate plan, and I started asking friends and colleagues at work to sponsor me to do it.

Those of you who read my usual blog will know that I’m raising the money because I’ve signed up to do the EnduroIndia tour in February, 2007. The Enduro is a charity event. The deal is this - I raise a minimum of £3,850 for charity before the end of November 2006 and, in return, EnduroIndia fly me out to Goa, give me the use of a brand new Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycle for just over two weeks, and send me off with 100-150 other slightly deranged people (I mean it, I’ve met them) on a 2,000 mile journey through the mountains and High Plateaux of Southern India. The Enduro route passes through the Indian states of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. It takes in many remote villages well off the beaten tourist track.



This and the following are photos taken on previous EnduroIndia tours.



http://www.enduroindia.com/home.htm

Some nights the riders get to sleep in cheap hotels, three to a room (a luxury!). Sometimes they get to sleep on the beach or in a treehouse in the forest. In some places they have to keep a fire going all night to drive the tigers away. Five star comfort it isn’t. A lot of fun? An adventure? A whole new experience? Well, it sounds like it to me.

Although the event is called an Enduro, it isn’t really, because there is no element of competition involved. It’s a tour. But the organisers do their best to make life difficult and a little dangerous for their riders. Their task is made easier for them by local conditions: Indian roads are notoriously ‘poor’, Indian driving notoriously homicidal, and the Bullet… Well, the Bullet is a bike unto itself – and it’s not exactly designed for comfort.



And here she is - the baby that does the business! The Indian Bullet. Note the Brembos, the fuel injection, the slipper clutch, the single sided swingarm, the Corbin Gel seat. OK, OK... I lie! Ouch!

http://www.royal-enfield.com/

Back in 1953 The Royal Enfield motorcycle company, based at Redditch, south of Birmingham in the UK received a huge order from the Indian Army for Bullet motorcycles. Instead of making the bikes in the UK and shipping them half way around the world, the company granted a licence to an Indian entrepreneur to build a factory in Madras and manufacture them on the spot.

In the post-war years, times became hard for British motorcycle manufacturers - we all know the history - and the British Royal Enfield motorcycle company eventually went bust. The Indian business survived - just - and has continued making motorcycles to this day. Royal Enfield in one form or another has now been making motorcycles continuously for longer than any other company anywhere in the world.

The motorcycles that the Indian firm turns out today are pretty much the same motorcycles they started building back in the 1950s. Virtually unchanged for over 50 years, the Bullet is a throwback to a byegone age. But it is still THE status motorcycle in India. I'm told it is absolutely ideal for Indian conditions. It’s not the fastest bike in the world: its brakes are, shall we say, primitive and, as I said, it is not exactly designed for comfort. But it is bomb proof and easily fixed when something goes wrong – which it often does.

So I’ve been raising the £3,850 all summer with a series of events. My ‘Four Corners’ motorcycle ride was to be the first of these but, right from the start, the timing of it went a little awry. Initially, I planned to do it in August this year. But other commitments got in the way. I put it off and then had to keep putting it off – five times in total - to fit in other things. Eventually I set a starting date of the 2nd November. Even then, I had to split the journey in two, returning home for a few days in the middle of it to keep several appointments.

As two of the Cardinal Points (two of my 'four corners') are up in Scotland, one in the very north of the country, I'm chancing it a bit with the weather at this time of year. As soon as I tell people, they say I'm mad to try it. The weather will be awful, they say. Scotland can be wet during most months of the year and in the late autumn it will be just downright miserable.

Grouches!

What they say may be true (but what’s a little rain, eh?). What they are missing is that going at this time of year has two great advantages: there would be no mosquitoes (Scotland is famous for mozzies) and there would be no tourist traffic. I would have the roads all to myself. As I found out once I got up there, there was a third advantage as well. At this time of year, Scotland wears it autumnal colours and the country, which is always naturally beautiful, becomes just stunningly perfect.

The ‘Four Corners’ or four cardinal points I set myself to visit are all very different.

In the north, in Scotland, is Dunnet Head, a rocky little peninsula that thrusts out into the Pentland Firth, a local stretch of the North Sea - one of the wildest and most tempestuous seas anywhere in the world. The head looks out towards the even more remote Orkney Islands where harsh living conditions have created over the centuries, a unique and fascinating culture.

http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/d ... index.html

In the west, also in Scotland, is Ardnamurchan Point. I expect that getting to Ardnamurchan Point will be a challenge. Scotland’s shattered western coastline is a series of jagged peninsulas and islands. Ardnamurchan is a large, sparsely inhabited, rocky peninsula that pushes out into the cold waters of the western sea. It is narrowly joined to Moidart, an even larger and more mountainous peninsula, which clings to the rest of the mainland along part of its northern edge. Moidart is split almost in two by the long glacial lake of Loch Shiel. Ardnamurchan Point can only be reached first by taking the narrow, twisty road that circles Moidart and then turning off onto B8007. This is designated as a road but is really little more than a surfaced track that runs for 25 miles, mostly along the southern edge of the peninsula, towards The Point with its lighthouse at the westernmost tip.

http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/k ... chanpoint/
http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/a ... index.html

To the east, and much more prosaically, there is Lowestoft Ness, a tiny spit of land – no more than a pimple really, which bulges imperceptibly out from the coast of East Anglia. East Anglia is a large eastward push of the English mainland, very flat and very atmospheric. The Ness stands at the southern end of The East Anglian Broads, an ancient, man-made landscape of wetlands and snaking water channels. It is located on the map just at the southern end of the fishing and seaside town of Lowestoft.

http://home.clara.net/ammodytes/nesspoint.htm

Deep down in the south projecting into the English Channel from Cornwall (the most southerly, westerly and remote of all English counties) is The Lizard peninsula. Lizard Point, at its southern tip is so far south it is set apart from the rest of Britain by having its own microclimate. The summers are warmer here, the vegetation sub-tropical and the insects larger and stranger. The Lizard's geology is unusual. It is composed of a unique metamorphic rock known as serpentine. Serpentine is a strange, soft, marbled rock, very crumbly, easy to carve and dangerous to climb on (as I once discovered to my cost). Just to the north of Lizard Point lie the Goonhilly Downs, a wide and bare tract of land were the British satellite earth station is situated. It’s an odd and exotic place.

http://www.cornwalls.co.uk/The-Lizard/

As The Lizard lies only thirty miles to the east of Lands End and John O’Groats lies only fifteen miles west of Dunnet Head, I can fit in the traditional Lands End to John O’Groats run in addition to the ‘Four Corners'.

http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=lan ... s&ct=title

http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/j ... index.html

But that wasn't the end of it: the plan continued to evolve. A few days before setting off I was checking through a batch of news items that Mike had recently posted up on the TMW boards when I came across a survey by the DVLA (the British Motor Vehicle Licensing Authority). The DVLA had asked bikers which, in their opinion, were the ten best biking roads in Britain. The results were interesting and very varied and showed just what a mixed bunch we bikers are. Some of the roads chosen were tough and technical, others were easy but passed through wild and romantic scenery, some were very twisty and some were just plain fast. With just a little bit of extra riding, I thought, it would be possible to incorporate all ten roads into my route. Here they are:
1. Glen Coe; A82 (Scottish Highlands)
http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/glencoe/glencoe/
2. Bealach na Ba (The Pass of the Cattle); Unclassified road (Scottish Highlands)
http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/a ... index.html
3. Heights of Kinlochewe/Glen Docherty; A832 (Scottish Highlands)
4. Horseshoe Pass; A542 (Wales)
5. Clee Hill; A4117 (Shropshire, England)
6. Cat and Fiddle Pass; A537 (Cheshire, England)
http://www.macclesfield-express.co.uk/n ... _road.html ('killer road" is the nicest thing you can find on the cat and fiddle in the press - bikers to blame, of course!))
7. Hartside Pass; A686 (Cumbria, England)
http://www.visitcumbria.com/pen/hartside.htm
8. Snake Pass; A57 (The Peak District, Derbyshire, England)
9. Pickering to Whitby, North York Moors; A169 (North Yorkshire, England)
10. Hardknott/Wrynose Pass; Unclassified road (Lake District, Cumbria, England)
http://www.bikeit.eclipse.co.uk/localrides/ride2/24.htm (use the green arrows at the bottom of this link to navigate through some great pics of the Lake District scenery arount the pass.)
http://www.visitcumbria.com/wc/hardknottpass.htm

And then I thought, I would almost certainly have to pass through Ledbury in Herefordshire, the birth place of John Masefield, a former British Poet Laureate whom I’m quite interested in at the moment. I could go there as well.

So, this is the plan as it finally took shape in the last few days before I left. I will ride for eleven days altogether, but split the journey in half. The first part will be from Friday 3 November to Friday 10 November. I will then come home to meet a series of obligations from Saturday to Wednesday. I will continue from Friday 17 November to Sunday 19 November.

I will visit the four cardinal points of GB. I will also visit Lands End and John O’Groats. I will ride all 10 of the DVLA’s best biking roads and stop off at Ledbury in Herefordshire on the way. On each day of my ride except the last (which will be just a ride back home, having completed everything else) I will visit at least one of these places or ride at least one of these roads. The trick will be to find a route which will allow me to do this in the time I have available.

I’m now back home from the first half of the journey. The blog which follows is based on the diary I kept day by day.

So here it is – An account of my “Fundraising, EnduroIndia, Four Corners and Ten Best Biking Roads, Lands End to John O’Groats, John Masefield bithplace, sponsored motorcycle ride”.

Edited for typos and to add links etc.

Thursday Night, 2 Nov. Preliminaries

Packing. Packing. More packing. Unpacking and repacking. De-packing. Getting pissd off with packing. Shopping. More shopping. Back to packing. Abandoning packing. Going to bed. Dreaming of packing.

Before I went to bed, that night, I got a phone call from Chris, a good friend and a dedicated non-biker. We talked and, as we talked, the focus of my ride changed. Suddenly it took on a more serious and purposeful character. Chris had passed on a commission to me from his daughter, Annie, which was to bring her back a stone from each of the four corners of Great Britain. This was an important mission, one not to be shirked or screwed up. It stiffened my (it has to be admitted) failing resolve.

Friday 3 November. Day 1.

240 miles.
Included Cardinal Point East - Lowestoft Ness

OK. Here's a link to the starting point, my home town of Hitchin.

http://www.nicolasassociates.com/hitchi ... cklers.htm



The alarm rings. It is seven o’clock. I look blearily out of the bedroom window onto a big wide world that suddenly feels bigger and wider and far less certain that it did the morning before. The gardens and rooftops are unexpectedly covered by a layer of glittering frost. The frost touches everything with a hardness and a coldness that makes me shiver. It is the first frost of the year. Maybe, I think, the weather is sending me a message. Maybe it is telling me that I should abandon this crazy idea of motorcycling round Britain. Maybe I should go back to bed.

It is cosy in bed. Very! I’m happy just snuggling up here. I’m seriously not in the mood for freezing my bones on the bike; nor for riding more than two thousand miles, dawn to dusk, over the next eight days for some crazy fundraising idea I dreamed up months ago when the world was warm and pleasant. I think about this. I know that my negative mood will pass. I know that once I get out on the road - probably as soon as I get into my gear - I will start to feel enthusiastic about the trip but right now bed is definitely the more attractive option.

But I lever myself up, anyway. As I get out of bed I tread on my reading glasses, breaking one of the nose pieces, and from then on everything goes wrong. I burn my breakfast, trip over some books I’ve left on the staircase, and fail to find my tyre pressure gauge. My Broadband Internet connection isn’t working properly, so I can’t download some of the essential, last minute addresses and telephone numbers I need. I ring up the Broadband provider. The customer services guy detects a connection fault and promises to send someone round to fix it – next week. OK, so I’ll go without.

I finish packing, then unpack and repack yet again and stare hopelessly at the quantity of gear I’ve tried to stuff into my two soft panniers, my tank bag and my camping roll. Watching me, you'd never think that I've done this dozens of times. What's the matter with me this morning? In a decisive moment I throw out my cooking stove and cooking gear. I’ll eat out, I decide. I’ll travel light.

Eating out is not a simple option for me as I have a shedload of food allergies which many restaurants and cafes find challenging, even to comprehend. Most of the allergic reactions I get are just inconvenient, but a couple are serious. If I eat dairy products, for example, my muscles go into spasm, ache like mad and feel as though they have caught fire. If I eat nuts, I get sick and my vision gets blurry and I'm unable to see for about six hours. Things like this could be potentially disastrous to the whole trip. I decide to take the risk anyway. What the hell! I hate travelling with a load of gear. I will just have to articulate my needs to waiters and cooks in words of one syllable. If necessary, I will have to demonstrate the consequences of an allergy attack to them, graphically - with dramatic enactments. That usually does the trick.

In the end, I don’t leave the house until 11.45 am. But by then the frost has melted away and the morning is clear, crisp and warm. At least I think it is. I can’t exactly tell under all the thermal layers I am wearing. For the first time this year I’ve decided to abandon my leathers and wear my thermally lined cordura suit - another indication of things to come, perhaps.

At the end of my road, an endless line of cars rolls by. As I turn out into the queue of traffic I am still wondering why the hell I am doing this. After all, I have a lot of jobs to do at home, lots of practical things that need taking care of. I have to get a lot of legal stuff sorted out soon and I need to redecorate the bedroom.

Yakkity yak!

Yakkity yak!

Yakkity yak go my thoughts. I know it’s just yakkity yak because I’ve heard it all before. Time to change the mental scenery.

I’m deliberately setting out with no fixed plans and keeping everything very fluid. I’ve already changed the route that I planned out last night (the one I changed from the route that I had planned out the night before that). I'm not wedded to any particular set of details about where I should be going first, or how I should get there. That feels good at one level, but travelling with that kind of uncertainty has a cost.

All morning, whole clans of anxieties have been threading themselves round and round inside the space opened up in my head by The Big Hole. The Big Hole is that area of uncharted territory which now lies at the centre of my mental map. My mind doesn’t like holes. If my map isn’t complete, if I don’t quickly fill in all the empty spaces with plans and fantasies and just about anything that I happen to think of, it will rapidly try to fill them for me or goad me into doing it with a bucket full of niggly anxieties. Those anxieties certainly have been bothersome this morning. What if...? they go. What if...? What if...?

So now it's time to change the mental scenery.

Last night's plan was to travel westwards from home along some familiar roads, through Ledbury and then up to Wales and the Welsh Marches where two of the ‘DVLA Ten best biking roads’ are to be found. Then, after that, to head up to Scotland via the M6, maybe stopping off to visit Vicky and Satish, some friends in Manchester. Instead, I find myself responding to a stray thought, almost a whim and before I know it, I'm heading out north-eastwards to East Anglia, to Lowestoft Ness, my first cardinal point.

I take the A505 to Sawston and then the A11 and A14 to Bury St Edmunds. After that it’s the A143 all the way through East Anglia towards Great Yarmouth, turning off for the last few miles to Lowestoft on the A146. It’s an unremarkable ride through some pleasant but unremarkable countryside but it has the virtue of simplicity and directness.

At about three-thirty later that afternoon I roll into Lowestoft past some busy-looking dockland gear and a fleet of fishing boats moored in the estuary. The place has the look and smell of a port, full of opportunity and uncertainty. The outskirts of the town are noisy. The traffic is heavy. Now all I have to do is find the Ness. It is not signed, so I make for the town centre where I hope to find someone who can give me directions.

That proves to be not so easy. As I ride, I get diverted around town to avoid a sequence of road works. It seems that I am being shunted further and further from my destination until I find myself lost in a maze of little back streets that seem unlikely to be going anywhere that could be of any use to me. I turn a corner and there, in a shabby painted-brick building with a forecourt full of bikes, is a little motorcycle dealership. I need some earplugs so I park the bike nearby wander in and ask my question.

“Harry, ha’ we sold earplugs. I ain’t seen none.”
A man in a corner reading a newspaper looks up briefly, “No. Wouldn’t know f ‘ certain where to look. Ask Jack.”
They glance vaguely about them, but Jack is nowhere to be found.

The bloke behind the counter then searches feebly through a few racks and trays. There is much musing and consideration of the matter but the look on his face carries not the slightest anticipation of success.

A young lad who had been polishing up the bikes outside when I first arrived comes into the shop, overhears the musings and says (with great confidence), “We don’t sell ‘en. We never sold ‘en” He has an accent I can’t place - West Country perhaps. His comment is immediately and gratefully accepted as fact. The chap behind the counter clearly does not like to be the bearer of disappointing news.

I breathe a sigh of relief. So that’s that. I can go now. But before I do, I feel a worrying but rising need to ask another question.

I ask about the whereabouts of the Ness. Now that he can help me with. His face brightens and he beams at me with the full force of his good nature. I then receive the most comprehensive set of directions I have ever had in my life. By the time he has run over them with me for the fourth time, drawn me a map, explained how the map is not quite accurate, described the complicating reasons why that should be, given me a detailed set of landmarks to navigate by and explained the history of some of them; by the time I have received all this and much, much more I am beginning to feel a desperate need to get back out into the fresh air. I start to wonder once again what I am doing here at all - chasing after pointless bits of geography.

I try several times to extricate myself from his helpfulness without giving offence, but find myself so caught up, fascinated even by the innocent web of his enthusiasm that the most I can do is utter a few unfinished sentences that I learned in a ‘assertiveness techniques with difficult customers’ workshop which my work sent all its front-line staff on many years ago.

I leave the shop reeling, but in the sure knowledge that if I fail to find the Ness, it will only be because in the last 24 hours the district council have bulldozed it into the sea to build a new marina – or some other lucrative civic venture.

Actually, all the guy in the bike shop needed to have said was, head towards ‘Goliath’. ‘Goliath’ is one of those gigantic, electricity-generating windmills which are springing up everywhere in a passing attempt to maintain a sustainable energy policy. ‘Goliath’ stands ‘d’reckly’ beside the Ness. It is visible on the skyline across the whole eastern half of the town. I’ve never seen a modern urban windmill before. [Edit. After getting home from the trip I looked it up. Apparently, it is the biggest in the country.]





To reach the Ness I navigate strictly according to the directions I have been given. These guide me accurately through an industrial hinterland, so barren and depressing that my mood is already downcast by the time I get my first sight of the Ness and I fail to be disappointed by it. There it stands, a small paved area, on the foreshore, fronted by the perimeter fence of the Birds Eye factory, and overshadowed by the giant swooshing sails of Goliath. A few bits of broken concrete pillar with rusty metal reinforcements curling out of them give something of the character of the place. On the seaward side of the Ness lie a line of huge, tumbled concrete blocks which constitute the sea defences.

But the town has done its civic best. The spot is marked by a large circular ‘compass rose’ in metal and stone with a plaque in the middle proudly announcing its geographical significance. The compass rose is marked around its edge with the names of other significant geographical spots within the United Kingdom and beyond, and their directions from Lowestoft. These include the three other ‘Cardinal Points’ of Great Britain – the ones I shall be visiting. I take some photos, ask someone to take a photo of me standing in the middle of the compass rose, and wonder what to do next. Surely, there must be more to it than this? But obviously there isn’t! It’s time to go.



As I get back to the bike, two men, one elderly, one in his thirties hail me as they return to their nearby cars. I saw them when I arrived, gazing out to sea through telescopes and binoculars – ‘twitchers’ I supposed. Yes, they said, they had come here to do some bird watching. They had seen a Little Auk and a Mediterranean Gull that afternoon. There was much excitement as they told me this. This was a good place to watch from, they said.

But they were also bikers and wanted to talk bikes. Bikes, dogs and children: always good to start a conversation. The thirty-year-old admitted apologetically to being a Sunday rider. He had a CBR1000 at home in the garage, now put away for the winter. The older man reminisced about his Rocket Supersport. They seemed to know a lot about the SV and agreed with me that it was an excellent do-it-all bike which made me feel unreasonably pleased with myself.

I told them about my trip and why I was doing it, and they instantly began plotting a route out of East Anglia for me to take.
“You’ll be taking the A47, past Norwich, then,” the older man said. I hadn’t planned to, but what the hell, I thought, why not? Accept the gift.
“That used to be a good biking road,” he said sadly, “before they ironed all the kinks out of it. There’s only one good set of bends left. You can’t miss them.”

A doleful conversation followed as the two of them discussed how bikes and biking weren’t what they used to be and how wonderful the roads round here once had been before they had de-kinked them and infested them with speed cameras. Ah, well…! We then, all three, solemnly declared our abhorrence of the way car drivers drove these days and what a menace to bikes they were. The glow of the declining sun, the slow, powerful swooping of ‘Goliath’s’ sails and the moist-eyed biking reminiscences began to put me in a mellow mood. Perhaps there was some meaning to my having been here after all.

I waved some cheery good-byes, left them to their talk and headed up the coast to catch the A47 at Yarmouth, the next big seaside town to the north. The sadly de-kinked A47 would take me due west until I could turn north again around the great double estuary of The Wash. But for now, I was travelling through a low-lying land of sky and water, of pumps and endless drainage ditches, fascinating but often featureless. For someone who loves mountains, it has taken me many years to come to appreciate its strange watery beauty. But beautiful it is and somehow sad as well.

As I hit the northern limits of Yarmouth and the beginning of the A47 the declining sun was beginning to set the sky ablaze. Brilliant oranges and reds and mauves and ochres mingled with smoky grey streaks enlivened the whole of the western sky. Such colours! And that was not all. Those colours were repeated, softened and reflected back from the wide and placid waters of the River Yare which ran from the roadside into the distance, seeming almost to touch the horizon in this flat land. The whole darkening western hemisphere of sky and water was soon burning with colour.

And then I had one of those moments. As an unrooted traveller, passing through all that natural glory, I briefly felt that my life, usually so fragmented was, for a moment, temporarily whole, totally absorbed into that seamless multi-coloured mingling of water and cloudy sky. I hadn’t seen a sunset like this for many years. As a Tibetan friend would say: very auspicious!

As I turned onto the A47 I rode directly into the flowing sunset. It lasted for what seemed hours, slowly darkening, turning bloody, then grey. Shadows grew huge. Perched on the distant, empty and level horizon stood the charcoal silhouette of a factory and its single tall chimney pumping black smoke into a violent red sky.

By contrast, the A47, slicing ahead of me into the night, seemed ridiculously tetchy and full of unpleasant business. At the end of the day, motorists were driving their cars homeward in long, fretful lines. They were driving carelessly and stressfully. As a motorcyclist you grow hyper-alert to the casual and erratic moves that car drivers make in their sluggish vehicles. As a matter of survival you come to anticipate each drift over the line, each sudden unindicated manoeuvre, each pulling out across your path. At least twice a week, on my short 12-mile journey to work and back, I have to take serious avoiding action to protect myself from careless motorists; especially at going home time when bellies are empty and minds have not yet shed the stresses of the working day.

The de-kinked A47 ran straight as a die, utterly featureless across an open, featureless land. Cars occasionally bickered with each other ahead of me, chafing to get ahead. The road seemed endless. I rode in the queues of traffic for what seemed hours - though I guess it wasn’t that long at all. Frustration set in quickly. Cars are so SLOW!

As darkness fell I started making plans for the night. I still had some thought of riding on up to Manchester and staying with Vicky and Satish for the evening. But, being realistic I would be riding for hours and probably wouldn’t get there till late – too late to enjoy an evening of their company which was the main point of going. I thought of seeing some other friends who lived not far from Grantham. They were old college friends who had made their home, years before, in a small village folded away among the Lincolnshire hills. I didn’t have their telephone number on my mobile and they were ex-directory but I guessed it would be all right if I just dropped by. They would probably be happy to see me but were perfectly forthright enough to tell me if it was inconvenient my turning up just then. If that was the case, then there were a number of campsites nearby, still open at this time of year. It seemed a good plan.

I stopped off to eat at a Little Chef at Kings Lynn. The food they serve in Little Chefs is pre-processed and unexciting but for someone like me with allergies to consider it has the advantage of reliability. The menu is always the same and I know what I can eat from it without ill effect. And it held out another advantage. In the dark of the evening on an endless road, I had begun to experience that first melancholy hit of lone-traveller blues. The cold, lonely feeling and sense of insecurity only ever lasted a day or so, but right at that moment I wanted something known and comfortable. I was too tired for risks or adventures of any kind, right then. The food would be safe and the ordering uncomplicated. The standard decor would be comforting. Settling myself down in the warm, seemingly familiar surroundings started to bring out all the aches and tiredness in my bones and muscles and made me think of turning in for the night. But that wasn’t really possible. Not yet. Wherever I decided to sleep I had to press on, or I would not complete everything I had set myself to do.

I left the A47 after Lynn and made for Grantham along the A17 and then the A52. The traffic was thinning out. Every so often I would come up behind a queue of cars, overtake and ride on by myself till I came upon the next one. Eventually I came upon a particularly long, particularly slow-moving line of cars driving behind a slow vehicle with flashing amber lights. In the dark, I couldn’t make out what sort of vehicle it was. The leading car was following well back from it and seemed to be making no move to overtake, even though the oncoming lane was straight and largely clear. That seemed strange. I hopped along the queue till I was riding behind the slow vehicle with amber lights. I stayed well back for a while to give me a good angle on the road ahead. I could see nothing unusual, no reason not to overtake. I moved up closer ready to move out into the opposite lane and was instantly showered with swinging arcs of salt spray. It was only then that I saw the word ‘SPREADING’ written in dark letting at the top of the vehicle.

By that time, I (and more particularly the bike) was covered in salt, so there was nothing to lose. I ploughed on through the salt spray and got ahead. For a moment I had a flash of socialised anxiety and imagined the driver of the leading car having a quiet chuckle to himself, but was soon having a chuckle to myself. I would have to try and wash the bike down though before I went to bed.

The night had begun to settle in cold and slightly damp and I started to feel chilled even through all my thermal layers. I was enjoying the ride. It was a pitch black, but there was now very little traffic. The cold, night and the temporary loneliness of the road started to lull me into a cosy romance of solitude. The miles flashed past and I began to enter that trance state where the mind goes humming away on its own and the body takes over the practical job of piloting the bike.

And so, I had only a vague idea how long I had been riding or how close to Grantham I was when I saw the the lights of a motorcycle halted by the side of the road. The rider looked as though he might be in trouble. Having brought the bike to a halt in a lay-by a hundred yards or so further down the road, I started to walk back towards him. Sure enough, he had run out of fuel. He had run out of fuel in his main tank and couldn’t access his reserve: the fuel tap was buried deep inside his Gixxer’s innards and its head had long since broken off. He had spent an awkward ten minutes poking about with a pair of pliers. But without any light to see what he was doing or where the damn thing precisely was he wasn’t having much luck. By the time I arrived, he was in a state of frustrated annoyance with himself and with the bike.

As soon he had seen me stop, he had stood himself up, put down his pliers and walked towards my bike to ask if I was carrying a torch. This turned out to be a big mistake. I had a torch all right but it is never a good idea to put down an essential tool in the long grass on a dark night and then walk away from it. We spent at least fifteen minutes looking for it until we eventually gave up. In the end, I just held the torch on the bike while he tried to twist the tap shaft with his fingers. Amazingly, he succeeded and with a flick of the starter the bike got going again. Nevertheless, I rode the remaining miles behind him into Grantham where he found a petrol station, just in case his reserve ran out before he got there.

Somehow, the brief human contact had brought out my need for sleep and comfort. I gave up the idea of visiting my friends, whose home was another fifteen or twenty miles further on down some country roads, and made straight up the A1 looking for a service station and a Travel Lodge where I could stay the night. Travel Lodges are comfortable, basic and reasonably priced. I paid my cash, got my key, lugged my gear into my room, ran the bath and crashed out into the hot water. And there I stayed for at least an hour and a half. You have no idea how good it was to have a comfortable bath that evening. At home I still have the bath I had installed for Di after she became too paralysed to use an ordinary one. You fill it up (which takes ages), lie on a platform that is level with the rim of the bath, press a button and the bath rises up around you. It did the job for Di but it is fiendishly uncomfortable in my opinion, very wasteful of water and just plain odd. One day, when I have a moment to spare I will put it onto E-Bay and try to get rid of it.

I went out and got some highly overpriced and pretty manky food from the Moto services opposite the Travel Lodge, left my key in the room and had to get the receptionist to let me back in, then planned out a west coast route up to Scotland via Snake Pass, one of the ten DVLA best biking roads. I watched some telly and went to bed. As I drifted off I realised that I have forgotten Annie's stones from Lowestoft Ness. The reason was clear, short of pulling up a few paving slabs, there weren't any. I would have to go back and see what I could find. I couldn't go back now though. It would have to wait for another time.

Saturday 4 November - Day 2

273 miles
Included DVLA Bike Route #9 – A169 North York Moors

I had a good night’s sleep at the Travel Lodge but was still reluctant to get up the next morning, despite a firm promise to myself that I would make some miles today. I ate breakfast at a Little Chef which I hadn’t noticed the night before. With excellent planning it had been hidden away behind the Moto without a sign to say it was there.

While I waited for breakfast I sketched out my route for the rest of the week (ha!). I had plenty of time because only one member of staff had turned up for work that morning and was cheerfully trying to take orders, cook, serve, make out bills and work the till all by herself in a rapidly filling restaurant.

As my food arrived I looked at my completed plan and felt a glow of satisfaction inside. The trip was going to work out well. Except… I checked my lists. …except I’d forgotten to include Route #9 over the North York Moors. Damn! So, back to square one. Route #9 is the only one of the ten that lies on the eastern side of the country. (Not surprising since almost all the high ground in Britain is to the West and the North).

A thought began to form. I could do route #9 that afternoon if I headed out east again through Lincolnshire, nipped over the Humber bridge to Hull and then rode on up to to the moors beyond. And maybe (just maybe!) while I was passing through Hull I could look in on Steve and Jane. It would only be a flying visit, but they were rather special people to me and I hadn't seen them for 30 years. It would be worth it. After months of looking, I found Steve a year ago on an American Civil War Re-enactment Society website. Luckily he has an unusual last name and apparently still had this unusual interest (dressing up as a confederate soldier and coming home covered in bruises) - so it could only be him. Wooo Hooo for the web.

I met Steve for the first time while I was a student in Hull in the early 1970s. At that time he was bringing up his two children on his own. He was 28 while I was just 20 and still very wet behind the ears. He became something of a hero for me. His great skill (and fascination) in my eyes at that time was his inexhaustible ability to attract women very much at will. He was an extremely good-looking bugger with a big mischievous smile, a mountain of crude, good-humoured cheek and just a touch of something dangerous about him. More than anyone, he was the guy who gave me the push to buy my first motorcycle back in the 1970s. I think he would be surprised to hear that now, but it’s true.

Life around Steve always had a bit of an edge to it. It was he who first made me realise that I wasn’t exactly destined to lead the quiet bookish life I'd begun to imagine for myself. Spending time around Steve made me realise that I had something of a taste for risk-taking in me. That was disturbing but exciting. We did some fairly crazy things in the three years I knew him. My one reservation about meeting him again is that he has (or always used to have) a remarkably good memory and a tendency to leg-pull, so he is likely to remind me of certain things I would kind of prefer to forget.

When I spoke to him recently I discovered he was still well into bikes. He’d been very sniffy when I told him I rode an SV1000 but was much impressed that I was buying the Daytona.

I gave him a call on the mobile and told him my plans but he was going to be out at just the time I would be arriving in Hull. I couldn’t hang around. I had a lot of miles to cover. So that wasn’t going to work. Well, maybe… I decided to thrash it up over the bridge to Hull anyway to see if I could get there before he left home at 11.30. And if I missed him, I’d get to see Hull and Beverly anyway. I lugged my luggage down to the bike in relays, locked myself out of my room again. (Luckily, there was a different receptionist on the desk this morning, which saved me some embarrassment.), got the bike all strapped up and fired up, and finally got off up the A1 behind a car trailing a giant cloud of exhaust smoke.

Getting up to Hull by this route is easy enough on the motorways, but there is one disadvantage in going this way - Lincolnshire. In Lincolnshire you have to watch your speed carefully. The Lincolnshire police are fanatical about speeding. If you are riding up country, you always know when you have entered Lincolnshire because the side of the road will suddenly start to bristle with speed cameras. The local police force don’t give an inch on this issue. Drift over the limit by one mile an hour and they will do you. And they particularly dislike bikers. That’s the wisdom on the street, anyway. And sure enough, half-way along the M180 I came round a bend to find a police radar van parked in the shadows of a motorway flyover gunning the traffic.

I changed onto the A15, rode its easy length for about eight miles, turned a corner, and there, brilliant in the midday sun, was the gleaming white form of the Humber suspension bridge spanning the estuary - about a mile wide at this point.

The city of Kingston-upon-Hull is built on the muddy northern banks of the Humber estuary and its foundations are undermined by dozens of little underground watercourses. The Victorian houses in the town all have cracked and uneven brickwork. Many of their windows and window frames are oriented at odd angles. The houses at the end of each terrace are generally shored up with huge wooden beams. With all this subsidence and the lack of employment in the town since the fishing industry declined, you can buy a house in Hull for just a few thousand quid.

The cathedral, on the other hand, seems to have survived remarkably well. Archeologists say it is literally floating on a huge medieval raft of timber. (The medieval builders were not only incredible craftsmen but took incredible risks). The Humber bridge is another wonder. It was being built when I was living and studying in Hull in the '70s. On the northern shore the builders spent months pouring ton after ton of concrete foundation down into the muddy, waterlogged ground, only to see it endlessly disappearing down into god-knows-where. You might wonder how far building techniques have genuinely progressed since medieval times.

I got into the town just at 11.30, too late to meet Steve, but I pretty much expected that to happen. I carried on straight up to Beverly where it took me about twenty minutes to find somewhere to park in the old town’s windy, little back streets. You have to have a lot of patience to be a motorist or a motorcyclist in the centre of Beverly. It’s a lovely old town but quite unsuited to modern traffic. I had a quick look at the Minster before seeking out the Angel Inn for some lunch.





The Angel is a busy place with a good menu and its interior hasn't been mucked about too much and made to look like every other pub in the kingdom. I sat at a table with a party of older folk who had come up to Beverly for a day out. They were in their seventies, I guess. I put on something of an unplanned performance for them getting out of my bike gear. That was an immediate opener for a conversation and it wasn’t long before I was listening to the inevitable bike reminiscences from the two older blokes at the table.

The number of retired people I meet who immediately go dewy eyed and want to tell me about the bikes they rode as youngsters makes me realise just how much biking has declined in the UK over the last fifty years. Almost everyone over the age of sixty or sixty-five seems to have owned a bike or a scoot or ridden pillion at some time in their youth – very different from today. I read in a recent government report that, apart from Ireland, there were fewer bikers, per head of population in the UK than in any other country in Europe. We are a dying breed. And I guess with the issues of global warming being taken seriously(ish) at last, the days of the petrol engine are now severely numbered.

One of the blokes at my table was keen to tell me that he had lost both his kneecaps in a bike smash in the Edgware Road, London, in the 1960s. He'd been riding his Norton Dominator at the time (That was an essential detail. He clearly loved that bike). He had to give up riding after that and bitterly regretted it. He looked genuinely mortified as he spoke.

He seemed very interested in my back protector and the armouring in my gear. Back in the sixties, there was very little to protect you in a smash: just a basic leather jacket, a pair of levis, some solid boots and an open faced lid. The death toll among bikers was huge back then, much greater than it is today, despite all the resounding speeches by our current politicians (who appear more interested in the electoral significance of the road safety figures than concerned for people's lives or liberties.)

I told the people at my table about the charity ride and they seemed very interested, though the one thing that seemed to trouble them most was how cold it was going to be on the bike up in Scotland. The conversation hovered on this subject for a while. Then they found out that I had lived in the area years ago and immediately wanted to share all the local gossip with me including a lurid tale of yet another suicide attempt from the bridge. Death and destruction seemed to hold a particular fascination for them.

I asked them if ‘Nellies’ was still in business. ‘Nellies’ was the local name for The White Horse pub in the centre of the town. It had originally been owned by three sisters born in the time of Queen Victoria. The trhee old girls brewed their own beer and served behind their bar, which, if I remember correctly, was just a large slate-topped table. They also kept order pretty successfully themselves without the need for doormen. Nelly had been the last of the three to survive. At the back of the pub was a little ‘snug’ where the local policeman was accommodated with a pint or two after hours or when he sneaked off from his beat. I was told that the pub was still open under the same sign, but everything else about it had changed since Nellie died. So, no surprise there.


Another scene in Beverley, with a Hull Corporation Telephone Company telphone box, painted cream even when in the rest of the country they were all Post Office red.

The small A road from Beverly up to Driffield and beyond passes through some lovely chalk wold countryside. The land is less folded here. It is undramatic but well managed and attractive. In the southern Wolds the fields are small and traditionally farmed, the farmyards are neat and well kept. I have fond memories of walking here in my Hull days. Experiencing this landscape again for the first time in years, I really felt my heart lift. I began to feel connected to the wider world around me. It was the first time that I'd felt that sort of connection since my wife, Di, died in May this year.



The road passed by Wharram Percy, a deserted medieval village, much excavated by archeologists. But there are many such villages in this area. Most of the evidence of their existence has gone but they have all left one unmistakable trace upon this waterless landscape: a dewpond. You see these little grassy depressions in the ground everywhere. And everywhere you see them there was once a flourishing little community. Each village constructed its own dewpond to trap water. When I looked up ‘dewponds’ twenty years ago in an encyclopaedia there was considerable disagreement about how they worked and whether it was just dew that accumulated in them. It seems unlikely somehow.

This is chalkland. So it is rabbit and badger country. You see the little buggers everywhere. During a fortnight-long walk across the Wolds back in 1972 I had bedded down under the warm summer sky in a field not far from here - only to wake up covered in rabbits. I lay without moving for about half-an-hour, watching them clamber all over me, over my legs and arms and chest, without the slightest hint of fear or a sense of danger. I was veggie at the time. Perhaps they knew

On another occasion, a friend and I had taken shelter from the rain under a groundsheet. We sat on the grass with our backs to a dry stone wall and fell asleep. A young rabbit, had found the narrow gap between us where we lay. It was covered with the groundsheet so presumably it was dark. The rabbit must have thought it was a burrow because it had come in and snuggled up. I woke up feeling this soft, furry thing by my hand and had wondered what the hell it was.

The road was a joy to ride, not taxing, but full of long straights and combinations of sweeping bends. The afternoon was warm and bright. The SV purred along happily underneath me. It was an idyllic hour, riding through this homely landscape. As I continued north, through Norton-on-Derwen and on towards Pickering and the vale, the fields grew larger and larger and there were signs of agribusiness everwhere.

After Pickering the landscape changes dramatically. The A169 begins to climb steeply up on to the moors. The A169 is my #9 DVLA best biking road. After weeks of seeing bike numbers decline rapidly on the roads at the end of the season, suddenly they were everywhere - mostly, groups of big sportsbikes, Gixxers especially, with riders in colour-co-ordinated, one-piece leathers and speed humps. But there were a number of trailies and tourers and a few nakeds too. I spoke to a couple of riders in a lay-by where I’d stopped to take a photograph of the view. They were locals making the best of this late-season warm weather to come for one last thrash over the moors.

And it didn’t take long to find out why. It was a great road to ride: broad sweeping curves and fast straights; hidden dips and blind summits; all up-hill, down-dale and, to add some spice, a couple of dramatic hairpins cut steeply into narrow defiles in the moorland plateau. It was a good road for flinging a bike about at speed. Apart from the two hairpins it was just a great joyous ride.

And of course there was the dramatic scenery, all red-brown and chocolatey at this time of year. I stopped the bike beside a deep moorland valley just to take it in. A dozen or so kestrels were sailing overhead on the updraughts. I noticed a group of people gathered on the far side of the valley but couldn’t make out what they were doing there. There were white dots of sheep running about on the upper slopes, so I thought at first that it might be a sheepdog trial. Then I heard the sound of a hunting horn and spotted a bay horse carrying a rider in hunting scarlet down the far side of the valley. But I saw no hounds. Possibly they were casting in the undergrowth and I just couldn’t see them from where I was standing. Or maybe there were none. Curious! Hunting with hounds has just been made illegal in Britain, but many hunts have decided to defy the law and to continue hunting anyway.


It's hard to capture a sense of the sheer mass of the moorland valleys, but here's a go.

It was then that the walker in me started to resent the biker. If I had been carrying a pair of walking boots with me, a good rucksack, some cooking gear and a few provisions I think I would have found somewhere to stow the bike safely and just lost myself in this landscape for a couple of days and nights. This was my first real walking country. I knew it very well and it had many happy associations for me. Later, as I passed road signs to Goathland, Hutton-le-Hole and Kirkbymoorside, I was reminded of an exciting time when I first began to discover in the landscape something much bigger and freer than myself. The moors are a wild and open land, somehow both inhospitable and homely at the same time. I just wanted to eat them up.

Coming down off the moors I didn’t go right to the coast at Whitby town, as sorely tempted as I was. I needed to get on. I turned westwards once again, this time along the A171 and headed for the very different world of Middlesborough; a hugely successful manufacturing town. It was a new-town, planned in the nineteenth century and built up from nothing. In the space of a few years it had growin into the industrial wonder of the age, a place of rattling machines and frantic human activity, a world far removed from the moors and their powerful, unmoving silences.

The A171 proved to be uncomfortably busy but the landscape remained captivating. And, for the second time today, after months of being strained and tense, I began to feel at home once more in my physical body and in the landscape. The setting sun, the breeze, the skeleton trees, the purring of the SV all worked a kind of magic and I began to feel at ease for the first time in months, maybe even years.

Riding into the west at evening time on the A171 proved to be almost as spectacular as the night before. The skies gradually darkened and were flooded with colour. The hues were more mauve and purple tonight, not orange and red, not quite so scorching but still very beautiful. I let my eyes take it all in for a while, but soon had to call a halt. I was now riding directly into the sun, a weak, watery autumnal sun but blinding to the eyes. I stopped the bike and put on my shades for about twenty minutes. I hate wearing them, they cut out so much of the world’s richness, but it is the price you pay for safety.

Middlesborough surprised me. I’d expected to find a dirty, tired old Victorian town with all its manufacturing heart ripped out of it. But not at all - at least in the part that I saw. It seemed, lively, bright, modern, clean, spirited, quite unlike your average northern post-industrial wasteland. The road signage, was however, crap, as it often is in the UK. Even where it existed in a coherent form it demanded a level of interpretation that left me in a state of continual uncertainty. In the end, I gave up trying to calculate my route from the occasional clues provided by the Highways Authority and just relied on my sense of direction and my instincts. And they didn’t let me down.

I rode on through Stockton and Darlington, with that incredible, ever-changing sunset still darkening gently and then coldly ahead. Darlington slowed me right down but I was in a mellow mood and hardly noticed. The ride along the A67 beyond and up the valley to Barnards Castle was a lovely evening experience – the kind of experience that is only know to motorcyclists, incorporating that free-flowing sensation that is the nearest thing on earth to flying.

Barnards Castle lies at the head of a valley surrounded by the grey slopes of the Pennine mountain chain. I’d hoped to cross the high, windy back of the Pennines while there was still some light. But there was no chance of that now. I was getting hungry and as there was no longer a reason not to stop, I parked the bike on the one area of level ground that I could find in this moorland town and went up and down the wide streets hunting for a takeaway.

I ordered a meal (with bulk and fuel-value in mind), found a bench half way down the long sloping street, and with a chilly wind rushing up between the houses, sat down to enjoy my food and have a verbal sparring match with a bunch of teenage boys who were eager to find ways of winding me up. Everything in Barnard’s Castle is built solidly of local stone to keep out the Pennine weather. It looks as though it wanted to keep strangers out too. I moved on.

Beyond Barnards Castle my road, the A67, rose up through Deep Dale to Bowes where it joined the A66 then swept up onto the broad back of the Pennines. As the road climbed steadily, the temperature dropped noticeably and the road beneath my tyres seemed to become just a touch slippery with frost. On the bare Pennine peaks there was very little to break the force of the gusting winds or prevent them from throwing a bike all over the road. I had to fight them all the way. It was a little scary, especially on the narrow road with traffic coming from the other direction. There must have been very heavy cloud because, although it was only 6.30 pm I could see nothing at all above me and nothing about me either except the shadowy heave of the fells to my left.

The A66 crosses the Pennines at what must be their narrowest point. In twenty minutes the road started to descend steeply towards Brough and the Eden Valley. After that it was then just an easy ride up beside the river to Penrith via Appleby-in-Westmorland. Earlier, I'd been on the mobile and checked out a campsite located in the Lake District some 14 miles the other side of Penrith. But when it came to the crunch, the lights of Penrith seemed too comfortable and too inviting to ignore. I decided I wasn’t in the mood for putting up a new and complicated tent in the dark – and anyway I was tired an achey from being on the bike all day. I chose comfort and headed for the nearest B&Bs. They weren’t hard to find. There was a whole street full of them. Half of them had vacant signs on their doors. I chose the least fussy-looking and booked in.

It was as I was enjoying a shower that I decided I wouldn’t do any camping on this holiday at all unless I had to. It was becoming clear to me that if I was going to achieve everything I had set out to do I would have to ride into the night regularly, and the same issues about putting up the tent would arise. Well, that’s what I told myself. In truth, I think I have just arrived at that stage in my life where personal comfort is beginning to rise up in my scale of values for the first time.

After changing, I went for a wander round the small town. There were loads of people out on the streets and in the pubs. I hadn’t intended to do anything in particular, just walk. But the sight of all those people enjoying themselves made me feel a bit like Billy-no-mates, so I dived into a pub for a warm up and a drink. I tried to start a couple of conversations but it seemed as though everyone in the pub was discussing the arrangements for forthcoming weddings or other earnest family or tribal matters, so there wasn’t much room for a stranger. That was OK. I just sat back and enjoyed the atmosphere for an hour or so before going back to the B&B for the night.

:pics:

Kidding. It's a great thread, but we need pics. You did say you took some.

blues2cruise wrote::pics:

Kidding. It's a great thread, but we need pics. You did say you took some.

Oh woe!!! I haven't got a clue how to get pics onto the site or I would include some (dozens probably). I'm technologically incompetent. I understand petrol engines, steam engines and electric toothbrushes, but anything spooky like computers just defeats me.

However, I will try to get some help to post some pics when I get back from the second half of the ride next week. So watch this space.

Sunday 5 November Day 3

260 miles
Included:
DVLA best biking route #7 Hartside Pass, Cumbria
DVLA best biking route #1 Glen Coe, Scottish Highlands


Breakfast at 8.30 please, I’d said, as I booked into the B&B on Saturday evening. I’d taken a breath as I said it (not being very well acquainted with such things as ‘8.30 in the morning’), but I really (really) wanted to get off in good time the next day and pack in a lot of riding. Nevertheless when I set the alarm in my room for 8.10 am that night, I felt a certain degree of resentment and foreboding.

but as I hit the alarm at 8.10 the next morning I was already feeling bright and fresh and ready to greet the coming day. That was crazy. When did I ever feel that way about 8.10 in the morning? 8.10 is still the middle of the night as far as I am concerned. Somehow, I must have acquired another personality overnight!

I got dressed and went down to breakfast at 8.30 on the dot. But instead of the welcoming sound of sizzling sausages and the smell of bacon and eggs there was... Nothing! Nothing at all! The house was deserted. Not a soul was about. It was then that another, quite horrifying, realisation struck me. I checked the time on my mobile. No-one had bothered to reset the alarm in the bedroom since the clocks went back last week. So, here I was, happy as a sandboy wandering round the house at 7.30 in the morning without the slightest hint of the zombie about me. Something was very wrong.

I was right. All this positive energy first thing in the morning couldn't last. I was fine when I finally did go downstairs to the breakfast room. I was fine as I ate my breakfast and chatted happily to the landlady. I was still fine while I packed my things in the room. Fine again as I paid my bill. And fine as I took my gear downstairs to the bike. But suddenly, as I was strapping up my panniers, I started to have the biggest attack of hypoglycaemia I’d had in years. Wooooooo…

I just sat on the bike in the parking space at the back of the B&B shaking like a leaf. My brain was so rattled I couldn’t think straight. I sat and shook and sat and stared into space for twenty minutes before I dared start the engine and pilot the SV out into the road. Even then, I was still in a real two-and-eight. My eyes were blurry and the blood was pounding in my ears. I rode her carefully through the almost empty streets and into town. I parked her up and sat myself on a bench wondering what to do. Time went by. I had a lot of miles to cover but I was in no fit state to be riding off anywhere.


Penrith town centre

Sugar!. Normally I stay well away from the stuff. But sometimes, I get the urge and then I binge. Yesterday I’d indulged myself fully: puddings; chocolate; alcohol, and this delayed-reaction low blood sugar was my reward. What should I do? Then I remembered: I needed water! That’s what I needed: water!

I walked up and down the streets of Penrith looking for a newsagent or an off-licence (liquor store) where I could buy some. But it was Sunday and this was a small town in the North of England, so nothing was going to be open till 11.00. I returned to my bench and deposited myself there like a sack of potatoes, feeling too vague and washed out even to think. For the next ten minutes, I sat gazing at a rook perched on a signpost in the town square. The bird had a bone from someone’s cast-away chicken leg in one claw and was picking the meat off it cynically. It watched me suspiciously out of the corner of its eye but went on picking.

A little later, a pack of six or seven Harley riders wearing fringes, shades and waistcoats and sporting prize-winning beer guts rode by in hard formation. Their hard-man expressions were unreadable, their hard eyes (shades, at least!) fixed dead ahead. (Just like mine, I thought). But grooving along quite comfortably, in the middle of all this iconic American metal was a gleaming Triumph Rocket III.

It was only after the riders had passed the light bulb went on in my head. (I felt so Homer Simpson.) As I refocused, I suddenly realised that, directly opposite me on the other side of the road, there was the offie I’d been looking for - and it was OPEN. Its lights were blazing. I went over, navigated between the stacks of booze, bought two large bottles of water and drank one of them straight down. I felt instantly better. The thudding in my ears stopped, the shaking disappeared and I became aware of my extremities again. But by that time it was 10.30 and I'd said goodbye to my early start.

The A686, the DVLA’s best biking road #7, the A686 over Hartside Pass, began just ouside the town. It was so late now, that I abandoned my plan to make a quick visit to a bike dealer in a nearby trading estate (I was still looking for those elusive earplugs) and headed straight out of town looking for it. The A686 was a popular biker’s road: that much was clear the moment I found it. Within minutes, I'd seen several groups of bikes coming my way. It was definitely twisty, it had a 50mph restriction and a notice warning motorists to ‘Think Bike’. The restriction was fine by me. I was continuing to feel better all the time (wonderful stuff water!) but my reactions were still slow.

The road wound itself casually about the low, hummocky hillsides outside town before dropping to the the valley floor for a couple of miles. It crossed a girder bridge and then, with a suddenness that took me by surprise, began climbing rapidly, winding up the side of the Pennines to Hartside Height. In almost no time at all there were broad panoramic views right across the Eden Valley to the peaks of the Lake District beyond. I managed to sneak a glance here and there but I needed all my focus for the road ahead as it coiled unpredictably about the narrow mountain spurs.


The Eden valley with the Pennines in the distance

The flanks of the Pennines are bare and open. The sheer bulk of these hills makes you feel very small and alone. Their barren slopes empty you out so that the hill winds can blow right through you. They are not high, but they are mean and there is a rawness about them that other, higher peaks just don't have.

Ever since I was a small child I’ve loved mountains. I’ve never been able to look at a hill or a peak without wanting to pile my way straight up it. It used to drive Di mad. Why can’t we go round the side? she used to ask, we’ll get there just the same! But that was never the point. It’s the going, not the getting, I used to tell her. I don’t think she really understood. Poor Di. In our twenty years together, she had to put up with a lot of piling.

There are few things in life more exhilarating than pounding your way up a mountain slope, feeling that muscular push against the earth, and the earth's energetic respose, pushing its way upwards through your legs and trunk until it lofts your body skywards while the air goes charging through your lungs – step after step after step. Endlessly. Till you are fit to burst.

Press on upwards for long enough and you begin to sense the vastness of the land and the sheer physicality of it. Your consciousness changes. You begin to hear an organ note originating deep in the rocks. It resonates inside you. And then with some part of you that is not wholly physical, you touch something hidden down at the root of things. What that is, I don't know and I can't really explain. Either this is meaningful to you, or it isn’t. Either you’ll understand me or you won’t.

As an experience, it is brutally physical. There are not many things left in life that are as simple as this - or as exhilirating because they are so simple. There is almost nothing that can make me feel more excited or more alive, and none that will just go on and on, hour after hour after hour.

Climbing a mountainside generates a unique relationship with the land. I don’t know what the deep psychology of this is. I suspect its true meaning lies way beyond our normal categories of explanation. Our concepts are usually too explicit, too concrete or social. Maybe (being romantic about it) it’s a stream of consciousness that goes back through all the generations till we ourselves were just gusts of air and shattered lumps of mineral ore lying around in the earth.

In the moment of experience, though, the meaning of it is very present and very real. And at certain times all that energy will give a hint of form. Somewhere in there, there is a joyous sexual aggressiveness and a pervasive sensation of real love. Above all, there is a vast, borrowed power, totally transpersonal, which seems to come from the mountainside itself.

Riding a bike is exhilarating too. To ride skilfully and well, you need to abandon yourself to the unconscious – to the body-sense - just as you do when climbing, but you also need razor sharp judgement and control. The great, fluid experience of the bike gives the same hit, the same fundamental sense of freedom experienced on the mountainside. But it’s an experience that is deeply gratifying to the ego too. There is more of the self in riding a bike. The experience is more mentally charged and less acutely physical. And because things happen much more quickly, the mental focus is more intense. On the mountainside, the sense of power and freedom is much broader, more diffuse (unless you are doing really serious rock climbing).

Ahem!

Back in the real world of Hartside Pass I suddenly realise I need to pull back from a moment’s mountain dreaming and focus on a sequence of hairpins coming up fast. So, with my attention now fully on the road ahead, I lean and countersteer the bike round the bend. The great electrical buzz that comes from negotiating the twisting road tells me I've recovered from this morning’s sugar famine and am responding more freely. This is the rule: accept the gift! So... here I am, my visor down and my head encased inside a bubble of metal and plastic. There is a tarmac road ahead. The mountainside will have to wait for another time.

Riding the hairpins can be nerve-racking or exhilarating depending on what part of your total self you are at home with at the moment of engagement. Embrace the turn, commit yourself to it and the buzz is immense. Say 'no' to it, even with an ever-so-quiet voice, or with an ever-so-small part of your consciousness and you will have an anxious fight on your hands. And that is generally, a fight with yourself. I’m a nervous rider and it has taken me a long time to learn this.

The winding road hit the top of the pass and came down quickly through Gilderdale Forest into the village of Alston. The autumn colours on these slopes were breathtaking. Every shade of gold and crimson glowed in the trees. There were ochres, russets and browns all mixed with remnants of the summer’s green. Slowly, as I rode along, with the sun flashing occasionally through the trees, something inside me was waking up. Slowly, I was beginning to find my own true relationship with the world again. After two long years of watching Di’s body disintegrate, two years of caring for her day and night, of mentally trying to pull her back from the grave, or slipping slowly with her into it, I was now breathing the free air again. I really needed this break. Away from home, all kinds of mental tie were being loosened, as they always are. Each day and in different ways my experience of personal identity was getting stronger.

But of course, very little in human experience is that simple. This thought passing through my mind immediately brought back memories of her and of what I had lost.

At Alston I turned off onto the A689, a road which would ultimately take me up to Carlisle, then on to the M6 and Scotland. It was a less taxing road to ride than the A686 over Hartside Pass. The neighbouring landscape was less dramatic. It followed a lower route through the hills, never moving far away from the South Tyne River which drifted along in the valley bottom below. All about me was typical Pennine scenery: rocky outcrops rising here and there among the high, farmed pasture lands; river valleys cutting across the great dome of the hills; bold, stone-built villages and jumbled farmsteads; small clumps of windblown trees; and everywhere, the endless, drunken lines of dry stone walls. I stopped and took out the camera several times - a laborious task when you are strapped up into all your bike gear - but there was little point. There is no way to squeeze the sheer bulk and bluntness of all this magnificence into the narrow frame of a viewfinder. I love this road.


A view from the A689


Another low, rolling Pennine landscape from the A689

I rode into Brampton, then down to Carlisle and finally up the M6/A74 to Scotland. As I passed the road sign to Carlisle I had a Sam Gamgee moment. This was the furthest north I had ever travelled in the UK. From here on, I was breaking virgin territory. And soon I would be in Scotland. As I got nearer to the border I kept looking out for the sign I knew would be there. And there it was. ‘Scotland Welcomes You,’ it said, then, ‘Ceud Mille Feulte’. A different language and a different land. The ‘Hundred Thousand Welcomes’ of the Highland Gaelic was familiar, almost identical to the Irish I had learned from my mother: familiar and yet thoroughly alien. The message of the sign was both a welcome and an assertion.

I passed into Scotland and everything changed. Beyond Lockerbie it changed with such a shocking rapidity that I took some minutes to reorient myself. The signage was the same. The same lorries trundled along the motorway. The road furniture, the bridges and the Armco barriers were all the same as in England. And the same pylons marched across the roads. And everything was different.

I hadn’t expected to see anything this wild or beautiful till I got up into the Highlands beyond Glasgow. These were the Southern Uplands. I knew what to expect. This geography had been endlessly drummed into me at school. But what I expected was not this. I’d imagined rolling hillsides dotted with farms, cosy and comfortable on the English model, not these absolutely empty, gracefully rounded hills, so clean and fresh that it seemed as though it had rained here for a thousand years. (It probably had!) There were higher, wilder, emptier places in parts of England, but none that went on and on like this for nearly a hundred miles.

I stopped off at a service station. I thought I’d better eat something before I hit Glasgow. I wasn’t entirely sure I would get through Glasgow on the motorway system without getting hopelessly lost. It all depended on how good the signage was. Annandale Water, the stop was called. I gave my order. The girl on the counter smiled sweetly at me and asked if I wanted gravy. I hesitated a moment (allergies are always upmost in my mind at moments like this) and then said, yes, but not too much. (What the hell!)

Too late! ‘A small amount of gravy’ in Scotland turned out to be two huge ladlefuls of something resembling sticky toffee. In England, gravy is a light brown, watery affair, too polite to do offence to the meat on your plate. Here it is a kind of glowing, dark brown treacle that clings aggressively to the sheer sides of the mountainous chicken carcass you find on your plate. I should have known. As an Englishman, I had come fully armed with preconceptions of Scottish food. While the rest of the world laughs at English cuisine, the English quietly pay a similar tribute to the Scots. This is, after all, the land of haggis and the deep-fried Mars bar (A toffee-centred chocolate bar, dipped in batter and deep fried).

Actually. The gravy was very good.

Getting through Glasgow was a breeze. The motorway ( the M8 ) sailed straight through the centre of the city and the roads to and from it were well signed. Beyond Glasgow lay scruffy, outlying Dumbarton. And after Dumbarton the A82 got businesslike and hurried me northwards up to Loch Lomond and the Trossachs.

I’d been warned about Scottish Roads. They can change in an instant. And sure enough. The moment the broad well-surfaced dual carriageway of the A82 reached the shores of Loch Lomond it suddenly shrank down into a wizened shadow of its former self. It became a cracked, poorly surfaced, single-track road, with more twists and turns to it than Tony Blair’s mind. Loch Lomond was as beautiful as it is reported to be – as much as I could see of it beyond a thin screen of lakeside trees.

At first, I was caught in a traffic queue and couldn’t get past, so there was no chance of stopping. Later I was caught between a desire to linger and an urgent need to get on. If I was going to fulfil all the terms of the plan I had set myself I would need to put some miles behind me today.

The road was increasingly confined to a narrow ledge between the waters of the loch and the rocky slopes which fell steeply almost to its brink. More and more it was forced to twist and turn about the sudden spurs which fell precipitously into its depths. As I rode along, it began to rain; wet leaves lay strewn across the road and the tar macadam was cut and scored, enough sometimes, to force my wheels this way or that. I took it easy – at least, at first.

A van which had been driving on my tail for about a mile began to seriously annoy me and I decided to outrun and lose him. It was easy enough but the concentration involved in riding at these speeds in these circumstances was more than I wanted to maintain. I still had a long ride ahead. I pulled over, let him pass and took a break. I’m glad I did. It gave me time to take stock of my surrounding, take photographs and deal with all the water I had drunk earlier that morning.

Beyond Loch Lomond, the A82 widens again and heads up into the Highlands towards Glencoe and then on to Fort William. As I rode deeper into this craggy land, the mountains rose higher and more dramatically about me, the evening grew greyer and then the scenery grew more and more familiar until I found myself drifting along in a comfortable trance, paying little attention to my surroundings. I had no idea where I was going to stop for the night, though clearly there wasn’t going to be much in the way of a B&B until I hit Glencoe village at the far side of the Glen and that was still some way on. The A82 through Glencoe was the DVLA’s #1 biking route. It was also something I’ve always wanted to see. But I would probably have to go through it in the dark to find somewhere to stay the night. Damn!

As I rode into the wide approaches of Glencoe, the wind came howling up from the valley bottom below. It howled, too, across the huge empty spaces of Rannoch Moor. Side winds began to buffet the bike, throwing it about like a toy. Twice I was blown right across the road into the oncoming carriage way. The night was descending rapidly. I dropped my speed from 60 to 50, then 40 mph. The further down the narrowing valley I travelled, the fiercer the wind blew and the gustier it became, and the harder I had to fight the bike to keep her under control.

Despite my anxieties about the wind, I couldn’t help glancing repeatedly to the left of the road where the huge shadowy forms of the high mountains rose almost vertically from the floor of the glen, gigantic heaves of stone, towering over the open moorland below. (They have wonderful names that roll about in the mouth - Meall A’Bhuiridh, Buachaille Etive Mor, Buachaille Etive Beag.) I tried to keep relaxed, to keep my belly unclenched and my arms free to respond to the buffeting of the wind, but time and again I found myself stiffening up.

Cars were coming up the glen in long convoys, each convoy separated by five minutes of empty road. As I was to discover, the bridge below was being reconstructed and slow one-way traffic signals had been installed. Each time a convoy of cars came past I went into high stress mode. I was fighting really hard now to keep control of the bike. As I continued down into the narrowing valley the road began to swing about - and I acquired a tailgater: the last thing I wanted just at that moment. With the gusty winds there was no way I was going to try to outrun him this time, so I did the opposite, I slowed down further and hoped for the best. As the walls of rock closed in around the glen, car lights lit up the crags brightly and some of the mystery of the place was dispelled.

http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/glencoe/glencoe/

I exited the narrow defile and the winds abated. Within a few minutes I found myself coming into Glencoe Village. It was a small dispersed community. Buildings were dotted all about the valley floor. Some had B&B signs showing, but I ignored them and carried straight on. I was in no mood for parking and plodding, wandering about in the cold and the dark, going from house to house to see which B&B had vacancies and which hadn't. The darkness had a bitter edge to it here. I needed somewhere warm and comfortable to relax in at once, and besides, my nervous system had locked, and I'd entered that ‘just keep going’ frame of mind.

Beyond Glen Coe the A82 turns north-eastwards and follows the shoreline of the huge Loch Linnhe towards Fort William. The first five miles or so of this stretch of road were very twisty. And the light was now almost completely gone. I wanted to get into Fort William quickly and get off the bike, so I began to ride fast. Given my stressed condition I was managing the twisties surprisingly well and even began to enjoy the experience (a slightly hyper kind of enjoyment) of throwing the bike around the bends.

The long straight drag into town was lined on one side with B&Bs. I didn’t stop. I had one thought in my mind - one very rigid thought. I hadn’t realised until I came upon the lights of Fort William just how tired and hungry I had become. I rode straight into the High Street, stopped at the first restaurant I found (a Chinese), settled myself down and the rest is a blur. All I recall is a furry kind of feeling and tucking in to some extremely good food. Over the next hour, my nervous system gradually unclenced, I relaxed into the warmth of the restaurant, enjoyed the proximity of other people socialising over their evening meals, and then... and then, I took one enormous deep breath.

Finding a B&B was easy. There were plenty to choose from. Eventually, I settled on 'Myrtle Bank', a large Victorian, high-gabled house with a long sloping front garden running down to the road and to the loch beyond. It turned out to be a good choice, very comfortable and amazingly cheap (another advantage of travelling out of season.)

After an hour or so of settling in, I walked back into town to do some investigating. It was November 5th - Guy Fawkes Night but I was surprised at how few fireworks were going off. Maybe the Scots didn’t celebrate Guy Fawkes Night like we do, I thought. But somehow, that seemed unlikely. After all, Mr Fawkes had tried to blow up a Scottish King in Parliament and he was a Catholic. Given the extreme nature of radical Presbyterianism up here, I would have thought the Scots would have relished to opportunity to celebrate the burning of a few Catholics. On the other hand, maybe their is a lingering regret that the conspirators failed to blow up the British parliament once and for all, and left them in peace in Edinbury.

But then, with the shops full of masks and costumes and fireworks and a lot of other things much more interesting than political/sectarian history I don't suppose what happened four hundred years ago mattered much any more. Down in England the history behind Guy Fawkes Night is almost unknown to youngsters now. It's just an opportunity to have fun.

If there is such a thing as a night life in Fort William (the largest town in The Highlands) then I singularly failed to find it. There were a few pubs and bars open in the High Street, but they were almost empty. A few people, mostly youngsters, were wandering up and down the windy High Street (the only street in the town centre). Wherever the Fort William Scots go to get rat-arsed on a Sunday night, it isn’t here. As I walked back to the B&B, a couple of kids were letting off a few rockets over the loch. I was knackered, done in, exhausted. I went to bed.

http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/f ... index.html



.

Good writing Wolf--your blogs make for better reading than many of the books I've read. Thanks for sharing your experiences with us!

Thanks for saying so Creature. Glad you like it.

Day 4 coming up.

Monday 6 November Day 4

265 miles
Included:
Point to Point: John O’Groats
North Cardinal Point, Dunnet Head

I ate breakfast and was out of the B&B by nine. I made a quick stop at an auto shop to get some chain lube for the bike and then I was off in a good mood, heading for the far north and Dunnet Head.

Late last night I’d had a brilliant but simple idea. If I was not going to bother using my tent this holiday there was little point in lugging all my camping gear about with me. Why didn’t I just book into the B&B for another couple of nights, dump all my gear in my room, use it as a base and go for day rides to all the places on my schedule. All I would need to take with me were the few essentials that would fit into my tank bag.

I reckoned I could make this work very well.

So, putting a few details together, I came up with this. Today I would ride up to John O’Groats and Dunnet Head (The North Cardinal Point) making use of fast roads. I'd then cut down to the DVLA best bike routes #2 and #3 on the west coast. I could manage all that before nightfall, I reckoned. And after that I could make my way back to ‘Myrtle Bank’ (the B&B at Fort William). The last part of the journey would be in the dark, but it was all along main roads, so there shouldn't be a problem. It would be a long ride and a hurried one but I was sure it would be great.

Then, tomorrow, I’d ride out to Ardnamurchan Point (The West Cardinal Point). That would be a much shorter trip, but I could take my time with it and I would probably need an easy day after today. I would then have plenty of time to ride back south on Wednesday, visit Vicky and Sats in Manchester and pick up the remaining DVLA bike routes. These were all down the west side of England or just over the border into Wales. Some things were just meant to be, I thought. It was a good plan. But entirely impractical. It was just that I didn’t know it then.

Apart from the last few miles, the roads up to John O’Groats and Dunnet Head are all dark green on the map (major routes). They looked so slick and easy to ride as I pored over them in my room before going to bed on Sunday night. I could be up in the north in no time. I’d take the A82 straight up the Great Glen to Inverness. At Inverness I’d pick up the A9 and then the A99 which between them run all the way along the north-eastern coast as far as Wick. After that the roads turn red for the last forty miles to my destination. But red is still good and should be easy to ride.

After that I had several choices of route to bring me back down onto the west coast, depending on the hour and the weather and my mood. I’d have to put on some speed where I could, and I would have to miss seeing the north-west of the country, which is the wildest part. But realistically I wasn’t going to be able to see everything anyway.

The ride out of Fort William was languid and easy. It was a beautiful day. If it continued like this, I was going to be in for a memorable ride. And the scenery was unsurpassable. I didn’t get far before I had my first “Oh!” and the first of those overwhelming urges to stop the bike and get out the camera. As the road rose up the side of a low hill, a spectacular panorama of the Great Glen below was opening out to one side. The morning sun sent splashes of gold over the high peaks. Great chunks of mountainside glowed like Greek icons. Cloud shadows threw patches of hillside into mysterious shade. The lochs gleamed.





I pulled up. A couple with the same idea as I had left their car and set up a camera on a tripod. When I arrived they were gazing silently out over the valley, arms wrapped round each other. We smiled a greeting, and then talked for a while. It was a first visit to Scotland for all of us. Our conversation was full of superlatives. What other possibility was there in a landscape like this, so clean, so fresh, so beautiful? The woman seemed shy and said little except to express her amazement at the scenery. The guy sounded Norwegian but said he came from Peterborough. More prosaically still, he admitted to working for the lighting company, which was causing all the disruption on the M1 close to my home in Hertfordshire. So! There was still a ‘real’ world out there beyond all this magnificence. We talked of practical matters. The weather forecast, he told me, was predicting a fine day today, but a wet one tomorrow. So, all the more reason to make the most of it. We said our goodbyes and got on our way.

The Great Glen is a geological fault which runs south-west to north-east and splits Scotland practically in half. It is occupied by huge lochs. Between them lie short stretches of river and Thomas Telford’s Caledonian Canal, built in the eighteenth century to complete the waterway and join the two coasts, east and west. To the south of Fort William, the huge Loch Linnhe opens into the Sound of Mull and the Firth of Lorne, broad channels which wind their way among islands and rocky peninsulas to the open sea. To the north, Loch Lochy, little Loch Oich and then Loch Ness, follow one another, nose to tail, all running straight as a ramrod along the line of the fault. At the headwaters of Loch Ness lies the town of Inverness, ‘Capital of the Highlands.’ And threading its way through the town, inevitably, is the canal, joining the whole system to the saltwater Moray Firth beyond.

At Glen Coe, the A82 runs into the Great Glen and for most of its length follows the lochs right up to Inverness. Occasionally it crosses the valley from one side to the other, swinging over a stretch of river here or a canal there. Locks and lock keeper’s cottages, tiny bascule bridges, narrow boats floating among the green fields bring an occasional and delicious change of scene to the dramatic lakes and floating hillsides. I had an idyllic morning riding this gently twisting road, along the flanks of hills, through little woods, occasionally over emerald green fields and always, always accompanied by brightly flashing waters.



The trees and the lochs were so beautiful that the urge to stop and capture them on film came over me again and again. Mostly, I resisted. I needed to press on. But sometimes I just had to call a halt and get out the camera. It hardly mattered where. At every turn there were exceptional views. I found a narrow parking space beside the banks of Loch Ness. The lay-by gave entrance to an arboretum and to a walk that ran up through the wooded hillsides. A waterfall roared and foamed over steeply tumbled rocks before tunneling under the road and falling thirty feet into the waters of the loch below. I snapped it all up with the camera, every inch of it. I took off my outer gear, drank some water and just enjoyed the morning sunshine. I was in a very good mood!



The traffic along the road was light. I left my lid and my gear with the bike and took a walk up along the woodland path. Birches and dwarf oaks predominated, radiant in autumnal gold. Fallen leaves strewed the little path. In the distance I vaguely heard the noise of a lorry rumbling along the road in my direction. I carried on up the hillside, enjoying the sensation of the sun’s heat. It came sprinkling through the thin leaf cover onto my head and face. Suddenly, from down below there was a whoosh of air, a warbled shriek from my bike alarm and a sharp crack. It was the sharp crack that worried me most. I ran back down the path and found my bike wailing but intact. My lid however, was lying upside-down on the ground some feet away.

One thing I never, never do is leave my lid on the saddle of my bike. Never, until today! The draught from the lorry had rocked the bike and shaken the helmet onto the ground. I checked it over. It must have hit a stone as it fell because there was a tiny hole right at the back of the casing. This was my new £400 customised lid, the one I’d been trusting after for months and was so proud of owning. dodo! "Et in Arcadia Ego!" I thought. That bit of school Latin has always stuck in my mind - Even in Arcadia, am I: there’s trouble, even in paradise! Dammit! It tarnished my golden mood, and for a moment the day tasted extremely bitter. Another lesson in pride and attachment to be absorbed and digested, and a hard one at that.

The bad feeling didn’t entirely leave me for some hours but it quickly evaporated from the surface of my mind. It was impossible to feel completely black inside for long on such a day and in such a place as this. Even so, It had blown out my mood for drifting comfortably through the landscape and I was now overtaken by the need to hurry. I had a mission to accomplish. I got back on the bike and fired her up. The road continued to twist excitingly around the lakeside spurs towards Inverness.

Twice by the roadside I saw flood warning triangles but there were no signs of flooding. That was odd. I’d been coming upon flood warnings ever since I’d got past Glasgow and up into the Highlands. But the roads appeared mostly dry and the land didn't appear to be waterlogged. I gave the warnings no more thought.

At Inverness I turned onto the A9 and immediately crossed a neck of water between the Moray and Beaulay Firths. Beyond the bridge lay the Black Isle - not an island at all but a peninsula shaped like a flint arrowhead. The waters to left and right were full of that dockland mood, massive; ringing with organized chaos; busy; and very focused.

As the road climbed over the dome of the peninsula I became increasingly aware of a buzzing in my helmet. I’d had hints of it for several miles, but now it became irritating and persistent. I thought at first that I’d picked up an unseasonable mozzie. But no, it wasn’t an insect. I pulled over at a lay-by and gave the lid a thorough inspection. A rocker in one of the vents had been damaged when the helmet fell and was now vibrating freely in the slipstream. I had nothing with me that would hold it still. I could have done without it: it was a constant irritating reminder of the damage that had been done.

Beyond the lay-by the road was curving down towards a low bridge – almost a causeway – that skimmed just feet above the choppy waters of the Cromarty Firth. It reminded me of a bridge of boats I’d once had to draw as a kid in a history lesson. Crossing the causeway so close to the surface of the Firth was exhilarating and brought home a sense of the suppressed power of all that water. As I rode, an onshore wind blew roughly up the channel. I opened my visor a fraction and gave my lungs good use of it. Wonderful! It buffeted the bike a bit but not enough to cause me any worries. My helmet buzzed away merrily.

A series of small oil platforms rose from the surface of the Firth. These were the first signs of major industry I had seen since I passed through Glasgow, now 150 miles to the south. But the land and the water around them looked perfecly neat and clean. I couldn't help thinking that if this were England there would probably be piles of industrial rubbish all around a commercial site like this.

I didn't have much time to look at the platforms before I was distracted by an oncoming van flashing its headlights frantically. The driver’s mate was making similarly frantic gestures and thumbs down signs. He’d seen me overtake a traffic queue and wanted to warn me of trouble ahead. The message was repeated again and again by other drivers. Saving my licence appeared to be a matter of the most urgent concern for them. The Scottish traffic police like their colleagues in Lincolnshire are notoriously hot on speeding. I took good note of my speedometer for the next four miles until I passed a police car lurking in a turning just off the main road.

The further north I went, the twistier and narrower the A9 became. It followed the contours of the coastline, dipping down regularly into the river valleys. The land was increasingly low and treeless now. Isolated houses and bungalows were dotted about on the cliff sides. There was nothing resembling a village here as it is understood in England, where overcrowding and property values concentrate the builder’s mind and housing densities wonderfully.



Just outside Wick there was more wild gesticulating from oncoming motorists. One extremely bony and elderly man was practically doing himself an injury trying to impress upon me the importance of slowing down. His warning was welcome though, for sure enough, a little further on, there it was, a radar van with some very determined looking police officers at the side of the road.

Wick was the first town in the far north I had come across. It looked as cold and wet and windblown as I had imagined. My fleeting impressions of it are of extensive road works; huge traffic foul ups (even here!); massy, stone-built public buildings the colour of fresh cow-pats; and exceptionally fresh-faced looking people, as clean and neat as the countryside about them. I ploughed on through the traffic queues, past a scruffy building site where a new, out-of-town Tesco’s was being erected (What will that do to the traditional local economy, I wonder). The bright company colours of red and blue glared synthetically among the soft natural tones of the land and local building stone. I didn't stop, but headed straight on up to John O’Groats in the most extreme north-easterly corner of the country.

Having seen other small communities in the area, John O’Groats was exactly as I should have expected it to be, but didn’t. It was just another windblown oupost of scattered buildings way up in the far north. Individuality rather than coherence was the guiding principle. There was little sign of the planner's heavy-handed meddling here.

Like everyone else in these islands, the name 'John O’Groats' has been part of my consciousness since I was a child, and without much thinking about it, I had built up a picture of what it would look like. And that picture was based upon what I knew. So, in my head it didn’t look that different to a town down in the South of England. But there is a world of difference between a busy little market town in Hertfordshire and a farming community in the Caithness region of Scotland.

I rode through its empty streets, looking for somewhere to eat. I’d imagined that I'd just have to stop off in the town centre, choose a restaurant or café and tuck in. Some hope! I did find a Post Office-come-local shop, though, and pulled up to ask what the town might have to offer in the way of lunch. (Come on! There must be a pub serving food, somewhere here.) To my great relief, the friendly shop owner told me that, yes, there was somewhere I could eat in town. To my extreme puzzlement she then advised me that I should make for the knitwear shop down by the beach. I thanked her for the information and paid for a packet of Blue-Tack which I intended, at the first opportunity, to ram into the vent on my lid to get rid of the companionable little ‘insect’ that had taken up residence there.

I didn’t pursue the question of the knitwear shop with her any further, because I had one other need that had rapidly grown overwhelming. I needed to find a toilet as quickly as I could. I suppressed my scepticism and decided that the knitwear shop café, or whatever it was, would have to do.

[Warning. I have been told off before for being frank about this sort of thing on the boards, so I need to advise you that the next 3 paragraphs are not for those with delicate sensibilities.]

I hurried on down to the beach in the direction indicated and found a huge deserted car park. There, on one side, was the knitwear shop looking decidedly closed. And there on the other was a well-signed public toilet. Right now, that would do, thank you very much! I parked the bike and bolted for the entrance to the Gents as quickly as I could, only to find myself facing a turnstile and a notice demanding 20p. Oh Bugger!

The only coin I had easily to hand was a 50p. I knew I had a couple of 20p pieces, but they were in my wallet. Extracting money from an inside pocket when you are wearing bike gear is, as everyone on this site will know, not the most straightforward job in the world. As I pranced about yanking off gloves, tearing at zips, press studs, toggles, Velcro, I noticed an exceedingly annoying sign, which told me cheerfully that change was available, on request, from the attendant. I glanced across the deserted, out-of-season wasteland about me and my mood did not improve any. Fingers which, in the normal course of life, were perfectly agile had suddenly became all numb and fumbly. As my blood pressure rose, I began muttering to myself and called down curses on everyone and everything I could think of. I did briefly consider leaping the barrier, but then reflected that this might, in itself, bring its own unwanted consequences. I found the 20p and thrust it into the slot.

Most small communities like to identify something special about themselves. They like to boast that they have the best pumpkin show in the region; the best floral display; the best cricket or darts team; the best pub; the handsomest manor house; the most professional drama society. John O’Groats, is no different. John O'Groats, the most remote community in the kingdom, is, without question, exceptionally proud of its public loo. Giant, ‘Loo of the year’ awards for many succeeding years were displayed all over the gleamingly sanitised and hygienic walls. There is undoubtedly a parish committe, somewhere, devoted to rewinning the award again next year. But, you know, all those certificates did have their affect on me and I left that hallowed space feeling both chasened and a lot purer than when I went in.

Sad but true -> http://www.loo.co.uk/

Edit: I found this later on the Caithness Community Website and couldn't resist posting it.
"The Highland Council has scooped seven national category awards at the 2005 Loo of the Year Awards, held on Tuesday during the World Toilet Summit in Belfast."

Emerging back into the car park with my senses rather more broadly focused than before, I suddenly realised that the sign I had been so annyoyed at earlier, had not lied after all. There, framed by the walls of a narrow cubicle, which was set between the Ladies and the Gents toilets was, indeed, ‘the attendant’, a woman of such massive proportions and severe demeanour that for a moment all thought and understanding failed me. Then, I felt embarrassed, certain that she must have heard my solitary, Gollum-like mutterings as I had struggled to get into the loo.

My mouth began to form itself automatically into a polite greeting but froze instantly on my lips. ‘The attendant’ sat utterly unmoving, staring stonily out across the empty car park towards the turbulent waters of the Pentland Firth like some ancient sea priestess in trancelike communion with the deep.

I wondered briefly if she had died at the end of the summer season and no-one had yet noticed. Then I wondered if she were like those mechanical laughing clowns or gypsy fortune tellers you used to find in fairground amusement parks. If I could find a slot somewhere in her booth and drop another 20p coin into it, she might speak to me and reveal some deep and secret truth known only people who live on the fringes of the known world.

As I crossed the car park once again to the Tourist Information Office a chill breeze whipped across its empty acres of tarmac making me shiver. I glanced back at the guardian of the prize-winning loo for a moment and revived my theory that she had indeed died. The general air temperature here were so low that she might have been preserved in her rigor mortis for months.

The Tourist Office was bursting to the seams with knick-knacks, leaflets and tourist junk but was resoundingly empty of customers. Behind the desk I found two human beings whose bodies were still warm and animated but whose manner suggested that their lives were surrounded by vast silences. I offered a greeting. In their response, they seemed to exude such genuine warmth and good nature that I wanted to hail them as long lost relatives and take them to the bosom of my family. And yet, at the same time, they remained utterly remote. I tested out my question on them. Was there anywhere round here were I might get a hot meal? (The knitwear shop seemed so utterly unlikely a possibility that I didn’t even dare to mention it in case they thought I was off my trolley.)

They consulted in voices that were extraordinarily gentle and quiet. Various possibilities were discussed and abandoned. (The knitwear shop was not among them). Eventually a phone call was made. The chef at the Seaview Hotel was still cooking, they told me - just. He would wait for me to arrive. I thanked them both and left. (Good grief! Up here? A ‘Seaview Hotel!’ In my world, 'Seaview Hotels’ belong to little old ladies taking dainty constitutionals on the prom at Eastbourne, not to the wild and rugged men of the north – I clearly needed to adjust my ideas.)

The ‘chef’ appeared from the bowels of the kitchen, looking every bit like the barman – which indeed he was. And no doubt he was the receptionist, porter, waiter and proprietor too. The bar-restaurant had a timbered and slightly nautical feel about it which reassured me somewhat. It was dominated, however, by a massive plasma screen. Two news anchormen were giving me the benefit of their oily opinions on the day’s news. The food was not only excellent, but there was plenty of it. It was one of the most wholesome and filling meals I had ever eaten outside my own home. I felt thoroughly comfortable here.

But I was utterly dumbfounded by the time. Two-fifteen said the clock. There were just two-and-a-quarter hours of daylight left, possibly even less this far north. I was never going to get down to the west coast before dark and I was certainly not going to manage the two biking routes. I would either have to compromise on my plan to include them, or… or I could lie, I thought! Yes, to my shame, that thought did flash briefly through my head. But only for an instant.

I needed a rethink.

I considered the possibilities. The one fixed point of reference was that, whatever else happened, I had to get to Dunnet Head. That was un-negotiable. I pored over the map book. I then assessed the various routes I could take back to Fort William in the dark. And then it dawned upon me that I had got myself stuck in some rather rigid thinking here. There was actually no necessity for me to go back to Fort William tonight at all. If I stayed out, I would have to pay for a second B&B - but why ruin the trip, disappoint myself and Annie and others who were supporting me for the sake of a mere £20. Instead of a disaster, I might just have an adventure on my hands. With all the extra time staying out would give me, where couldn’t I go? I might even get to visit the wild north-west. It would mean an extra day in Scotland and that might cause problems later on, but who knows? I decided to leave that one to fate. Right now I was off to Dunnet Head.

As I left the Hotel, a very ordinary blue bus turned a corner into this less than ordinary village. Well, of course. Why not? It just seemed odd, that’s all, like going to the moon and finding a branch of Macdonald’s serving cheeseburgers in the Mare Tranquillitatis. What had I expected? Maybe I should be checking the inhabitants to see if they all had six fingers on each hand. Or maybe I should be investigating the village hall or kirk for evidence of ‘the old religion’ and disturbing ritual practices. (I’ve seen the movies!!! I know these things!).

My road out of John O’Groats ran straight as a die along the coast and into the iconic west. Well why shouldn’t it? There wasn’t much here to prevent it going anywhere it damn well liked. And as roads are rather scarce up here in Caithness it might as well be economical about it. If the landscape in this north-eastern corner is not quite flat, it is certainly very low, very bare and featureless. There are few trees. What vegetation there is has a windblown look – as do the people. On my first arrival here I'd missed the mountains but now I found myself enjoying all this open space. My consciousness went rolling across its wide grasslands: my eyes relaxed onto its distant horizons. By the time I had ridden the 20 miles to the Dunnet Head turn-off I was so mellowed out that I rode straight past it and had to double back.

The rusty-brown ‘road’ up to Dunnet Head tried to lose itself in the boggy, rusty-brown land. Here and there I saw quiet herds of rusty-brown Highland Cattle with shaggy coats and huge, elegantly sculpted, rusty-brown horns. Here and there, too, there were black, acidic pools of standing water - unnatural and unmoving surfaces that bitterly reflected the clouds and sky. It was a desolate place. Apart from some evidence of turf cutting, the peninsula seemed entirely natural. And yet, as I looked about me - despite all evidence to the contrary - I couldn’t help thinking of the slag heaps and rotten-topsoil of England’s industrial wastelands. If this was truly nature at work, then it was nature at her most forlorn and suicidal.



The Peninsula wasn’t entirely deserted. Here and there, at its most southerly end there were tiny communities of people who drove old cars, had craggy faces, and scowled at me as I passed. Now, that’s more like it, I thought! There was even one place big enough to have a signboard and a name. ‘Brough’, it was called. Most unlikely! It was a grey little place. It should have had chickens clucking about in the gardens and running across the road. But it didn’t. I imagined that the whirlwind which had snatched it up in Kansas and dropped it here unceremoniously on Dunnet Head must have left Dorothy and all the chickens behind.

The Peninsula was even big enough to have a proper loch. It was disappointingly round, unlike all the other lochs I had seen, which were long and narrow. It was a sad and dismal thing, and also a little creepy. St John’s Loch it was called. And I can well imagine the evangelist sitting here upon its banks having dreadful visions of the end of days. I know I would!



The ‘road’ that had skirted it and set off across the dun grasslands of this northernmost peninsula was twisty and narrow and fun to ride. Evening had not yet begun to fall, but the day was growing thin and there was need for haste. I was in a hurry: not anxious, not driven; just in a hurry. When I enter that frame of mind, I disengage most completely from all my anxious, nay-saying voices and my ride becomes a dream.



I’d decided on a plan (or rather, the plan had decided on me). The plan was this: to travel as far west along the northern coast as I could before it got too dark or I got too tired and then, come tomorrow, whether it rained hard or just rained I would travel down the entire length of the North-West Coast, keeping to the sea road, cutting no corners, taking in every little bulge and bay and riding the two DVLA bike roads before going back to Fort William and supper. Do it! I told myself. Just do it! No compromises!



Of course, judging by the time it had taken me to get this far today on a major road and in dry conditions, there was no way that this little hatchling plan was going to be at all achieveable. It was a foolish idea. But I have many foolish ideas. They are born out of sheer bloody-minded wilfulness and a kind of hyper-optimism that will invest the most unlikely notions in glowing colours and see me through with a sunny smile. If things don't work out as planned there are always other possibilites: possibilities that include the unexpected and the adventurous. I’ve had many great adventures thanks to my foolish ideas. And sometimes, if you are foolish enough, the impossible becomes possible. ‘Cos the impossible is only impossible to THOUGHT. (Sounds good eh?)

Having written that, a host of critical voices have suddenly elbowed their way into my mind. Proper, responsible adults often cluck and tutt and my impractical take on life and like to remind me, whenever they can, of how stupidly optimistic or risky are some of the things I do. Di did, all the time. But here, riding my bike - my freedom machine – right up in the far north, with just miles of possibility stretching out from me in every direction, none of their practical advice or cautionary admonitions seemed to make any sense at all.

I reached Dunnet Head, the north cardinal point, prised three small stones from the earth for Annie, and rode the bike up to a viewpoint overlooking the lighthouse. There I sat for a while in the saddle breathing in the salt air and feeling completely at peace with myself. I gave myself just ten minutes. I didn’t have time to spare for much reflection but absorbed what enjoyment I could from this wild and joyous place. In my diary I wrote, “Sitting here at Dunnet Head, looking out to sea, I’m chuckling in my lid, suddenly filled with a manic sense of freedom in which anything seems possible.”


The sea cliffs, seen from Dunnet Head

My next stop was… I wasn’t sure. Somewhere west. Somewhere where I could fill up the tank, I realised. That probably meant Thurso.

Thurso looked remarkably comprehensible to me as a town, a huddled community with solidly built terraced houses and public buildings. It had that essential element of all urban communities, a tension between rich and poor. Big houses, their wealth secure behind wrought iron gates, shouted their status at rows of small-fronted workers cottages whose front doors opened straight onto the streets. And there were signs of a civic middle-class's preoccuption with town planning and pomposity.

I stopped at a garage and filled up the bike. The woman attendant in the office wasn’t busy and was ready to chat. We talked about the tourist trade and the economy and the weather. I asked her about the flood signs I had been seeing. She nodded and told me that in the week before I had arrived, the region had seen the worst flooding in living memory. So that was it! I was lucky then. If I hadn’t had to delay my start (yet again!) I would have been here in all that wet weather.

Getting out of Thurso proved to be slightly more complicated than I had bargained on. As I left town, I found myself on what I took to be the ‘wrong’ road (the A9 again) which would take me back southwards down the east coast. Oh bugger! But I’d made a pact with myself to let fate take a hand in this, so I decided just to carry on and see what happened. It didn’t necessarily mean I was heading back towards Fort William. I could still find somewhere else to sleep tonight and then cut west if I wanted to, but it would mean missing the north-west corner.

And then I realised it wasn’t the 'wrong' road at all. The road swung round and once again I found myself riding into the westering sun. I had decided to let fate choose a route for me. It had taken hold of the reins (the clip-ons, anyway) and was winging me once again along the north coast towards Tongue. Though the late afternoon had begun to drain a little of the colour from the landscape I was still feeling sunny inside.

I suspect fate, or something like it, plays a much bigger part in our lives than we like to imagine. And I’m not so sure that is a bad thing. Many years ago when I was studying in Hull, I read a book called ‘Witchcraft among the Azande’. All the anthropology students were reading it. I was doing philosophy at the time, not anthropology, but it caught my interest. Members of the Azande tribe all carried a simple mechanical yes/no ‘oracle’ with them which they used to decide everything they did – and that really meant everything, from trivial, every-day issues to matters of life and death. The writer concluded from his research among them that by handing over control in this way, they led lives that were just as successful as any other culture he had studied including our own. I found that bothersome and extremely reassuring at the same time.

From John O’Groats, to Thurso and then beyond to the village of Melvich the A836 undulates gently along the line of a coast which provides little to distinguish one mile from the next. It is an unadventurous road but a pleasant one if you are happy just to bowl along through the landscape. The SV is very comfortable on a road like this. Though it is a big bike, it will cruise sweetly at 60mph for as long as you like without complaining, and then, if the mood takes you, it’s just as happy to wake up and stretch its legs a little. There is not much that it doesn't do well.

Amid all this sameness, the sight of a giant white golf ball pointedly sitting on the landscape ahead came as something of a shock. It appeared totally incongruous in every way. Either it was a nuclear power station, I thought, or something to do with the military early warning system. Then, I realised it must be Dounreay, one of Britain’s first generation nuclear reactors; ageing now and with a safety record that left something to be desired. I’d forgotten that it was located up here. I found myself hurrying past.

Beyond the reactor lay a hardnosed compound of low buildings fronted with a large sign, red on white, which declared it to be the offices of the British Atomic Energy Commission. And beyond that was the little village of Reay. The village probably provided a fair bit of the labour that kept the reactor going. I kept my eyes open and was reassured to see that none of the inhabitants were actually glowing as I passed by.

Reay was another spread-out village that looked as though it only had a temporary footing on the landscape. Several of the houses were made of clap board. I hadn’t seen any up here previously. It is unusual anywhere in the UK. I wondered how warm they would be in winter. Indeed, I thought, if I lived in Reay I would probably have insisted on nothing less than a house with two-foot concrete walls and probably lead lining too.

After Thurso the land to the south begins rising again gently, forming itself into distant peaks. Then suddenly, beyond the little village of Melvich the hills sweep norhward down to the sea. The road rises and the land grows mountainous again. Flat grassland gives way to moor and bog and the road, which, until then, had had two lanes, a decent camber and a white line down the middle, narrows to a single track with regular passing places and a very uneven surface. It is as though molten tarmac has simply been poured out in a long ribbon upon the face of the moor and allowed to set. All the humps and bumps of the terrain underneath – and it is very humpy and bumpy – are reflected in the surface of the road.

But despite all this, it is still a British A road. I had difficulty keeping that in mind. Although there is very little traffic to be encountered along it – very little – there is some, and that traffic consists of all the same sorts of vehicle you would find on a normal A road – vans, busses, lorries, and trucks as well as cars. Suddenly I'd turn a corner to find a huge twelve-wheeler coming straight at me with its rubber completely straddling the ‘highway’. Incredibly, with the frequent passing places, this arrangment works perfectly well.

If the road made little impact on the landscape, then the moorland sheep and wildlife could hardly be blamed for ignoring it. Flocks wandered across it witlessly. Woodcock and pheasant and partridge seemed to have a positive preference for it. I’d seen no deer so far, but no doubt they were there too and, as the hills rose, it was only a matter of time before I would come across them - hopefully not in the middle of a blind bend.

The village of Bettyhill gave me another surprise. I just wasn’t expecting to find a substantial community up here and certainly not one as pretty as this. The road had dipped down into another depression and then cut through a small gully with overhanging rock walls. In the gully, beside the road, were several very attractive little cottages. Beyond the gully, there were more cottages and bungalows and the beginning of a town or village. Then suddenly, the road swung left into a long green valley and there amid the moorland wastes I found myself stumbling into a veritable Shangri-la. The light was fading now, which probably added to my romantic notions of the place, but it was attractive.

Later, I learned its history, which is probably more curious and interesting than my twilight fantasies about it. Bettyhill was, according to a guide book I read, a ‘charitable’ experiment, established in the eighteenth century by ‘Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland’ as a refuge for crofters evicted from their homes during the Highland Clearances - a small comfort for a lucky few. It occurred to me later still that maybe the ‘thoughtful’ Countess had been responsible for evicting the crofters in the first place, which, on further enquiry, turned out to be the case. Today, the village appears to be a popular centre for huntin’ shootin’ and fishin’ folk. On the other side of the valley was a beautiful, deserted beach (white-water breakers slow-crashing onto acres of sand). This was the first of many such that I would see in the following days.

http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/b ... index.html

Up on the hills the wind grew blustery again. The night was coming down now and I had to take extra care. A few light showers came and went. There had been no spectacular sunset tonight, just a creeping greyness. It was time to stop.

Tongue also took me by surprise. It was tiny. But there were a couple of hotels. I gave the first a wide berth. It was very flash and ugly-looking, over-decorated and probably expensive. The second looked more like a country inn. More my style! I parked the bike and enquired the price. Too much! The friendly landlady referred me without a thought to a B&B just thirty yards down the road and suggested that if I needed an evening meal I could come back at eight. That sounded pretty good to me.

I found the B&B. It was a pleasant looking house overlooking a hairpin bend on the road. The owner was friendly but troubled. She had a room free but was expecting the double-glazers in first thing tomorrow morning. What time did I want to leave? As early as you like, I said, and felt very heroic as I said it. The terms were good – very good, in fact – so the deal was done. She showed me the room. Actually it was an entire flat and had a bathroom as big as my living room, bigger probably. And... the bathroom had a Jacuzzi. Luxury or what! And all for twenty-five quid!

I bathed (wasting ten minutes trying to locate the on-switch on the Jacuzzi - it was under my arm), read till 8 o’clock, then made my way over to the Inn for dinner, feeling a little self-conscious as I had no change of clothes with me and was in full bike gear. The dining-room/bar-room was panelled in dark wood and lined with maps and hunting trophies. It was quiet and nearly empty. At one table, a group of three local lads were playing a mean game of dominoes and drinking. At another, curiously, there were three Frenchmen, one of whom the landlady clearly knew well and referred to as ‘Doctor’. The conversation was genial and subdued.

The menu, on the other hand, was excellent. I went through the dreary business of explaining my allergies and got my order sorted. Or so I thought. When the food came it was utterly laden with everything I couldn’t or shouldn’t eat – nothing that would cause me a major problem but quite enough to make me feel uncomfortable. It wasn’t the landlady’s fault. She had gone to considerable lengths to accommodate me. It was all a misunderstanding. But the Inn was cosy, the food looked so good and by that time I was so hungry, that I said nothing, hoped for the best and tucked in.

It was delicious. Even after thirty years I still miss a lot of the foods I’m allergic to, so the meal went down very well. Inevitably, though, I was soon feeling achy and spaced out, but I was determined not to let it spoil a pleasant evening. There was some good cider on tap to round out the meal. Outside the wind was getting up. It howled around the corners of the Inn, dashing gusts of rain against the window panes. The landlady breezed cheerfully in and out. The fire blazed. The dominoes clacked and the quiet conversational French drifted round the room.

Eventually I had to tear myself away for the night. I zipped up my jacket, and held onto my cap as I walked the few yards back to the B&B. The rain was drenching now. And the wind was tearing at the trees. Leaves and twigs whirled about in the gusts. The Norwegian guy I met this morning had not been wrong about the weather. It looked like it was going to be quite a day tomorrow.