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Glasgow to Bladnoch, to Barrhill, 54 miles

Few mornings on tour combined stress, trauma and surrealism in quite such a befuddling cocktail as this, my final one. A tough task master to the end, I woke myself up at 5AM for my 7AM train to Ayr. Immediately post-dawn Glasgow in early summer is not the most awful place to be. As I descended through the parks and smart Georgian terraces to Sauchiehall Street, I experienced that thrill you get when you are awake and doing while everyone else wastes the peace and calm in bed. Once on Sauchiehall Street, however, I began to spot clusters of folk who plainly were only just on their way to bed.

The roads were largely empty, which was just as well because I’m not sure all of my city centre riding was within the Highway Code. I had street maps, obviously, and I knew the general location of Glasgow Central Station and the rough direction in which it lay. I was not helped by road signs, however, and all of a sudden I was quite undesirably on a bridge over the Clyde. I barrelled back across on the pavement, cut into a left lane and only after I had ducked under the railway bridge itself which sprouts out of the concourse did I spot a sign. I still had to come back the way I had come, further east, but I found the entrance. Finding the main platform was harder, and whether it was the poor night’s sleep or insufficient rest compounded over six weeks, tasking my reserves of logic to find it from the ground floor entrance did not work. I ended up hauling the bike along a deserted access corridor, down into the underground station and eventually found a lift which took me up to the concourse. The relief I felt was uniquely potent.

I caught my first train, which was devoid of any facilities to stow my bike. After running the length of the short train to try and find a little bike symbol at one of the doors, I wheeled it on and kept it in the space by the doors. I was positioned in a seat nearest to this area so that I might keep a hold of it. I guzzled most of a bottle of water and texted mum. Stage One complete. ‘What would you like for pudding?’ was the reply.

As the train sped south out of Glasgow, mist cloaked the fields and industrial estates. By Ayr it had cleared up, precisely when things became most shrouded and arcane for me.

I have decided to include the oddest and most traumatic encounter of my entire tour because it is in fact rather appropriate as a dramatisation of impressions and conflicts which had been developing within me over the six weeks. Meeting my first stark raving God-fearing lunatic was important, although its significance is most likely solely attributable to the coincidental occasion which witnessed it. For some weeks, I had keenly missed company, cameraderie and the ability to share with others that which I was experiencing. This had taken me by surprise at first, for I had always considered myself very independent, indeed perfectly happy in my own company. I had expected to lap up every moment of blissful solitude. As it turns out, I need people. This is a good thing, though, because if I ever decide I don’t, I might just turn into the paranoid, doom-propheting hermit who, several times over the forty-five minutes he enforced his presence upon me, insisted that he just wanted to be left alone. I wished, without hope, that the hypocrisy of his actions and desire would occur to him. Once he had expounded his theories on the non-existence of time, the government keeping tabs on him due to his fearless and pure lifetsyle, he got on to preaching. It was very clear that he thought I was one of the many people destined to burn in Hell. All the while, I’m trying to savour the frankly gorgeous hills, forests and coast of South Ayrshire, proffering the bare minimum response which was in any case often all I was capable of, so regularly would he start off on a new tack with something I couldn’t quite believe anyone would say to a complete stranger. So draining and bizarre was his constant onslaught of drivel that when the time by which we should have arrived at Barrhill station approached and I got his name wrong as we parted, it had a pre-determined feel about it. He got rather nasty, in fact, and gave a fairly bleak diagnosis as to the state of my soul. My complete absence of inner strength, as he would have it, seemed a trifle at odds with the three quarters of an hour I had endured with him out of politeness, however. In fact, I rather fancy it was my openness at Ayr, waving him and his many bags onto the train ahead of me, that marked me out from the herd. Had I stuffed earphones in, swore, spat and scowled a bit, he might not have been so keen to latch on to me. Still, as a writer I can see the positives of unusual interactions such as this one.

I got off the train physically shaken. After such an early start, on my very last day, this was not exactly what I had needed.

Beautiful Barrhill: it looked just as gorgeous (and welcome) when I passed through six hours earlier.

I had just under two hours, after changing in the lane up to the station, to get to Bladnoch. Dumfries and Galloway pacified me, cleansed me of my morning struggles and was the perfect epilogue to my travels in Scotland. I have never been to this part of the country before, but I will return. The sun was warm, the air fresh, fields green and full of lambs. Hills were low and rounded, forests plentiful and pine-fresh. I reflected that if my bike conked out, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. I followed a single track forestry road, almost completely empty of traffic save for one huge tree truck which demanded an unsteady emergency stop in the grass verge. Besides that, I couldn’t belive how beautiful it all was.

I began to head further south, having bypassed Newton Stewart. Trees nearly swept the road with their new, ethereal leaves. The landscapes which opened out before me on such stunning frequency were soft, busy and idyllic. Everywhere hummed, in the cheeriest possible sense, with the aroma of cow.

11AM, my tour time at Bladnoch, was approaching fast, and I wasn’t seeing any signs to Wigtown. Soon, I rejoined the main road and phoned the distillery. Martin answered the phone. “I’m at the Torhouse stones,” I said. “Oh, you’re just a mile and a half away. It’s all down hill from there.” I began to wonder if this was some cruel joke of his, or maybe we were thinking about different Torhouse stones. I was faced with a sequence of rolling hills, and then I went straight on over the road that could have taken me cheekily right and straight to Bladnoch. As it was, I passed through Wigtown which at least gave me the opportunity to scout out a Co-op for lunch. I made it into Bladnoch at 11.15AM, only for Martin to tell me that I had taken the long way from Barrhill. I was told that, for my return leg, heading through Newton Stewart would be much quicker.

Simply, cycling heaven.

In the sweltering and still building heat, I was given a superb tour of what is a unique distillery. Martin knew everything there was to know about its history and place within the local community to this day. It was with the help of the villagers that the Armstrongs succeeded in reversing the ruling by previous owners Diageo that Bladnoch could be bought but must never distil again.

You need more than an hour in Bladnoch.

I made it a bit of a frenzied tour, I must admit. I had asked for the tour to last an hour, but so enchanted was I by all the doors Martin was opening (he says that the hardest job is locking everything up again after his father has conductd a tour) that I rather lost track of time. After taking a photo in the beautiful grounds, I checked my display and read 12.36. I needed to be going. Martin reminded me of the route I should take then broke off. “I could give you a lift to Newton Stewart.”

The first part of my final leg of cycling on tour, therefore, was spent in the Bladnoch Transit van. This is how they transport casks from Glasgow to the distillery and back. Other companies use swish trucks, the Armstrongs use a builder’s vehicle. The bike was stashed in the back amongst cardboard boxes, bags thrown in any old how. As Martin hurtled along Dumfries-shire roads, these a tad busier than those I had taken earlier in the day, he gave me a potted history of the local area, which had played a significant part in the Second World War, an RAF base stationed to the west of Newton Stewart. Regrettably, quite a few Spitfire pilots misjudged the altitude of the Cairnsmore of Fleet, and flew into it.

He deposited me on the main street and I thanked him from the bottom of my heart. Once I had bought lunch and escaped the throngs of the town, I began to appreciate just what a timely favour he had done for me. Shade was essential to pack in my last meal, and I found a sturdy tree on someone’s driveway to eat sandwiches and shortbread. Across the road, sheep panted and tried to take advantage of the cover granted by the same tree. I mixed the last of my electrolyte tablets with the water I had taken from the tap in the Bladnoch courtyard and set off for my final time trial. It was 1.30PM, I had less than two hours.

Again I must stress the beucolic beauty of the area, but I could not appreciate the gentle meanders, rises and falls of the roads, the bluebelled woods rising from the carriageway, the verdant fields, the glorious sunshine because I had a train to catch. And if I failed to it would be dicey as to whether the next trains could fit me and my machine on.

Moist and exhausted, but so very chuffed.

The ferocity of the sun became a genuine concern, as opposed to a luxury. So open and bare are some of the landscapes in South Ayrshire where forestry has been cleared, and so windless is it, that it feels as though you are pushing the pedals with a burning bouncy castle strapped to your back. I saw a sign saying 15 miles to Barrhill but the next one, which seemed to come many hours later, said only 11. Four miles had taken me what felt like an age. I began to doubt the accuracy of my bike computer, I began to doubt my ability to push on as the food I scoffed provided negligible sustenance. The road began to climb, not seriously, but markedly upward. I was pushing on the pedals with all my might but feeling a little lost and doubtful for the first time since I had been condemned to eternal damnation earlier in the morning. So wonderful, surprising and beautiful had my time since that surreal encounter been that I began to wonder if I had in fact dreamed it. As the road began to descend, I could pick up some serious speed and cool off, I genuinely doubted that it had taken place at all. Barrrhill appeared, and not before time. 2PM was developing nicely, and was indeed already too late for the village shop, where I would have bought some Lucozade and some chocolate bars. I was absorbed in food matters, and couldn’t quite remember how far along the village the turning up the hill to the station was. After maybe half a mile further into Ayrshire countryside, I realised that I had passed it. A frantic U-turn, and needlessly savage climb up to the station later, I had made it. 2.45PM, time enough to change out of my dripping cycling gear, put some water back in, and reflect on all I had achieved. I passed a pleasant few minutes on the platform with a lot of swallows and the scorching sun, which still wasn’t backing off.

The bike at rest: its job was done. Check out the swallow in the top right - I'm quite pleased with this picture!

The train back up to Ayr was not especially full, and I secured for myself a double seat. All of the windows were open and most of my fellow passengers seemed to have been hypnotised, those that weren’t already asleep on their bags or tables. I joined them in slack-jawed, blithely smiling abstraction. I was deliriously happy, and profoundly dehydrated, of course. I could enjoy the anonymity that public transport provides, whilst sharing a smile with the rest of the carriage when we past through a tunnel and all the windows slammed shut.

The change at Ayr was a swift one, and whilst there were plenty of bodies already on the train, I succeeded in blagging another seat by the doors so I could look after the bike. It turned out I didn’t need to be anywhere near it. Masses of exposed, burnt Scottish flesh boarded the train, couldn’t find seats and so squashed into the seatless spaces. One man found my pannier rack a useful cup holder as he fielded and received calls for the duration of the journey about what he and his friends were likely to be up to that night.

Once in Glasgow the stress returned. I had misread my timetable, and plain forgotten which train I was to catch. I thought it was something like a 5.30PM train, and when I got off my train from Ayr at 5.10PM and couldn’t find it on the departure boards, I panicked a little. I also panicked about locking the bike in the bike park in such a way as to make theft impossible, but also appeasing the urgent signals from my bladder. In the end I only secured the front wheel to the rack, which would have made it very easy for anyone to steal the rest of the bike by flicking the quick-release level to detach front wheel from bike. Anyway, I used the toilet, bought sandwiches, crisps and a large bottle of water from a standing-room-only M&S and returned to find the bike where I left it. Sweating copiously, I wheeled machine and my baggage of six weeks to the departure screens. My train was actually the 5.50PM. Seeing ‘Alnmouth’ scroll along as one of the stops was not an overly momentous sight at the time. However, when I had found the right platform, belatedly the right carriage for the bike (the guard’s van right at the front of the train, my carriage being towards the back), remembered just before we moved off that I’d left my M&S purchases in said guard’s van, had my provisions returned to me and taken my seat; then did I realise that my travels were over, and I had done it. Out of Glasgow, through Motherwell, I couldn’t stop smiling. The evening was as beautiful as the day had been. I ate, sipped and thought. My mind pedalled its way back to Glen Garioch, Tomintoul, Skye, The North, and all of my testing moments in the Central Belt. My thoughts then sprinted off ahead of me into the future. “Stephen,” I said, when he phoned me up, “do you want to come on the next one?”

A sight of the Forth Bridges, through Edinburgh and down the East Coast: all of these familiar sights seen with new eyes. The train raced into Northumberland and I recognised landmarks from my many training miles. That hit me rather hard. When the train stopped in Alnmouth, I hit the side of the guard’s van rather hard, too. I had notified the steward of my exit stop, and that I had precious cargo stowed away. I had made my way to the first class carriages in readiness to alight on the platform and be ready for a speedy handover. But I couldn’t get into the carriage. I hammered on the door but no reply. I had vivid, livid visions of my bike making it as far as Birmingham when I detected in the far distance a man in a hat jogging laboriously towards me. “It’s chocker in there,” he gasped, opened the door for me and in a flash I was on the platform, the train pulling away. I was home.

Out of the station and into the surrounding estates. The smell was different somehow. Down into the village everything had exploded into life, including the local pub where I work, very busy at 8.45PM on a Saturday night. Back at the house, I unhooked the panniers as I had done a hundred times before in foreign parts, wheeled the bike into the garage and without realising or necessarily agreeing to it, became abosrbed once again into the real world.

Park Terrace to Gear Bikes, to Dumgoyne and back, 27 miles

I can now totally empathise with Mark Beaumont’s tears when his bike demanded professional repair. My Giant has been the only permanent companion throughout these 6 weeks, and now it is in a pretty bad way. It isn’t so corny or ridiculous as personification. It never had a name, nor did I imbue it with any sort of character. But it was the durable, functional tool which allowed me to find my most extreme limits, to discern who I am and what I can do. And now, instead of carrying me through Glasgow it is in pieces in a bike shop.

It seems that bike shops are like distilleries, and don’t open before 10AM. I had set out to find the two premises that my hostel receptionist had highlighted for my just after 9AM: a small independent on Gibson Street and a much larger one at the other end of the Great Western Road. The former said it would open at 10, the latter made no mention of when it would throw open its doors. I squeaked back to the first shop, locked the bike to a rack outside its door, popped into the neighbouring cafe and waited. What more could I do?

The dustbin wagon arrived, and a man in an apron carried large flat cardboard boxes out to intercept it. I took this to mean that the shop had opened.

I was not the only cyclist looking for Joe and Ian to sort out my equipment issues. They were very very busy indeed with people coming to collect serviced bikes, buying new ones and bringing in more poorly cycles. I am so grateful that they did all they could as quickly as they could to sort out my own problems. Initially, their expert eyes could see that the front derailleur had slid down from its original position, so was effectively coming into contact with the big chainring. They also found that the front mech was bent, and this required a few trusty blows with a hammer to correct. A number of other things received minor tweaks and I was sent round the block to see that everything was back to normal. It wasn’t at all. One of the guys took it for a ride. “Bearings,” he said. “Your bottom bracket is bust.” This was very Mark Beaumont, and I was asked to give them about an hour to sort it out.

I wandered around the various convenience stores in the Great Western Road area, reflecting that an hour meant a little after 11AM. I had wanted to be at Glengoyne for 10AM. I walked back in to the shop, was handed the bike again and took it for another spin. The noise was more cacophonous than ever. The other guy took it out and came back muttering and cursing. I went for another walk, then returned to the next-door cafe for a tea and banana cake. Time past. I was sipping water, watching the world go by and pass me by, when one of the men bounded in, a look of something like triumph on his face. “We think we’ve worked out what it is.”

This is not a photo I can easily look at. 1300 miles together and my bike is in bits.

I followed him into the shop and there was my bike, resting on its saddle and handle bars, devoid of cranks, one of which was in a vice. “There’s movement between the crank and the spindle,” he said, jiggling the crank in the vice. “Has the bike had a fall?” I replied in the negative. He thought that the only explanation for it was an impact on the right side, which had partially broken the weld between the crank and spindle which passes through the bottom bracket. It was a one-piece job, and would need to be replaced. “Do you want me to try it first, just to see whether that is the problem, or do you want a price?” Years of reading procycling had given me a mental inventory of expensive components and I closed my eyes at this point. He put the new crank in, and fixed everything up. As he tightened and knocked he said that I had been really rather unlucky. Based on what I had told him about my itinerary, his first guess would have been the bottom bracket, failing that the pedals may have had a problem. The crank? 10 or 15% chance. I gave a wry smile. Such is life. One whole day to go and it just couldn’t quite hold out. “You could have risked it,” he said, “but if it had given way the crank would have fallen off and you would have been in real trouble.” Not liking the idea of breaking down definitively in the middle of a Glasgow motorway, or in the wilds beyond it for that matter, I just paid my £120 (part plus labour) and was ready to be on my way. “We like a challenge,” he smiled. “Obviously its not ideal, but you couldn’t have guarded against it. It would have been silly to carry a spare crank.” He gave me a couple of protein energy bars, I changed into my cycling gear and applied sunscreen, the day outside my dark little shop having developed into a real broiler. Mark Beaumont actually made his way into the conversation. It seems that Gear was his local bike shop when he was at the university. Every couple of weeks he would bring his bike in, deconstruct it and modify it ahead of an ambitious weekend challenge. Even then, they said, they could see he was set to do something rather insane. I had suffered some of my hero’s mechanical malfunctions, and indeed used the same shop he once employed. For all the circumstances were very stressful, worryingly expensive and time consuming (Auchentoshan was now a no-no), I could at least glory in the feeling of being on the road again, that because of a sixth sense about this particular alien noise, my tour could continue.

On the way out and up towards the Great Western Road I was nearly swiped by an overtaking car, and mindful that I was less easy to fix than the bike, I stuck to the extreme edges of the road from that point on. This wasn’t always a better option for the bus lanes and bus stops within those bus lanes were even more likely to bust a wheel than some of the stretches on Islay. In a city, you average about 2-3 mph more between traffic lights, so you are fairly gunning along when an enormous sunken pothole nearly kills you. Until I got to where the A81 heads north through Milngavie and on to Strathblane, it was all rather stressful, so much traffic, so many people, and so bloody hot. I hadn’t the baselayer on today, but even so the sweat was pouring off me, and I’d sucked one bidon dry within the first 8 miles or so. The thing was, I was loving it. I may have felt afraid, nervous, panicked, but I felt so alive. Avoided cars parked in cycle lanes, broken glass, trying to make it through on the green light, finding the necessary name on a road sign: pell-mell and just brilliant. With Milngavie and its awful roads conquered, I was suddenly in the countryside, and seriously buxom, beautiful countryside with big trees, lush fields and blue skies. I began to recognise sections from our drive to Auchentoshan in 2008, although the potholes and the traffic were new to me. It was still very busy, and very up-and-down, and so hot!

I passed the Mugdock country park, where we had had a picnic the last time we were in the area. This made me feel very nostalgic indeed, for our Auchentoshan visit, picnic and evening meal in Swinton for my eighteenth birthday was one of the loveliest days I have known. Returning to somewhere I had been before also introduced the familiar, and a suggestion that I was nearing home at last. I stopped in the woods by the loch a little further on, took off my reflective jacket and stood in the shade for a few minutes so that I might escape the damned heat. The remaining miles to Glengoyne were again quite hilly, but a good deal more pleasant. The Strathblane Hills sat lumpily on the horizon, not as spectacular as I remembered them, but then I have seen my fair share of jaw-dropping mountain scenery of late.

Glengoyne is right on the road, surprisingly. None of the photos you see of distilleries really give you an idea of their place in the regular human world. It is still a staggeringly beautiful distillery and I had a great time there.

It was 4PM before I leave, and I’m rather overwhelmed. My next door neighbour has connections with Ian Macleod, and had promised to arrange something for me for when I visited. This turned out to be a place on the Master Blender Tour, one I had to decline because of course that is not the point of this adventure, and a bottle of the 17YO with a personalised label! It had my name on it and the date I visited. Not that I could take it away with me there and then, of course. Many thanks to Robert and Johnny at Malmaison Hotels and everyone at Glengoyne for giving me a very special momento of my travels. Nowhere else did I find quite so many tour guides and staff, and they were all super. It is still fabulously hot, I’ll hit Glasgow in time for the Friday night rush hour and I haven’t put in enough calories today.

I feel better once I finally depart and the route back to the hostel is relatively stress-free. Again, I feel very much alive as I tank round roundabouts, dodge traffic and buses and hurl myself into the pace of city travel. I arrive at the hostel utterly soaked with sweat, but I have done it. Despite the most acute stumbling blocks, I did my best to honour my itinerary and, as always, was rewarded.

I found the nearest supermarket so that I might have something for breakfast the following morning, then had fish and chips in the adjoining coffee shop to the hostel. It was such a relaxing evening, and it is tempting to tinge it with sentiment now that I come to relate it but I had by that stage honed the ability of putting my day’s troubles behind me, to savour simply having overcome them. I flicked through one of the outdoorsy mags that you find in such places, had a long and fascinating chat with a half-naked Australian who had just completed the West Highland Way, passed the time of day with the other occupants of the dorm, and was generally full of goodwill to all men. I could barely sleep so happy and inspired was I by passing this last night on tour, in Glasgow, knowing that the following night I would be in my own bed, that my plans were about to be completed.

Lochranza to Glasgow, 58 miles

I hadn’t much of an appetite for my toasted Hovis rolls this morning. It had been a struggle leaving the shadowed, undemanding nowhere-land that was my hostel bed. The world must be faced, however, and if I didn’t catch the 1.30PM ferry, I would be cycling into Glasgow at midnight. Not desirable.

A chat with a Frenchman who bore a resemblance to the tennis player Gilles Simon distracted me nicely, but he and his girlfriend left, I handed over my unused and unwanted washing powder and hunted out the distillery. As I waited in the grounds for signs that the tartan-skirted folk inside wanted to take my money, listening to the aggrieved cries of the real-life Arran peacock, lured away by an unscrupulous neighbour with more interesting tidbits, I doubted I would stay dry today. The idea of spinning effortfully through the Central Belt, soaked and harried, did not appeal.

I was as wet as I was going to get, as it turned out, racing two very fit young ladies on unencumbered road bikes who flashed past the distillery entrance just as I was tip-toeing across the cattle grid and afterwards wishing violent, ignominous death in an oblivious motor-home driver. I passed them with some ease on the hill out of Lochranza towards the east coast. It had much in the way of authentic Highland scenery about it, though, and I guess you could call it a proper mountain. It was appallingly hot and airless, however, ribbons of cloud flapping gently in wooded glens away to our right. Having so carelessly overtaken, I didn’t now want to stop and take off my pointless baselayer. The descent was a mixture of the sublime with the ridiculous: perfectly smooth, sensible tarmac giving way to roads that would not look out of place in Basra. It was as I was negotiating one of these sections that one of the girls flew past me, seemingly with no thought to her wheels. I was deeply concerned about these, and certain soft pieces of my anatomy which I did not share with my fellow competitors. Just before the hill bottomed out, the second lass put me behind her and sped away up the next incline. I was tired of racing, and these girls were plainly mildly insane, so I watched them disappear into the mist and small villages.

The mist was an enemy of my mental equilibrium. In much the same manner as it had goaded and tormented me the previous day, I felt trapped and constricted. Nothing beyond the rocks on the shore were visible: the rest, sea and air, was a featureless unity. I suffered more disappointment with Arran roads before Brodick appeared, tree-lined routes especially pitted. There were craft villages, cheese shops, the brewery and ornamental gardens in country houses. Had I not got a ferry to catch to my certain doom, I would have liked to have stopped and explored.

I clicked into Brodick just as the mist began to coalesce and fall as rain. I bought my lunch and dinner for tonight, reasoning that I hadn’t a clue when I would arrive at the hostel in the centre of Glasgow and, after the mini breakdown in response to what I had endured, would not know if there would be anything still open to feed me, it would be a good move to have food with me. I should explain that I fully expected to be mugged, stabbed, run over, assaulted, jeered, kidnapped and any number of other unspeakable things when I got to the big city. This was partly my dad’s fault: he had even offered to drive me to the Glasgow distilleries, and partly the inconceivable contrast from four weeks in the most isolated pockets of Scotland to the noise and bustle and human threat of a built-up area. This is why there are no pictures of my journey to Glasgow: I’m ashamed to say that after the distillery I put my camera’s memory card in my glasses case and that at the bottom of my panniers. I now know that it was a gross over-reaction, and the act of facing my fears and just doing it made for a far more enjoyable ride than I had expected, and I would have liked to have had pictorial evidence of it. At the time, however, I was atrociously anxious and wary, and could not have been too careful.

I checked in at the ferry terminal, and sat on the wall beside the area reserved for ferry-bound cars: a concreted expanse the size of a football pitch all covered in vehicles. I wondered how on earth they were all supposed to fit, as traffic snaked off the ferry from the mainland which had since docked. I didn’t even have time to finish my lunch before myself and two other more senior cyclists were being waved on.

The Ardrossan ferry, the last I would board on this tour, had a completely different feel again to the others I had taken. There was an impression that this was less for tourists and holiday-makers, more for commuters. There were builders and businessmen, and me sat in the soft grey gloom, trying to read the paper, knowing that forty-five minutes from now I would be facing my greatest test of the whole tour: the real world in all its unpredictable, flawed glory.

Land ahoy. Down to the bike. The cars bounce out and screech away. Me and the other cyclists follow into Ardossan. They are off to Troon and we wave as they take the first right. I continue over another roundabout and follow the little blue signs which will be encouragement and cause for concern in equal measure over the next four hours.

I change by the sea front, still swaddled in this timeless, soporiphic mist. The cycle route leads me on what feels a little like a wild goose chase for the first few miles: along the coast, through a park, over some dunes, along the side of the railway line with its trenches and broken glass. Oh there was lots of broken glass. The nightmare scenario of actually puncturing in this grim place was almost paralysing. A couple of times I would hear crunches beneath my rear wheel, only to find that the tyre bulge was just as healthy as it had always been.

I soon left Ardrossan and Saltcoats behind, and it began to look rather pastoral and pleasant. Until I got to Kilwininning. Work on the main street meant that I abandoned the cycle route temporarily, and this was of course enough to very nearly get very lost. If I hadn’t seen another blue sign in a residential street across the road, I could have been lapping Kilwinning for some time after. Everywhere, even the estates, was deserted. The cycle paths leaving any built-up area, however, were clearly the coliseums of the local bored youth: graffiti’ed, broken glass everywhere and scorched by aerosol cans or other inflammables. It was rather intimidating, and indeed on this section I decided to push the bike until the terrain became less prickly.

I did begin to enjoy myself a bit more after that. The cycle route was incredibly well signposted and avoided all of the seriously busy roads, for all I was granted good views of them intermittently. It was now after 4PM, and Glasgow had started to appear on my signs, but was still 30 miles away. It felt rather like a treasure hunt with all the blue signs and little tarmacked cuttings I had to dive up with little warning. Now that Iwas there, in the beating heart of Scotland, it was less menacing. As I swept down into Highlfield, I experienced a thrill: there was beauty here, and the evidence of other people prepared to get out and appreciate it.

The Kilbirnie Tesco takes some of my money and I then get a little lost. When I catch up to a female mountain biker and ask about the cycle route she says I have come quite a way away. After shopping, I should have headed back the way I came. I thank her and do as she says. I learn from this experience that unless there is the little route number in red on the sign, if isn’t the official route, just a branch line off it.

By Lochnwinnoch I encounter fresh water, which means insects. By this point I am on a wonderfully flat and straight piece of path which is quiet but peopled with enough joggers and cyclists to keep one’s spirits up. After Kilbarchan, I have no shortage of company. Johnstone is next and that basically means Glasgow. I’m eating every ten miles for energy, and I have no problem finding bushes when nature calls, allaying one of my biggest irrational fears that I would get caught short as the buildings sprang up and that finding public conveniences with somewhere to lock up the bike in time would become more difficult and stressful.

At Johnstone I cross another major artery in the Central Belt road network. It is bright, but not too hot, and everything is going to plan. Reflecting on it now, it was a very exciting ride with so many new challenges. One such new challenge began after I pushed off following a sausage roll and shortbread stop. A faint crunching and grinding whenever I put power down to get myself moving again. I follow the disused railway line over the motorway and into Johnstone proper. Here I get a little lost again but quickly return to the cycle route. However, stopped on the main street, with an unknown equipment problem, I feel very alone and conspicuous.

Paisley is rather terrifying. The advantage of cycle routes in general is that they take you away from the busyness. In disadvantaged areas of urbanity, however, the busyness can be a protection. The underpasses, litter, high-rises and quiet folk sitting by the canals smoking is not an environment I wish to return to soon.

The route seems to be flinging me all over the place. After the run-down suburbs I’m back in a park, and here I largely stay, give or take a few more estates and main roads, until I hit the centre of Glasgow. All the while I have been slowly counting down those little blue signs: City Centre 9 miles; City Centre 6 miles. There is no getting away from the fact that I am already deep into built up Glasgow however, with all the traffic lights ramping up the fear as all that grinding and squeaking erupts when I move off from stationary.

Another underpass, another climb back up to rejoin the main road, then it is back into another park. Once again I’m in the newish suburbs with people, threatening to me by their very presence, going about their Thursday evenings in a manner so very alien to mine. I regain grass and trees. I come across lots of people running – for leisure, not due to criminals.

I cross a busy road, head up a big hill and there is Glasgow. It is oddly stirring to see it, knowing I have made it so far already. I cycle in parallel with the motorway for a stretch, then meet the beginnings of one of Glasgow’s central business districts: pizza restaurants and underground stations. The blue signs don’t let me down, and I follow those for the SECC. Another cyclist is the benefit of an earlier green light to my left and he scythes expertly through the traffic about to cross the arched bridge over the Clyde. I join the queue. There is the SECC, here are lots more traffic lights (there is so much traffic and I’m in such a state of nervous tension that I don’t hear the complaining drivetrain), there are lots of girls crossing the road with little concern for their own safety, here is ‘Govan’ written on the tarmac, there are signs for the city centre, here is the M8. I stop myself in time, I’m pleased to say, but it required a couple of cars overtaking me at about 50mph before I realised that I was on a slip road. I get out the A-Z and frantically search. The hostel seems to be to the north of Kelvingrove Park. After a spell on the pavement, then on the wrong side of the road, I finally join onto Finiestown Street legally and reach the set of traffic lights I would have encountered last October when my mum and I walked from Sauchiehall Street to the SECC for Fleetwood Mac. I get distracted by an Audi R8 and a pedestrian alerts me to the green light for my lane. I follow signs right off Argyle Street north to Kelvingrove galleries. The one way system baffles my planned sequence of streets. But wait: there is Kelvingrove Park, I must be able to go through there. My companions now are students: students sauntering, students sitting, students playing lacrosse. I reach the top of the park and is that Park Terrace? I abandon any adherence to the one-way system now, and very quickly the hostel sign appears. I sag with relief and pride. I’m here in this leafy, neo-Georgian terrace having fought through seemingly everything. My bike is probably knackered but it has got me here in one piece. In my room I chat to two walkers, then make myself some pasta at 9.30PM. I read a bit of Raw Spirit in the lounge, fabulously relaxed. Just like the day to Glen Garioch and back to Huntly, I had done something I neither wanted to nor thought I could do, and my reward was quiet, peaceful exhaustion.

Port Askaig to Carradale, 31 miles

Sunrise over Jura: a mystical and auspicious start.

The promise of freedom and the open sea pacify my inclination to whine at a 5.40AM start. I would feel much worse waking at 9AM in the knowledge that I still had one more day imprisoned in the hotel. It is just the best time to appreciate the beauty of this part of the world and the particularly complex environment that is the shore of Islay, the shore of Jura and the mad sea in between.

Breakfast costs nearly a tenner, but I need the calories that only a canteen cooked breakfast can provide. As I read Raw Spirit the southern-most tips of Islay and Jura slide by. I’m facing north in my seat, and the rocky coast with that famous triad of distilleries is in view for maybe an hour. Before long new land approaches, and so shaky is my grasp of the geography between south western Scotland and Northern Ireland I think it is the latter. It is in fact the Kintyre Peninsula and we are making for the port of Kennacraig.

I change in the car park, and put on some warm stuff: it may be bright but there is a real chill to the wind. At the junction with the main road, right says ‘Campbeltown’, left says ‘Glasgow’. I gulp but go left anyway. It’s just after 9AM, there are only 20 miles separating me with the mercifully three-star Carradale Hotel and I might as well check out Tarbet, that other important harbour.

Riding on the mainland is an unexpected shock to the system. Roads are wider, faster, and better, and motorists don’t wave at you anymore. I make it into Tarbet in good time. It has grown steadily warmer and feels very summery indeed. In the town I look for OS maps of Glasgow and find onlt street level charts for the city centre. I buy one. I have a piece of coffee cake and a hot chocolate, source my lunch, and then head for Carradale.

On the way back I appreciate the reappareance of heavy traffic. Unfortunately, the roads in Argyll are sinuous and knotted, clinging to the sea-chewed land but trying to avoid big hills and forests. This means that if you get a tanker stuck behind you, it is deeply unnerving when they eventually find a straight (and it often isn’t as extended as you might have liked) they must make to overtake you from a near stand-still. This, when you are dealing with a ten-ton truck, calls to mind what it must have been like on board Pricness Leah’s ship in the first Star Wars film as they waited for the star destroyer with Darth Vadar on it to dock. Once sunlight and silence returned to my world after the latest ponderous, glacier-paced manoeuvre, Kennacraig came into view again, and it was time to find my minor road.

It was no such thing. The B-road-cum-cycle route from Kennacraig down the eastern side of the Kintyre Peninsula is neither particularly quiet, nor is it safe. I’m being deadly serious, unless you are just nipping across to the ferry at Claonaig, take the main road. After more than five weeks on the road, this was the worst riding terrain so far. Once you leave the main road it is immediately uphill, and not gentle, nicely rhythmic uphill: short, sharp and painfully steep. It gets worse when you finally start to head south. I made it up the first series of inclines, whistled down the other side where I found more tourers looking very unwell, past signs for Claonaig and began to suffer. The picture you see of the bike with Arran all blue and romantic in the background is indicative of the views to be had on this stretch. Not that I could enjoy them. The picture was taken at the foot of a rearing road that had a 16% gradient warning sign, and it just continued thus for the next 14 miles or so.

One of the most raw and beautiful locations in all of Scotland. But it will eat you if you come with a bike. I'm typing with my thumbs: my other fingers having been digested by the Kintyre Peninsula.

Concerns over water rationing and psychosomatic panic attacks about my chain breaking typify my state of mind as I battle the terrain, the heat and the intolerable head wind. There is nothing between me and Carradale, and if anything the roads are gettig more and more insane. Unless you are a fusion of Alberto Contador and Steve Peat, or are training for a sportive in the Belgian Ardennes, do not come here. The uphills were bad, but the downhills were significantly worse, so steep and twisting with varying levels of surface integrity that I doubted whether my breaks would last.

Midday comes and goes. I want to get out of the sun, if only to stop feeling quite so mad, but the roadside vegetation is too thick or non-existant. At last I find a lonely spruce, and stand in its shadow. I reflect on how pathetic I feel, and how I don’t feel at all prepared for Glasgow. The loneliness is ramped up still further.

Some food inside me, I ought to have felt better. Unfortunately, the road just wasn’t going to let that happen. Grogport, far more attractive than it sounds with unparalleled views of Arran, is in the dip of a horse-shoe of hills. The one down to sea level is about 200 metres long and 16%. The one out again has hairpin bends and averages, AVERAGES 14%. By this stage I have to stop in each passing place that follows a serious incline, and they all are, because they all have big red triangles telling you so. I don’t know how I’m to carry on on the same road to Campbeltown, then retrace my route back up to Claonaig. Either I will die or my bike will. At the time, my degree of fatalism was even more dynamic than this Catch 22 would suggest.

I cannot stress enough how glorious the surroundings were. Deep glens with lush green sides and forests everywhere. A long, more steady downhill section allowed me to appreciate this, but only slightly. I knew I would be grovelling up it the following day. Not too soon, a sign. Not spiritual or religious or anything: just a sign for Carradale. It had spiritual and religious overtones, however, because I was very desperate indeed by this point. I passed further signs promising much in the way of home comforts and fine-dining in the area. here were craft shops and a cosiness that belied its extreme location. I arrived at the hotel, signed in, and hid in my room for a bit, mixing electrolyte cocktails for my hydration and revival.

I feel better for cleaning the bike and myself; worse for a call from home. Three times the signal cuts out, and by the third time we realise that there is very little point in continuing what is less a conversation more a dirge of a soliloquy on my part. At least it proves beyond all reasonable doubt that home cannot help. I must sort myself out. I eat curry, watch some telly and fall asleep, wishing like I have never wished before that it won’t be raining when I wake up.

***

Carradale to Lochranza, 56 miles

Oh, a weather sytem with a sadistic streak. It isn’t really raining, but it might as well be: that special strain of drizzle that succeeds in getting you wetter than proper rain. I had wanted to be on the road no later than 8.15 to get to Springbank for my 10AM tour, but what with one thing and another (breakfast, visits to the toilet, not being able to move about the hotel quite so fast on account of all the sobbing), it is closer to 8.30 when I push off into the mist and become instantly soaked.

I have to put the overtrousers on. It is too heavy to simply get a little damp. The road continues in the same vein as yesterday: ruinous elevations and sudden, terrifying descents. On the former, your head is drenched in sweat anyway, so you want to take your hood off, but on the latter you would freeze to death. I stop after the third ramp that demanded me to slog it out in very bottom gear and pant. I haven’t panted since Cairn o’Mount and the Devil’s Elbow. It only gets worse: a 16% blind hairpin bend. Fortunately I was able to move into the middle of the road slightly, because being forced into the corkscrew inner bend would have been impossible. I squeakily brake on all the descents, but I still fly off the bottom of them at more than 30mph. When I see Davaar island, I know I’m close. We holidayed in Campbeltown a few years ago and enjoyed weather very different to this. When the tide was low we walked to said island, saw the cave painting and walked back, harvesting mussels for our tea as we went.

I still have some memory of that time, and it was deeply incongruous to be in Campbeltown again under present circumstances. After many wrong turns and contraventions of the one-way system, I find Cadenheads. They send me on my way again because the distillery is elsewhere. At least I knew I was lost, and so aborted my charge on the main road back up towards Kennacraig. On the way back into town, I then saw the sign for the distillery.

An hour later I left Cadenheads for Campbeltown and some lunch. I didn’t fancy a Bangladeshi curry so found a cafe which served me soup, a toastie and some water while I waited for my jersey to dry. It never truly dried, but I never truly cared. I did some shopping, bought a whole box of washing tablets when I only wanted two and made the sensible decision that I would return to Claonaig via the main road. This turned out to be very sensible indeed. It was falt and it was fast, with a nice tailwind. It wasn’t even that busy, either. I accepted that I wasn’t likely to make the 4PM sailing but that was alright: I’d bought more food in the Co-op for just this occurrence and it was actually quite warm and pleasant with these nice views of Gigha. Then the rain returns.

Looking from the main road west towards Gigha.

When the weather closes in on the west coast of Scotland, you feel utterly lost and alone. Your vision is restricted to a soft sphere of about 70 metres in any direction and it begins to feel like a moving asylum. When I heard a huge crunch from my chainring area, I thought my chain had snapped into many small pieces, stranding me. When I continued to move forwards my moving my legs up and down I reasoned that it must have been nothing after all. In such situations, though, one niggling anxiety can assume megalithic proportions and genuine, physical weight.

I stop and check the map, because this road has now outstayed its welcome. I’m not that far from the turning to Claonaig now. I eat some food and carry on. I skid onto the “minor road” for the second time in two days. The hills and drops are all about survival, and I manage to make it to the ferry terminal by quietly talking myself through each up and down, counting them off in my head.

The view to Arran, playing with its silk scarves of mist.

I sit in the bus shelter, the only form of protection at Claonaig if the weather turns nasty, eat my crisps, sausage roll and chocolate bar, talk to my good friend Stephen and feel imeasurably better. I have achieved. I have tired out my inner touring cyclist and now he can give me a bit of peace. I nearly freeze on the ferry over: yet another different way of doing things over the seas. You walk on over the same ramp that the cars use, buy your tickets on board and prop your bike up against the wall of the car deck.

There is some joy as I disembark at the other end. Lochranza has just a lovely feel to it: not a village as such but a sequence of houses strung like beads along the road. Lochranza Castle, the sea loch and the massive bulk of the heather’ed and bracken’ed hills are wonderful to behold. So focused was I on completing today that I have even managed to forget about Glasgow! Oh no wait; there it is again…

Lochranza is completely lovely, even in the grey. There is a happy, island feel to it that I couldn't help but respond to. It's so peaceful, too.

May 13th, Bowmore, Caol Ila, Bunnahabhain, 33 miles

It felt deeply odd to wake up and have my mother cooking me breakfast, as opposed to someone else’s mother. I tried not to fight it, because after all, this is their holiday too and they want to see their first-born, even if he is unexpectedly hairy, smelly, unsure of the conventions of social etiquette and eats like a starving lion.

My father has wheeled the bike out of the garage for me, and I have much more sensibly-shaped panniers. It all feels so wrong! At least the Scottish rain keeps me grounded. That, if nothing else, is familiar.

I fight the rain and a stiff Westerley to Bowmore, take some pictures and sniff like a solvent-abuser the peat-laden air. Then I have to rake around Bowmore village because they can’t fit me on a tour until 11AM. I pop into the local Spar, which double sup as the Islay Whisky Shop. There were lots of delicious malts I wanted to take home with me. Which would be my favourite by the end of the week? I was seduced from afar by a bottle of Ardbeg Lord of the Isles. A snip at £400.

After my tour of Bowmore, I had to battle the rain and slightly increasing temperatures to Port Askaig and the impossibly rutted, then steep road to Caol Ila. I was so thrilled to be here, though: the home of my very favourite malt. Hidden by name, or at least in the marketing of Diageo, hidden by nature, with the steeply falling cliff ensuring that only its smokestack can be seen from above.

A very very special moment. Indescribable.

Regrettably, it wasn’t to be the glorious validation of my pilgrimage. As you can see in my review, it fell a good deal short of expectations.

I was fortunate that it had stopped raining by the time I exited, because nothing had had the chance to dry. Running a little on empty (the lunch my mothe rhad packed for me may have been delicious, but it was maybe half the requirements for the day) I flogged myself along the merrily undulating single track road to Bunnahabhain. I encountered a car travelling in a contrary direction, but none of the terrifyingly huge Carntyne lorries. Having said that, they were loading one with casks when I bumped over the cattle grid into the distillery complex, another one squeezed onto a shelf of flat land before some very un-flat cliffs.

Upon leaving Bunnahabhain, I discovered that the reverse end of the barrel which had acted as a sign post on my way to the distillery broadcast a rather entertaining joke, which you may find below.

The other side, the one you see first as you head to the distillery, says 'Distillery'.

***

May 14th, Laphroaig, Lagavulin, Ardbeg, 28 miles

There's nothing like being stunned by the ebauty of your surroundings first thing in the morning.

Laphroaig demanded an early start of me. Trying to organise my day such that I could visit all of the Kildalton distilleries in the one day was a major head ache. Initially, I had wanted the visits to be kiltered the other way around: with Ardbeg first and Laphroaig last. Due to their tour times, and some being fully booked, I had to rotate my itinerary around the fulcrum of Lagavulin.

Therefore, I was up and out in the lifting mist at 8AM, due for Port Ellen and the unexplored south shore. The mornign was quite stunning, with rain always threatening to the east, and a beautiful, sun-kissed western view of sea and sand. At one stage, I passed through an area where the wind blew the still-smouldering heather blazes (started illegally) into my face. Wowee! It was that triad of distilleries in one breath of wind: peat, heather, earth and smoke, with a view of the sea to boot. Islay in my nostrils.

Smoking Islay: uncannily reminiscent of the real thing.

By the time I reaached the south coast, it was a treat for the eyes. Few places I had encountered were as gnarled, cramped and rugged as Islay’s south shore, and to find three world-class distilleries within three miles of each other: amazing, mind-boggling.

Laphroaig was first, and how lovely it was. The buildings are utterly precious, and everyone else with a camera seemed to think so, too. A warehouse would have been nice, but what with all this interaction with the developing spirit and my running rather late for Lagavulin, it was probably just as well there wasn’t.

What should greet me as I hurtled back on to the main road but road works! This didn’t help. Once clear of the men in hi-vis jackets, the landscape became fractionally softer and more wooded in time for Lagavulin. I caught the tour by the skin of my teeth and just as well: it was magnificent.

Buoyant and fed, but very very warm, I made more serene progress to Ardbeg. When I got there it was as if the Festival had begun early for this particular distillery. “It’s always like this,” said one of the ladies rushing about. “Everyone wants to eat NOW.” There wasn’t a table to be had, and after some folk took the pouring of whisky into their own hands (glasses, really, but you know what I mean), there were no sample bottles, either. Pandemonium.

By the time the tour departed, everything felt rather wrung out. It was the last tour of the week, everyone on the production side had gone home, and their were some giggly young Germans as part of the 20-strong tour group. It might have been the heat, it might have been that they had had similarly intensive encounters with whisky that day. Soporifically, the tour wended its way to the filling store, I felt like a nap. I wasn’t allowed that. What I was awarded instead was an hour and a half of pitted, ruptured, buckled and destroyed Islay roads, into a head wind.

I was similarly broken by the time I returned to the holiday cottage. Once showered and dressed for our parting meal in the Port Charlotte Hotel, I began to feel the effects of six distilleries in two days and the impending desertion of my parents. The exceptional fare on offer at the Hotel recovered my spirits for the remainder of the evening, but what would break and engulf me the following afternoon had been awakened.

***

Bridgend to Port Askaig, Kilchoman, Bruichladdich, 36 miles

Another food parcel is being put together for me as I wolf down my breakfast. It isn’t an early tour of Kilchoman, but it is on the other side of the island. With regards to the food parcel, I’m wondering how I am supposed to readjust to buying food for myself once Ma and Pa depart this afternoon. It sees a return of the full compliment of baggage on the bike, too. 

The amazing thing about relatively low-lying islands in the Atlantic is that you can see weather coming long before it actually hits. I therefore had a lot of time to prepare myself for getting wet before the black and hevaily-laden cloud finally burst upon me. It wasn’t especially cold, though, so I resisted putting on the overtrousers. However, the rain grew heavier and I decided that getting soaked wasn’t liable to be much fun. On went the over trousers, and just as I set off again, the rain abated. I could then watch it as it bounded away to terrorise Jura.

Stormy weather.

The weather remained wonderfully fine for the rest of the day. I could only complain about the wind, and did I? I had agreed to meet my parents for lunch in the Croft Kitchen, Port Charlotte at 12.30. After a few minutes on the road to Kilchoman, I appreciated that such a time was ambitious, even if my tour was a scant half-hour.

The extreme western third of Islay is profoundly unstable. The road sinks and soars dispiritingly regularly. When fighting a vindictive Westerly, this is not a good thing. It wasn’t until I came to Kilchoman, however, that I could appreciate what a not very good thing was really all about. “You don’t like cyclists, do you?” I put to my guide. The farm track to the distillery cause my upper body into spasm as it endeavoured to execute minute turns of the handlebars so that I might avoid the biggest rocks whilst inching along at 6 mph. Nevertheless, the back wheel was regularly pitched into unexpected directions by pieces of gravel and I’m faintly amazed that I didn’t fall off or puncture. Maybe I’m a born cyclocross rider. I walked the bike back to the main road after the tour.

The bike with Lochindaal and Bruichladdich in the background.

This act of self-preservation cost me time. The frankly wilful winds ensured that my race against time to Port Charlotte (all the while raging internally that this was my last lunch with my parents before I left and I also had to get food before touring Bruichladdich at 2PM) was frustrating to the point of actually screaming. This doesn’t make me feel better, but succombing turns anger into embarrassment.

A chicken bacon and mayo sandwich, some chips, the hand-over of miniatures and food, the vanishing blue bumper of the car. It was all very upsetting, more so because I didn’t think I was going to be and didn’t want to be upset.

Bruichladdich had a similar feel to Ardbeg the day before: more sedate fairground exhibit than distillery. I ate some food, and headed towards the hotel at Port Askaig, trying to look at this change of scene, a reversion to old ways, as a good thing. This was me returning to those austere self-sufficient days which had done so much for me. Mum and Dad leaving was only an unusual, temporarily complicating factor.

Well, it was temporary in that I only struggled with it and a number of other issues for the following three days. It could have been worse.

I sat on my bed in the hotel, making a passionate attempt to label my accommodation as quirky; quirky that the door wouldn’t lock, quirky that the TV didn’t work, quirky that my bike was sharing the covered open garage at the back with a number of picnic tables, quirky that there was no-one in the place, quirky that everyone, to a man, had a Polish accent, quirky that Port Askaig seemed to comprise only this hotel, the ferry terminal and the shop, quirky that I was booked in for three nights, quirky that this seemed to surprise the Polish girl who showed me to my room, quirky that I felt suddenly completely alone and abandoned on this little island in the Atlantic. I tried desperately to maintain a sense of humour, but that I could see the ferry terminal from my seat in the dining room, my escape route but 72 hours hence, was too tragic an irony.

I was desperately hungry, but had no appetite when my very uniform-looking breaded haddock fillets arrived. That night and the next morning was the worst I had felt all trip, including the first three days and my equipment worries in Huntly and Keith. I battled with doubts that the appearance of my parents had dropped me right back at square one, that my passion for single malt, for Scotland, had been exhausted, and that I was dragging myself to Glasgow and its myriad new threats for no good reason. Compounding these anxieties was the accusation that I had no right to feel as I did. Five weeks in, and more than 1000 miles, I should have been able to take it all in my stride. Well I couldn’t and this sheltered cove within the cliffs felt like a prison, the scene of manifested madness and despair.

I turned the light out long before 9PM, and slept until what would class as late for me on this trip.

***

Port Askaig, 25 miles

Rest enjoyed, I could appreciate the lunacy of my recent itinerary. How could I expect to feel anything else after touring all 8 distilleries in three days? I was exhausted. Recenvening with familiarity only to have it leave was a risky move, but the end is approaching and the peripheral issues on this score are the most pressing. I have pushed myself beyond what I had thought I was capable of and my biggest challenge was still squarely in front of me, drawing nearer each day. Quite right that this evaluation of priorities and my own exact physical and emotional location should take place now, with the resolution of my goals and ambitions so very close.

I tried to chivvy myself by engaging in small tasks: making lunch from the rolls, butter, cheese and ham left for me, doing some laundry in the sink. With these little objectives completed, I decided that I reall wanted to get up and out. I packed my panniers, changed into my gear, retrieved the bike, and broke free of Port Askaig. It was, as I said in a text to my mother, a raod to nowhere. I looked at Finlaggan, central seat for the Lords of the Isles, bummed around Bowmore for a bit, visited the little retail/craft village just outside Bridgend, bought some groceries, and returned to the hotel. Despite a very suspect Spaghetti a la Carbonara (that ‘a la’ is crucial), my spirits had lifted.

Reading Iain Banks helped hugely, perhaps even vitally. His vitriol and invective at the political climate of 2003 when Raw Spirit was researched together with his hilarious anecdotes and experiences in distilleries that I had already visited lifted me forcibly out of my gloom. Without his ‘company’, I’m not sure how I would have passed the stickily-slow time in Port Askaig. Had I not been able to draw off some of his enthusiasm and attitude, day 35 might have ended with my seeing if I could swim to Jura, or something equally wrong-headed. Thank you, Mr Banks. As a writer, too, I only hope my work can have such a sustaining effect on someone.

***

 Port Askaig to Craighouse, to Port Askaig, 17 miles

It is a very exciting, and speedy, crossing to Jura. This little boat is captained with real skill, shuttling back and forth over the treacherous tides and currents of the Sound.

I should have known by now that no matter how close I may be to a ferry terminal when I wake up, at least an hour must pass between the first anguished yelps which is how I greet the new day in response to the brusque herald that is my alarm and finally exiting my accommodation, Lycra’ed to the max and ready to go. Consequently, as I ate poached eggs at 8.15, I accepted that I would miss the 8.30 sailing to Jura and had to shuffle about for the 9.30 boat. This, at least, gave me the opportunity to get in touch with Bladnoch distillery, as it appeared that there was every likelihood that I would make it to Dumfries and Galloway, after all. 

 As I waited and cars began to queue, William and Sue rolled down from the hotel. I had met them the previous afternoon as I walked the bike back down in to Port Askaig (saving the brakes on the ruthless hill). They had been cycling the other way, and the reversal of accepted bicycle locomotion with regards to negotiating inclines was remarked upon: it should have been them pushing their bikes up, not mine down. William asked, in a wonderfully broad accent straight from the North East of England, if I’d had a mechanical failure. I had replied that I was just nursing my equipment whenever I had the opportunity. Over breakfast we had met again, and had discussed my travel adventures and their own. As it turned out, they had completed almost exactly the same route to get to Port Askaig as I would take from Port Askaig to Glasgow. Reconvening on the pier, they asked if I knew about the Sustrans network. Phyllis in Dufftown had first put me on to them as we tried to work out a possible route from Nairn to Tomatin. Sue now told me that there was a very well-signposted National Cycle Route from the ferry port in Ardrossan to the middle of Glasgow, the 7. This was music to my ears. My Multimap print-outs and 21-year-old OS map (far older than some of the whiskies I had been tasting) were not at all compatible, and I sensed would not keep me off the very busy roads in Scotland’s most densely-populated area. That they had put before me an alternative already allayed some of my monumental fears concerning the stages at the end of the week, and which had grown from molehills into Cuillins of problems and anxieties over the course of my travels.

We boarded the Jura ferry, and what a charming and informal operation it is. On go the pedestrians and cyclists, who tuck themselves closely into the sides of the vessel, the n the cars board – far more than you would have thought possible. You buy your tickets, blink, and you are swinging into Feolin, Jura. A herd of cows represent a welcome party of sorts, and then you cannot wait to explore the interior of this tiny, sparesly peopled island paradise.

Glimpses to the heart of Jura.

The road follows the coast, essentially, although the mountainous nature of Jura is inescapable. With the Sound of Islay on your right, there are tiny dells and glens with streams and steep-sided gorges to your left, heather and grass and misty mountain tops. It felt the most island-like, somehow, of anywhere I had yet been to. The one single track road I suppose helped with the feeling of separateness and seclusion. I couldn’t help but think of Orwell, and whether it was his influence or not, I found my thoughts rising in an attempt to meet the grandeur and serenity of the landscape about me.

In the distillery visitor’s centre, I asked how far away Orwells old house was. It was only a little after 12 and I had not much else to do once I returned to Port Askaig. The lady looked sceptical. It is at the point of the tear-drop that Jura forms, and requires a fair walk once the suspect road finally peters out. Maybe next time for another breed of pilgrimage.

On the way back, the threat of rain vanished and cloud and light entranced me. The Sound itself was like glass, and a tanker slid along in utter silence. I stood opposite the point at which Islay and Jura form a bottle neck of sorts for the wild seas and create the Sound itself. It was gloriously warm and I had another Highland cow for company.

It is places like this that make anyone look like a good photographer.

I’d been able to claim a couple of sightings of Jura’s famous deer on the way to the distillery, a head or two on a ridge line. As I headed back to Feolin, I disturbed an army of the creatures, grazing on the land below the road. Upon seeing me, they bunched together and sprinted up the hill, amassing again and turning to assess my level of risk.

Back at the ferry terminal, I was one of a peloton of cyclists. There was Dad and son on a tandem, and Mum and daughter on their own bikes. I learnt from William and Sue when they arrived, having completed their exploration of Jura, that they had encountered this family on the Arran ferry. What an amazing thing to do with and for your kids, although I suspect you would need full co-operation and approval prior to departing. As I can testify, some of the greatest moments possible can come in the saddle, but there is massive potential for days of unmitigated  misery, too.

Back in Port Askaig, I had a drink on the lawn outside the hotel with my two fellow North Easters. They were due to leave for Bowmore shortly, but before they did William showed me his “tool kit” with everything a touring cyclist could need, and by rights shouldn’t be without. Having none of what he showed me, I felt rather ashamed. He then reminded Sue of the Sustrans map. This was excavated from a pannier and would be invaluable when, three days later, I headed in to the big smoke, and every one of my darkest fears.

Pure serenity. The vista is completed courtesy of the Highland cow.

When they left, I felt almost as bereft as I had on Saturday with my parents’ departure. The afternoon was still young, however, I wanted to see a bit more of Islay and Caol Ila was walking distance away. I then decided to hike to Loch Nam Ban, the water source for Caol Ila.

This was a very good idea. I panted up the hill to the main road and turned right for Caol Ila. The maps in the hotel had suggested a track of sorts that lead off the carriageway to the distillery itself, up into the hills where the loch lay. I passed the stone cairn/sign for Caol Ila, enchanted by the hot, citrussy and eminently peaty smells of mash and wort blown to my quivering nostrils by the breeze in the Sound. I turned left through a bank of trees and found the capped well, under which flowed the process and water, piped from the invisible loch above me. My shoes may not have been at all appropriate, and the route may have been rather unnecessarily circuitous after I headed up the wrong hill first, and had to fight my way through barbed wire, thick mosses, bog and grass to regain the road, only to find that there was a well-worn quad bike track up to the infamous loch. Standing on the shore of the lapping, energetic waters, I felt more at peace. It helped that its situation, in a bowl in the hills looking out to Jura, deflected all wind so the only sound was the faintly luxuriant and very soothing ‘blop’ of wavelets breaking against the loose stones of the shore. I picked up one of these stones and slipped it into my pocket. That was my most solid and significant souvenir of the tour.

The long hot walk back, during which I watched a thick hairy caterpillar speedily cross the road, was rewarded by some battered chicken and more Iain Banks. Tomorrow I would be on my way again. Progress couldn’t come soon enough.

Wild and soft, remote and welcoming. My favourite malt's very core and DNA.

Oban to Neriby Cottage, Bridgend, Islay; 10 miles

For all the actual travelling today lasted a mere five hours, so significant did it feel to be on a boat to Islay - the semi climax to my tour within which I would find secreted some of the most revered and iconic whiskies in the world, as well as acting as an encapsulation of the positively booming industry at this present time, as well as representing what I had feared in the early days would be a destination to far – it deserves its own especial post on ‘The Odyssey’.

With everything stashed away at the B&B until the afternoon when I would need to retrieve it and make my way to the harbour, I had my best opportunity yet to see Oban. I decided to buy my tickets ahead of time, and after leaving the ferry terminal I browsed a little in the sequence of stores beside the water’s edge. This was selling (rather hard) the brand of Scotland which I have come to know (and not merely suspect) fails to resemble the true character of the country in any regard.

I caught the 10AM tour of the Oban distillery and you can read about my mixed reactions below.

Emerging at 11AM, I knew that The Whisky Shop would have opened. It is far superior in its layout and contents to that of Fort William. I don’t know why I allow myself to be lured in to these places, though. It was the same with the Whisky Castle (although my conversations with Mike and Cathy were singularly brilliant, and I would have hated to have deprived myself of their company) but there really is no need for me to wander in to a whisky retail chain. Sure enough, there are all the whiskies I would love to buy: Glen Garioch 1990, Balblairs galore, a whole wall of Islay independent bottlings from Douglas Laing, little 20cl bottles of single casks from the likes of Ardmore, Caol Ila, Royal Lochnagar and Mortlach by Douglas Laing. The Dalmore Mackenzie… It was just as well I had no space or funds, because this Whisky Shop is one of the very best I have seen so far (and I’ve visited those in Glasgow, Oxford, Fort William and now Oban) and geared so very well to making the increasingly knowledgeable whisky enthusiast yearn to part with money.

After eventually prising myself away and making myself feel even worse by browsing the Travel Writing section in WH Smiths, I needed sustenance. Had I wanted to punish myself some more, there were more malts to be found downstairs in ‘The Kitchen Garden’. I went upstairs and read my paper, catching up on this new political landscape the Conservatives and the Lib Dems had taken almost a week to thrash out. The excellent team of waiting staff brought me some loose mint tea, a haggis and Mull cheddar panini and a slice of caramel apple pie with cream. It was gorgeous.

Waiting to board for the whisky isle.

I returned to Smiths to buy Iain Banks’ whisky travelogue: Raw Spirit. This was a move, at the time, to work out what comparative undertakings had been attempted in Scotch travel but as I shall tell you at the end of my Islay stage, it was just about the best purchase I made throughout the whole tour.

I past the time between lunch and ferry reading Raw Spirit and spent much of the actual crossing reading it, too. It was quite hilarious, and that he began his tour on Islay whetted my appetite wonderfully.

Waving goodbye to Oban.

At the ferry terminal, I had a bit of a wait, although the cars which would be getting off on either Colonsay, Islay or Kennacraig were already queuing. The Berth at which I was to wait was a different one to that which I had loitered around prior to leaving for Mull. In it, also, was a different ferry. That noble-prowed ship would be taking me to the whisky isle.

The crossing was fairly speedy. At least, for a boy helpless with wonder at the assemblages of rock sliding past his window and with the irascible company of Mr Banks it past speedily. On board a ferry in a spring evening was a new joy for me. After having left Colonsay it was a short hop to Port Askaig and I wanted to see Islay approach, to see its brown, curved-backed bulk lurch out of the waves which make a still more legendary location. I left the hoards of other cyclists waiting to explore Islay and went to the front of the ferry. There was already one man there, contemplating this extraordinary landscape approaching out of the sea scape. To feel the air as well as hear and see the water being displaced by the ship’s progress was the first time I had truly experienced the appeal of sailing. Beforehand, I had only appreciated as a rather romantic way of getting to places. Sailing as an end in itself had remained a mystery to me. The call of the ceaseless blue oceans must be powerful indeed for those who cannot resist it.

Caol Ila from the ferry. I confess I was quite excited.

There is no better way of seeing Bunnahabhain or Caol Ila. As I would later find, it is almost impossible to get a good view of them on Islay itself, so securely fitted are they into their little coves beneath the cliffs. From the ferry, and in this weather, it was a photographic bonanzza.

Trying to dock the enormous ferry at the tiny Port Askaig was just about managed and I couldn’t wait to get my feet on rich, peaty Islay soil. So eager was I, in fact, that I changed into my cycling cleats, which I should have realised grip as well on iron flooring as a cow does on an ice rink. I took the ramp gingerly and then I could at last breathe Islay air.

Leaving Port Askaig obliged me to breathe rather a lot of it, because the hill out of the tiny port and village is very steep indeed. The back roads I was required to take in order to find the holiday cottage my parents had booked were similarly vertiginous, although these had the added difficulty of being lightly seasoned with cattle grids and heavily dressed with potholes. This shall be a theme for the Islay posts, the state of their roads. By all means bring your bikes here. The wind is irritating but you get used to it, and its lovely how everyone in a car waves at you (unless they’re tourists. That said, so keen was my Dad to adapt to this island approach that his efforts to wave at every on-coming car, no matter what the road furniture or severity of cornering, made for high-octane car travel) but bring a mountain bike if you know what’s good for you.

It was deeply strange for me to see my parents at this stage. After five weeks of self-sufficiency, would this shocking return to the nest derail me at all for the key challenges I had still to face? I put it to the back of my mind. I had two of my Most Hotly-Awaited distilleries waiting for me the following day. And I was on Islay.

For all it was cold, I had a flawlessly beautiful first evening on Islay cycling along roads I'd thought I wouldn't see on this trip. Magical.

Ard Dorch to Talisker, to Ratagan, 70 miles

If that can't get you up and on the bike, I don't know what can.

Following some very rough calculations with a map and a bit of paper with the scale mile marked on it, I’d deduced that it was about twelve miles further to get to Talisker from my B&B in Ard Dorch than it would have been to get to this iconic distillery from the Glenbrittle hostel. Obviously, the leg taking me from the distillery back to the mainland would be the same as planned. Today would therefore be the longest of the tour to date, and looking at my distances for the remaining weeks, the longest; period. As the above figure shows, it exceeded my projections still further.

If there is a more perfect place or time to cycle than the Isle of Skye at around 9AM in early May, please tell me, but I doubt you can come up with one. The traffic was non-existant and the difference this made to my appreciation of the place swelled exponentially. The island felt new, undiscovered. It did not feel mine. Only after visiting Mull a few days later could I put my finger on what it is that Skye does to you. Falling in love with Skye is like Stockholm Syndrome. Skye is the most “there” place I have ever been to, it is so completely, fiercely its own place and it does not care one jot for your problems or concerns. It is aloof, it is punishing, it is capricious. It is not in any way friendly, but it captures your soul. Indeed, this is the only means by which you can truly experience it: you cannot see it or hear about it alone, and this is why the photos you see cannot hope to convey all of Skye’s personality and sorcery. My mum visited the year before at about the same time, and she said the same, although the pictures she took entirely failed to prepare me for it. With the clear, bright sun newly up, and the shoulders and caps of these great cones of ancient volcanic ire shaking off their clouds, to be cycling along at sea level beneath them was an awesome, humbling experience. I actually experienced fear: raw, thrilling fear. You can’t get to know Skye with the help of the conventional five sense. You are bullied into surrendering yourself to its spell because of how it acts on your very being. It’s the only way I can describe it. I sent a text to mum saying essentially: “I don’t know how I’m supposed to leave here.”

A little later I simply felt joy. The weather was perfect, the views were jaw-dropping. Only the traffic jams and road works spoiled it somewhat. With these cleared, the sign to Talisker appeared all too quickly. I was having a great time: these Skye miles were simply zooming past.

After making the left turn, you pass a hotel nestled in to the junction. You will also have to stop because you will have just spotted the Cuillins. They truly are like something out of a sci-fi comic book. You wonder how they don’t puncture the earth’s atmosphere, so sharp do they appear. After collecting myself following this far-off encounter, I free-wheeled down a very long, gentle hill, sensing the envy of those passing in cars. The approach to Talisker was a hugely significant one for me, and Carbost itself is worth a visit in its own right. All white-wash and cherry trees gleaming in the spring sunshine while I was there.

The tour over I had a super burger in the Old Inn, somewhere I would recommend for sheer informality and local colour. “Very Irish,” said one of the local lasses, “the fire on and the door open.” I had a lovely cheeseburger and then there was nothing for it but to head back to the mainland.

The reverse leg was just as moving, and vanished as quickly. I bought all of the stuff I thought I’d need for Ratagan from the Broadford Co-op, and had to hang around in the car park eating or drinking all the stuff I couldn’t actually fit in my panniers. 46 miles were up, and from the looks of the map I still had a not inconsiderable distance to go.

I felt quite glum as I crossed back on to the mainland. The traffic was giving me hell, though, so I hoped a different route would alleviate those whose journeys were just so vital they had to pass you at 80mph while cars came the other way. I disagree with Iain Banks’ interpretation of the island mentality. I think people get a false sense of liberation, that there actions can’t possibly have any consequences. Well they can for cyclists.

The road to Ratagan was unbearably long. After 50 miles I accepted that 6PM was going to come and go and I’d still be on the road. Apart from the quaint splendour of Eilean Donan Castle, I mostly had to suffer trees, cliff faces and yet more irritable motorists. However, it was sunny and I wasn’t about to knock it. After about 65 miles by lower back felt as if it had lost all structural rigidity. Nevertheless, I had to press on and fuelled by shortbread I eventually came to Loch Duich and what could only be one of the Five Sisters of Kintail. ‘Ratagan’ was written on a road sign, I cried with delight and pulled up at the hostel right on the shore of the loch.

After a mammoth plate of pasta and most of a McVities lemon sponge, I retired to my full 10-bed dorm. I have never felt such pure fatigue. It didn’t matter that the Dutch motorcyclists snored. I’d have slept in a Formula 1 pit lane.

***

Ratagan to Corpach, 61 miles

Isn't that perfect? the bike before Loch Duich and some of the Five Sisters of Kintail.

I has feared this day above all others, prior to having completed the previous day in the style that I did. No distilleries, just a solid 60 miles down the West Coast. If I completed this, I said to myself, the rest of the tour would be a doddle.

The road out of Ratagan towards Invergarry is undoubtedly spectacular. For the first few miles I kept expecting to be seized from above by a golden eagle. After the first few miles, I just felt plain tired. Hitherto, I needed to have covered about 10 miles before I stopped feeling dog tired. It was the break-in period for my legs of a morning. Well these West Coast roads expect you to be on top form from the gun. The road clung to the sides of mountains, then teased the shorelines of lochs. All the while up and down it went, and as the sun attained greater heights, out came the traffic. In the respect of the weather (painfully bright but rather cold), the maddening traffic and the sapping, never-ending road, it was not my happiest morning.

I kept eating and drinking, though, and with a little over 20 miles done I made the turn to Invergarry. It was a joy to actually encounter a junction of some description. I knew that from now on I was unlikely to be unmolested by other, motorised road users. All of the signs had the names of important towns on. The road I had just left had Inverness as its destination, and this one had Fort William at the end of it.

I had lunch half way up a seriously big hill, just in front of the sign welcoming me to Lochaber. Invergarry was still another ten miles away or so.

Another mind-boggling vista, this one near Glen Garry.

Despite several near-death experiences in the space of a few hundred metres: first with motorcyclists overtaking me on a cattle grid which had a whacking great pothole waiting for me at the end of it, and again when a car overtook me, the driver plainly forgetting he had a caravan hitched to the back, I made it to Invergarry. There isn’t a great deal there. Just a few houses and a hotel in which was a very pretty girl who happily served this grotty, smelly yellow creature without revealing in any way how vile it must have been for her.

Things improved slightly after that, and my ride through the Great Glen was quite spectacular. A reasonable tailwind hurled me towards Fort William. I took the minor road turning to the right, which took me over the Caledonian Canal and brought me out again at Banavie. I was staying with family friends in Corpach, and was relieved to see their road, and finally house number, materialise before me. “130 miles in two days,” I reflected over my cup of tea. I couldn’t stop smiling.

Fortunately I wouldn't be heading up these brutes.

***

Corpach to Oban, 52 miles

After a rather vital rest day in Fort William, during which I updated (or to be more correct: sought to alleviate some of the backlog for) this blog like crazy, wandered around Fort William and generally unwound, it was time to be moving on; on towards the isles.

Regrettably, I could not set off as promptly as I wished. Ben Nevis distillery could not accommodate me on one of their morning tours. In fact, they couldn’t squeeze me in until 1PM. This was galling, because 50 miles to Oban is 50 miles, and when I have a distance like that looming I like to at least spread it around lunch. I wasn’t about to miss another distillery, so I booked a spot on the 1PM tour and just accepted that it would be a later night than was ideal.

As you can tell from my review of Ben Nevis, I was glad to have lingered. I bounced and swerved through Fort William onto the south-bound road full of delight at this most immersive and educational of visits, and eager to see whether I would be lucky enough to meet Jim McEwan at Bruichladdich (“If you meet Jim, cancel all plans for the rest of the day,” John warned me), and whether I would encounter Willie at Jura. I was promised that there was nothing this man didn’t know about whisky.

The panorama kept my spirits fairly high, too. Once more I was giddily fortunate with bright sunshine and heat. The views of Loch Linnhe and Argyll slowly coming into shot were magical. The further I went, the more rock could be found protruding from the energetic aquamarine. The islands had technically begun.

Damn, it makes me feel so full of yearning seeing the bike all loaded up like that before those landscapes.

During my time in Fort William spring had definitely been making unsubtle hints as to its entrance. Now, the trees were in fresh-out-of-the-box leaf, and green was assiduously establishing itself. The best place to have appreciated this reawakening of nature may have been the cycle path, which I would spy running in parallel every so often. I only used it over a couple of stretches, however, because every time it looked as if I could join it from the road, it appeared to head of in the opposite direction to that indicated by the nearest road sign. 

Either way, I arrived in Oban shortly after 7PM. I was struck first of all by its location, within the hills and above the sea, secondly by the amount of people around. Fort William had been busy, too, but I had walked amoungst them. Now I was on a bike again and it was all rather overwhelming. I made it to my B&B by 7.30PM, unhappily discovering that it was some way out of town.

Once again, I had made it to a significant check point. I was in Oban now, so I could not fail to catch that once-a-week sailing from Oban to Port Askaig. Again, I could breathe a sigh of something like relief.

***

Oban to Tobermory and back, 45 miles

With no small amount of trepidation, I headed down to the harbour. I had spied out the ferry terminal the night before and let’s just say it was in impressive contrast to John o’Groats. It looked like a mini airport! I wasn’t at all sure of the protocols involved in getting me and my bike on to the ferry and how much it would cost. In a very short time indeed I was waiting at the head of a queue of cars to board, having paid half the John o’Groats to Orkney fare.

Awaiting the ferry in Oban.

In the passenger lounges, there was a large contingent of Americans, Texans to be precise. I wondered if it was a school trip or a holiday. I suppose for the same reason we head over there they come here: a change of scale.

On Mull I allowed all of the ferry traffic to precede me on to the island and this was a very smart move. If I could recommend an island to cycle on, it would be Mull. Between Craignure and Tobermory there is essentially no traffic at all and until you get to the one seriously malignant hill it is relatively flat and well-surfaced. Much like on Skye, miles flashed past without me really registering them. I found the whole place charming: you could see the mainland at all times and this suggested a fraternity existed between it and Mull. Once you are on Skye heading north, the island seems to turn its back on mainland Scotland, shoving lots of other islands in between.

Mull is a friendly place, and even after the rather nasty hills which begin once you are through Salem, the island seems eager to reward you with views which are nothing less than perfect.

A view into the Sound of Mull, from the top of the only hill you really need to worry about (cyclists and motorists alike) between Craignure and Tobermory.

Tobermory is quite divine, too. Again, because it is a “proper” island in a transport sense, demanding a b-o-a-t to get there, you sense that it is more preserved than it might be if there were an easy road link nearby. It had everything I needed: a distillery, a superb cafe selling fabulously rich cakes and a Co-op for my day to day nurtrition. I was sad to leave, and didn’t overstrain myself to get back to Craignure in time for the 5PM sailing back to Oban. I made it back anyway, just as the last cars were shuffling down on to the car deck. 

Looking back to Mull.

I elected to eat the food I had bought in anticipation of having to wait for the 7PM ferry on the rear viewing deck and quite marvellous it was, too. It was hear that I took the picture you can see above. My early return to Oban made dinner arrangements a lot simpler and hassle-free. I ate at a little restaurant called Cuan Mor on the harbour front. So impressed and inspired had I been by the unashamedly, committedly peaty flavours of Ledaig that I asked the waitress for one. They didn’t have it, incredibly, so I had a Caol Ila instead, in anticipation for the following day and its profoundly significant destination.

John o’Groats to Kirkwall, 27 miles

It is an early-ish start to be sure of catching the first ferry of the day, the 9 o’clock. The weather is as forecast: grey and rather damp. When I actually get out in it, though, it hardly detracts from the beauty of the place, merely renders it in a different palette.

There is some confusion with the ticket-buying. I thought you could simply saunter on and pay your fare but No, the man in the quite hideously tacky waiting shack tells me, You have to buy them from the ferry office. £28 for a green piece of paper which will bring me back again. I don’t have a great deal of choice as t0 when precisely that will be, however. I can catch the 9.45AM crossing back to the mianland, or the 5PM. Those are off-season ferry services in the north of Scotland for you.

Compared with the CalMac jobbies I'd be catching later on, this still had the feel of a community project: local, and an important link for the residents, for all I didn't hear a single Scottish accent on the boat besides the crew, but there you are.

The crossing is fairly popular, but I only spot two other people even vaguely close to my own age. The remaining passengers are all Australian, their tans quite incongruous in this murk and tepid conditions. There are buses waiting to take them to Kirkwall from the ferry terminal in Burwick. I have to get myself there.

Once everyone else has done the decent thing and buggered off, the only sounds are the winds and the skylarks. It’s captivating. Very quickly it’s wet, too. It doesn’t pour down, but it is a breed of mist that gets you just as soaking. I will encounter it the next day, and a couple more times on the West Coast.

It isn’t until I see a sign for St Margaret’s Hope that I realise that I must have got off the ferry somewhere else. And I’ve already gone 6 miles. It seems the Gill’s Bay vehicle ferry gets in at St Margaret’s Hope; the John o’Groats pedestrian ferry pulls in to Burwick. This upsets me, because all of my mileage forecasts for my Orkney stages have just been flushed down the toilet. This means that it is 20 miles from my hostel to the ferry. If I want to catch this first ferry tomorrow I shan’t be able to dawdle.

I’m desperately disappointed that I can’t see more of the islands I’m passing through. The mist restricts my viewing to the point where I cannot see any coast at all and wouldn’t know I was on an island unless I really thought about the likely provenance of the mist in the first place. There is a gradual reprieve, however, as I island-hop using the neat little causeways which warn of wave action and high winds and that drivers cross at their own risk. Again, the cyclist and his concerns is not mentioned. The clouds lift in parts, and I see golden sands, aquamarine bays and purply-brown hills rising out of the sea on the horizon. It is spine-tingling.

It might not look it, but I was happy to be there.

What idiot said Orkney is flat? I’m sure a couple of people made such a hopelessly false claim during the earlier part of my trip. It isn’t flat, and I have proof: latterly, all of the road signs, which I could just read despite the sweat in my eyes, warned of “blind summits”. To have a summit implies synclines and anticlines: up and down. Being an island, when you got up one hill you had the opportunity to career down the next, but unfortunately the flat section preceeding your next slog of a hill was just long enough to sap all momentum gained from your descent. The arduous, exhausting nature of the terrain was worsened by a really strong sun blasting away some of the clouds between it and me, and turning to vapour the deposits of water on the road and vegetation. It was like sauna on the approach to Kirkwall and when I finally arrived at Highland Park, it rained again. With all my wet weather gear on, body temperature soars. Therefore, I’m soaked by my own fluids instead of those coming from the heavans. When you stop, those dripping garments you couldn’t find a radiator for cool very quickly and walking around cold, wet stone buildings with these on is a further challenge to the initial effort and overheating of actually battling the elements on the bike.

After a late, and enormous, lunch, I peaked into a few windows on the Kirkwall highstreet, reflected that the whole place felt rather similar to most important Scottish towns I’d been in and that it hadn’t really what I had anticipated to find as befits an “island feel”. It is telling that those living in the Orkneys refer to the bit with Kirkwall on it as “the mainland”. With its Lidl, Tesco and Co-op, all on the one street, you can see what they mean.

I find the hostel with its supreme view of Highland Park on top of the facing hill. It has the air (the hostel, that is) of a WWII bunker. It was clean and warm inside, though, and populated by few others. I shared with Michael, a giant, spindly Lancastrian who had just done a tour of Shetland and told me horror stories of the austerity to be found in some of the more basic accommodation options available on those even more remote islands. he was such a nice and interesting chap, though, and we talked about tourinf cyclist things: clothing, other road users, equipment trails; and also other things: the perception of exercise, ambition and some other very profound topics. 

Heart-stopping, majesterial Orkney; even in the rubbish weather.

***

Kirwall to Wick, 39 miles

I had the time of 9.30 in my head as when I really needed to be in Burwick. I wanted to give myself two hours to cover the 20 miles, nice and easy. That meant leaving at 7.30. ‘Oh, if I set my alarm for 6.30 that should be plenty of time.’ I don’t know how, or where the time went when I was preparing to depart in the mornings, but one hour was not long enough for all the little tasks that had to be completed and checked. It was 7.50 when I eventually bounced out of the hostel. An hour and forty minutes to do 20 miles. Now I’m stressed. The thick mist was back and so I would not be spurred on by Orkney in her finery, either.

The hills, obviously in reverse for this leg, were even more infuriating on this run. I had my knee warmers and skull cap on: the over trousers and hood would have made me too hot and sacrificed speed. I didn’t notice the billions of little water droplets sticking to my bare calves and shins on the way up hills, but I couldn’t, after 10 miles or so, ignore the sensation of cold after a long descent. I kept having to towel them off, shocked by the degree to which numbness had set in without my noticing. Whenever I looked down to check my speed or grap a bidon, water cascaded off my helmet into my groin. Incredibly, I kept forgetting that head movement bore this result.

I sped through Burray after a few more causeways (which, at least, were flat) and stopped at a public loo. In here I held my skull cap under the hand-dryer and this blow-dry worked a treat.

There is a bus service which takes passengers from the ferry to Kirkwall, and it operates in the other direction, too. Of course, having a bike gives you limitless freedom on these inter-connected islands.

Another causeway negotiated, I rasped past St Margaret’s Hope. Looking back on my time trial, it seemed to go very quickly indeed. However, as I began to recognise roads and houses from the beginnings of my ride on Orkney the day before, the miles seemed to pass more slowly than ever. A bus roared past me, bound for the port. I had time, obviously, and after a few more turns I could even see the ferry terminal. I could not believe I was home and dry, though (a figure of speech only), and was still pushing it at 20 mph into the car park. One of the bus drivers said that the ferry wasn’t in yet, that I had about fifteen minutes to wait. I’d done it. I’d covered what turned into 21 miles in under an hour and a half. I was paying for it, though. I felt sick and wheezy, and suddenly very cold. I hadn’t had time to eat on the way so was essentially empty. All of my clothing was either wet with mist or wet with me. The waiting room was colder than outside, but there was a radiator which I switched on and, disobeying its instructions, put my gloves on top of it. I then stripped semi-naked to get off my jersey, socks and base layer, which amused a fellow passenger. I donned all my dry clothes and waited for the next shipment of tourists to shuffle on to this magical island which had tested me in ways I had not expected it to.

On the ferry I commandeered all of the three radiators on board. This act arguably saved me, for while my jersey wasn’t entirely dry by John o’Groats, I would have been in serious trouble had I now other option than to stuff it in a pannier.

I had a cup of tea in John o’Groats and watched with a degree of loathing as people photographed themselves by the marker post. I can’t help but feel that it is for all those who set out from Lands End, either on foot, by bike, by unicycle, whatever: what does it mean to those who got in their car and got here. What have they achieved. I was an angry young man at this point, because I took offence at the busloads of OAPs, buses which I had been traumatised by for the last week and whose occupants would simply get off the coach, wander around for fifteen mintes, have a cup of tea, use the loo, get back on the coach and head off somewhere else. This way of spending your time made me irrationally furious.

I delighted in taking things as easily as possible for the first half of my ride back to Wick. Even the return of the mist/rain wasn’t too severe an issue. However, just as I was due to rejoin the main road south into Wick, the rain decided it wasn’t going to mess around anymore. It was that fine, heavy rain that drenches you within seconds, yet seems to take longer to moisten the tarmac. Well, soon enough that too was awash. Arriving back at Netherby B&B (stay there, if you are ever up in the area. Alison is one of the nicest ladies you could ever have the good fortune to meet, particularly if you are approaching a laundry crisis), I have got out of swimming pools in a drier state. I wrenched everything off and simply walked  into the shower.

***

Wick to Ard Dorch, 17 miles

I may not have cycled a great deal on this particular day, but somehow I ended up in a different world again. I had to be up by 4.40AM to give myself time to get everything together and eat breakfast. Alison, saint that she is, made me a cooked breakfast at 5.30 in the morning!

The 6.20AM from Wick to Dingwall is a quiet service. Rain fell thinly as I cycled to the station and persisted until we headed in-land. Dingwall was the seventeenth stop on the route before Inverness.

It was only slightly dispiriting taking only four hours to return to a town that I had left via pedal power almost a week ago but there you are. Having passed in front of my youth hostel at Carbisdale and been confronted again by the white, steaming facade of Clynelish (it was open on that day) we also passed at high speed Balblair, Glenmorangie and Invergordon. I had just over an hour to buy some lunch (I’d had no food or water on the train from Wick) and await the train taking me to the west.

My first sight of Skye: a shock to find it so close to the mainland.

At 11.20 it duly pulled up and the amount of bikes and rucksacks squeezed on signalled quite clearly that I was going somewhere where a lot of people got red-faced and sweaty. I thought I’d fit in rather well. I had intended to update the notes on my progress which I tried to keep up with as little details simply vanished from my memory. Failing that, a sleep or some reading would be nice. The landscape was much too stunning to be ignored, however. Almost instantly after leaving Dingwall, the panorama altered. It looked vaguely Midi-Pyrenean in places, as it happened. Mountains swelled, then reared again, lochs formed, clouds spiralled and bulged. Everything became very dramatic indeed. But something wasn’t right. I felt guilty, and indeed very disrespectful, for travelling thus. During my first stage on the rails, I had wondered to what extent my taking a train was cheating. I talked myself round from that with the valid argument that I’m still touring, just by a different means, and that to have gone from Wick to the West by bike would have taken five days and cost maybe as much as £300 extra. My qualm on this train was how wrong it felt to so passively streak past these magnificent natural structures. I felt disconnected from the landscape for the first time. Hitherto, a mountain or a glen had taken as long as hours to materialise in front of me, and my suffering through and over them had been a valuable way of experiencing them, for the difficulty of each pedal stroke and the myriad atmospheric factors acting on me at any one time had given me unique insights into the landscape around me. I felt I knew it. Sealed in this clattering human tube, I felt as though I was instead showing contempt for my surroundings: these views were nothing more than a speed date, a visual goosing of beauty as opposed to considerately and progressively developing a relationship with it all. I got off the train in Kyle disorientated as a result, and not just because it was gloriously sunny and very warm.

How do you write a caption for that?!

After initially heading in the wrong direction for the road bridge, I changed on a footpath, shielded from the main road by a lot of gorse bushes. Then I went in search of Skye. I found it more or less instantly after breaking free of the blasted earth resulting from when they built the carriageway. I had to stop. I was speechless. I was moved. The view before me was of the sea between Skye and the mainland to the north of the bridge, with great chunks of rock rupturing out of a fast, choppy tide. The pictures I shall upload will not, cannot, put across the extraordinary beauty – a savage, allof beauty - and scale of Skye in the spring sunshine.

I continued onto the bridge and it is quite preposterously steep, especially with the winds as strong as they were. A bump, a sign in Gaelic and I’m on an island, apparently. There is only a tiny spit of sea between it and the mainland where the bridge is built, and so the construction of the latter was perhaps inevitable. However, it does rather take away the impact of arriving on an island. With Orkney, the act of catching a ferry conditioned the mind. The large roads of Skye with all the traffic robbed me of that. I also believe that it has a lot to answer for, on the subject of traffic. Islands, because of their relative inaccessibility and ferry requirements, demand a commitment of a motorist. On Skye, you can pop across like you would the Forth or the Clyde. Throughout my trip, no island was as treacherous for us two-wheeled pedallers as Skye. Cars, trucks, buses, a never-ending stream of snarling motorbikes all made the actual cycling a complete pain in the arse because there was no deterent: “Feel like a drive to Skye, darling?” “Oh, alright.” And it’s a shame, because the roads are mostly well-surfaced and there are no serious hills. If you want to go to Skye, then (and you really ought to), just take a car like everyone else.

On the way to Broadford.

The wind and the traffic were not having the desired effect on my equanimity. Neither, when I saw a road sign saying 8 miles to Broadford, was the location of my night’s accommodation. In Rothes, I had asked my mother to find alternative lodgings on Skye for me. I didn’t like the idea, at that time, of getting off my train at 1.30PM, still with 40 miles to go to reach my hostel in Glenbrittle which is what the SYHA call “rustic”. In short, miles from anywhere and demanding me to make my own dinner. I didn’t really want to do that. I had scrapped the idea of staying in Broadford when I first began organising this trip because the distance to Talisker and back to the mainland from Broadford was impossible, or so I’d thought. I now couldn’t remember if the B&B mum had found was in Broadford or further on. Looking at the address I’d scribbled down, I was relieved to see it was north, closer to Talisker. However, it was still to be a short day, so how much longer had I made tomorrow?

I skidded down the drive to the Picture House B&B and I didn’t care. It was right on the sea shore, over looking the tiny island of Scalpay, which was still enormous and filled my bedroom window with its quiet, bleak bulk. Tomorrow would be what tomorrow would be. I was here in this unbelievable place and on the West Coast. The second part of my odyssey was in full swing.

There are 'sea views', and then there are Sea Views. The water is being disturbed by a fierce wind which groaned around the edges of my window all night!

I dined with a group of retired folk, 80% of whom were photographers. If you are a photographer, a stay at the Picture House is a must. Gill and Steve run the B&B together with their own gallery, being professional photographers themselves, and their work decorates the bedrooms. They can recommend the best places to shoot, the times to go, and who else to talk to.

I returned to my room to catch up on the unfolding election. Jeremy Vine’s paving stones were a bit much for me, though, and I drifted off just as the ballot boxes from Sunderland were being tossed in to the counting stations.

Nairn to Strathpeffer: 48 miles

The morning’s riding is characterised by cool, wet winds. It isn’t serious enough to warrant putting on anything waterproof but they are quite challenging conditions. There is some degree of trepidation ahead of this ride. It is the first longer effort I have had to make in a wee while.

Inverness nears. I pass Culloden battlefield as I engage with my enemy: the weather and most other road users.

I hadn’t expected the capital of the Highlands to be quite so busy. It is a proper city! I make my way through the Central Business District, underneath the huge shopping centre. I misread the sign for my desired road. I wanted the same number but with an ‘A’ in front of it. I follow the ‘B’ version for some distance until I realise that I’m not going in the right direction at all.

I hammer back in to Inverness, then cross the river and make for those signs with ‘Dingwall’ on them. Every place name confirms that I am no longer in tidy, cosy Speyside anymore.

I stop at the Bunchrew Hotel on the banks of the Beauly Firth. I have my lunch down by the water’s edge and look over to the misty mountains on my left and the road bridge on my right. There’s something not quite right with the pedal as I pull away. I think the Allen key bolt has worn itself loose again.

I adopt what will become the standard mode for following lochside roads which aren’t entirely flat: head down, swear and try and ignore the lactic acid. I’m lucky that the weather is truly superb by this stage, and everywhere looks divine. Beauly is no exception and this is where I manage to find a garage with a little Allen key. I tighten the hell out of my pedal, and as I totter around the forecourt testing it out I think I’ve sorted it. Back on the road, however, it is patently clear I haven’t.

Muir of Ord arrives at long last and after arrowing through the centre I come to its industrial outskirts. Technically, it is only a pair of buildings that qualify for this, but one is the Glen Ord maltings. And it’s huge. All that romance the tour guides try and sell you when it comes to the malting process? True in the mists of time, but that isn’t how they malt barley now. No pagoda rooves, just multiple storeys of industrial blandness. Inside are enormous drums for turning and drying the barley. Floors and kilns are just too expensive. I later learn on the distillery tour that the Glen Ord maltings provides all the malt for Talisker.

While sitting with my dram of Glen Ord 12YO (see review below) I realise it is my ‘new’ cleat which has come loose, not the pedal spring. I borrow a screwdriver and the whole issue is resolved.

This stirring vista greeted me after I left Muir of Ord on my way to Strathpeffer. Sunlight and cherry blossom in the fore- and middle-ground, rain filling the skirts of the mountains in the distance.

The setting for the remainder of my ride is very much Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The gradations of colour and light are astonishing, and the outlines of the mountains themselves are majestically aggressive.

Road signs have begun to be displayed in English and Gaelic. It turns out I’m only 50 miles from Ullapool. It’s a steep climb up to Strathpeffer and an even steeper one to my B&B. I get off and push up the 50 metre ramp. I just can’t be bothered.

During dinner in the excellent Red Poppy I had noticed some guys head up the hill with tennis rackets. As part of my post-prandial walk, I spectated on the tennis for a little while. For the first time I felt homesick for my friends and our own unusual games.

***

Strathpeffer to Culrain: 52 miles

This was one of my better days, for all it started moistly. I’m pleased to report that it was just a shower and I had the company of the sun for the remainder of the day.

After a food stop in Dingwall (I hoard bananas, you see) I followed the coast overlooking the Black Isle. What a spectacular part of the world this is. Every so often the trees would cease and I could spy back to the spine of Scotland. It was still raining there, alright.

The Dalmore was so eagerly anticipated, and I almost missed it! I was where I didn’t want to be, on a busy road out of Alness, and the sign pointing to the distillery was just concealed.

I followed the main road into Invergordon, desiring a peek at the grain distillery. It didn’t look quite as huge or ungainly as I had been led to believe grain distilleries were. It wasn’t until I passed on the train a few days later that I saw the scale of the warehousing. It’s colossal.

I took the cycle routes to Tain, although I flirted again with the A9. Those roads really aren’t for cyclists. The location of Glenmorangie and the tour more than made up for it, and I only had maybe a mile to survive before I could turn off this horror of a highway and gently waft to Culrain. Err… not quite.

A splendid view of Balblair. Many a time I found a mini of the 1989 and had to put it back on the shelf. I didn't want it getting broken.

It was a quieter road, but I was beginning to develop out-of-body tendencies. I ate and ate and ate, but could not summon any real attentiveness. I realised that I had never visited more than one distillery on a day of more than 50 miles duration. Maybe that had something to do with it. What didn’t help was the highways authority’s loathing of telling you how far away you are from anywhere. Distance markers are so incredibly rare and so I was guessing how much further I had to go.

It wasn’t until Ardgay, after some awesome scenery, that I discovered I had only four miles to go. I had estimated seven, so was rather pleased.

Getting to the Youth Hostel involved more breathtaking roads; principally for the landscapes, but latterly for the hills. The track leading to the hostel forecourt was needlessly steep for someone in my condition.

Carbisdale Castle looks like any other Scottish castle from the outside. Inside, it is a youth hostel, but retains statues, rugs, libraries and ancient works of art. It’s unbelievable. Even more baffling is how long it took me to find my room and consequently complete my errands with dorm, reception, laundry room and dining room at opposite ends of the castle. I needed an energy drink just to get from the main entrance to my room. The views over the Kyle of Sutherland to Bonar Bridge were captivating, and largely made up for it.

It was all getting very very Highland-ish at this point. Mercifully, it was quite flat, though.

The hostel also offers evening meals. I paid for three courses and I’m well aware I was no prize picture whilst eating them. feeding had, by that stage, become a primal activity. I practically drank my soup and drummed my fingers on the table in anticipation of my chili, wishing for a big portion. This was quickly despatched. Pudding wasn’t quite the right amount of stodge for me, but at least I began to feel a little more human.

I was rooming with a fellow cyclist and he put it rather well: “You get fitter, but that doesn’t mean you get any less tired.”

***

Culrain to Helmsdale: 42 miles

The scale of the hostel made amassing my things and preparing for the off difficult. I was expecting to read some time in the afternoon on my bike computer when I eventually made it to the entrance with all my bags but in fact it was still before 10AM.

Whilst stocking up in Bonar Bridge, a stranger is compelled to voice his approval of my mode of transport. He was once a cyclist, too, and commends my style. He doesn’t care for these mountain bikers and their fat knobbly tyres, only interested in going down hill. He recommended an alternative route to the main road, and he did promise that it had a lot of ascending. Maybe he was using me to advocate the noble art of suffering on a road bike, thus contrasting me with the muddier sort of cyclist. I have nothing against mountain bikers. It just annoys me when the estate carts zoom past me with them tied to the back, that’s all.

Clynelish was as empty for me on that Saturday as Brora beside it.

The man also assured me that it was a wild road. After continuing over a junction, which turned out to be the last one for a very long time, I began to appreciate what he was getting at. It was freezing when I eventually reached the top and the barreness of the hillsides, together with the chilly-looking lochs made me feel very much on the edge of civilisation. Munching on some shortbread by the side of the road as two cars in convoy passed spoilt the image somewhat.

I could avoid it no longer, though: the A9 was back. I emerged from my track to the past beneath the Mound, an incredible edifice. The motorcyclists greeted me with screaming engines. The camper vans were well represented. What followed were 20 very miserable miles.

If you took away all of the people who believe they have to get to where they're going at 80mph, it would be perfect. A stunning piece of coastline.

The problem is that Scotland is a small, sparsely-populated country. When you get north of the Central Belt, what towns there are are hugely significant for the people living within their catchment and there are only a few roads connecting them all up. Factor in tourism, and cyclists have a pretty rough deal. I find it incredible, though, and actually nothing short of derisory, that there is no cycle lane connected to the A9. It’s on the Lands End to John o’Groats route, for goodness sake! I and the other cyclists I saw, together with walkers, all had to huddle into the verge as closely as they could while buses, vans lorries and cars hurtled past with soul-destroying speed and disdain. When I got to Golspie it started to rain, and the picture of dejection was complete. 

They were 10 wet and slow miles to Brora. Finding Clynelish shut was almost the final straw. Still rather wet, I decided not to head backwards to the centre of Brora but push on to Helmsdale. It was only 11 miles. And it was along the coast, too. It must be flat. Oh no, it wasn’t.

Helmsdale hardly endeared itself to me. The hotels were pricy and the cafes were not to my taste. The hostel was fully booked and there was only the one shower and toilet between a dorm containing nine beds.

I knew that all I needed was some gooey, calorific loveliness to pull round and I found it in the cafe on the A9 bridge, just out of Helmsdale. I had some gorgeous ginger loaf, a big mug of tea, and felt infinitely better. A phone call to Ross, who had spent three months in Uganda and Rwanda at the end of last year and so knows a thing or two about being alone and miserable, helped immeasurably.

***

Helmsdale to Wick: 36 miles

I don’t know if you have ever shared a room with a man with irritable bowel syndrome? I did that night and whilst I won’t go into details (I’m desperately trying to repress the memory), I will say that I had a broken night’s sleep. He woke me up just after seven when he cracked open a can of Tennent’s lager. I made my breakfast and escaped. On the road by 9AM. I ought to have been proud of myself.

The hills got worse between Helmsdale and Wick: one really long though gradual one, and one

Testing terrain between Helmsdale and Wick.

nastily steep one. Two guys I’d met the night before, and who were one day in to their attempt for Lands End, had warned me about the latter, promising I wouldn’t get up. They had admitted earlier that they had done very little training, and for someone who has been up Cairn o’ Mount and the Devil’s Elbow already this trip, it wasn’t much more than unpleasant. My gears did all the hard work for me.

The weather was changeable, but the landscape was unwaveringly beautiful. The pictures will communicate it best but it is utterly unique. I live by the North Sea, but this was different.

I got to Wick in good time: 12.30! It was no surprise that my B&B proprietors were elsewhere. I took the bike into the middle of Wick, having spied out Pulteney and sat in Morag’s Cafe for an hour or so. Her chocolate cake and mugs of tea revived me perfectly.

Back at the B&B, I tended to my bike, watched some snooker, and fell into a coma.

***

Wick to John o’Groats: 20 miles

As I have mentioned below, my tour of Pulteney left a lot to be desired.

My quest for groceries was similarly frustrating. Lidl would only sell me gargantuan portions of everything, and the Co-op which was said to be at the other end of town I haven’t found yet. The supermarket I did use was perfect, though. I had my sauce, I had my pasta, I had my meat, and I had my bread. It wouldn’t be gastro, but this would be the first night of cooking and I didn’t want to complicate anything by poisoning myself.

This view means the end of the British mainland and was a marker like no other of just how far I had come.

Into the wind, it was a long 20 miles to John o’Groats. I had no clue as to where the village was until I had toiled up the last hill and there were the islands. I was dumbstruck. A little board told me what everything was. Stroma, Hoy, South Ronaldsay, the Pentland Skerries. Orkney was not qyite visible. A gleaming white ferry was heading towards it as I watched, though. That must be from Gill’s Bay.

I could free-wheel into John o’Groats now. It is an odd place, though. It isn’t a village at all, really. I would say it is more a scattering of houses and two mouldering hotels. Unlike anywhere else so far, though, I sensed that here was somewhere a little bit different to what I had come from, with an entirely different relationship to its surroundings. These last were incomparable, it must be said.

In the bright sun and perishing wind, I arrived at the hostel. It was closed until 5PM. I could have gone for a little ride around, but the wind offered strong discouragement and so I pulled up an abandoned chair and read my book until the nice young man who had been trying to fix a bleeping in the building passed on the message that I could go in.

I found two Geordie ladies on the desk. When they asked what I was up to and saw where I was from one asked, “wasn’t there an article about you in the Northumberland Gazette?” Here I am in the most north-easterly point in mainland Britain and I’m famous!  

Dufftown to Rothes, Via Elgin: 45 miles

Having had my faith in humanity, and myself, reaffirmed by my weekend in Dufftown, I was ready to move on again. The weather could not have been better. Distinctly breezy, but bright and warm.

Oh man: too romantic for words: Highland peat smoke on the fresh, spring Speyside breeze. Said breeze wasn't quite coming from the right direction so I couldn't get a nostril full.

On the road out towards Craigellachie, I spotted what I had missed on the way in to Dufftown on the Thursday and consequently since in my walks around the town: the sign to Balvenie. I thought I’d better take a look, and at least cycle round the place if I couldn’t tour. It is quite a site, I must say, and bouncing along the road between Glenfiddich and Balvenie revealed some warehouse damage to the former which was being repaired with many vehicles and red plastic fencing. They were kilning the malt at the time as I returned to the main road. This made me rather more excited than really it ought to but it was stupendous to see those wraiths of peat smoke waft out of the pagoda roof to be snatched and stolen away by the Speyside wind.

Past the cooperage and Craigellachie distillery, over the Spey and then up the hill back past Macallan. The wind would be in my face for the next 7 miles or so but the scenery was so damn gorgeous I really didn’t care. I was relieved, though, when two pagoda rooves lifted their chins above the outline of a ploughed field. See my review of the Cardhu tour below – and my rave about their Highland cattle!

I had the benefit of the wind’s assistance on the reverse leg to Rothes and this ensured it was only a little after 2PM when I made it to my hotel. I phoned up Moray Cycles in Elgin to announce that I would be seeing them that very afternoon and headed off again.

I had by now grown used to the insane levels of traffic on these Speyside roads but that didn’t make it any more pleasant. That said, pagoda rooves appeared everywhere and at one stage, just before a quick descent towards Elgin, I fancied I spotted the outline of the Moray Firth and the Highlands bordering the sea.

The man in the bike shop put my mind at ease. The noise I had been hearing from the front wheel was merely a combination of a slight buckling which wasn’t at all serious and spokes rubbing against each other. It was worth the 18-mile detour for peace of mind.

I said I was going to "cycle around" the distilleries and that was literally what I did with Benriach and Longmorn.

On the return journey, with the sun so omnipresent, I stopped off at Benriach - it being practically on the road, and took my mission statement very literally: I cycled round the distillery. It had an inviting feel about it, too, and I would like to arrange a tour. I did the same with Longmorn – visible just a little way further into the glen. It was a privilege – a secret indulgence – to pedal round when no-one else was there.

I returned to my hotel, showered, did a mass of laundry and enjoyed a meal that owed more to chance and improvisation than management. Good fun, though, and my tour was once embued with momentum.

***

Rothes to Forres: 28 miles

Rain. Lots of rain. It isn’t how I prefer to be woken up, and everywhere looks a bit oppressed when it has that watery sheen to it. I had less than a mile to cover to Glen Grant, however, and it ceased on the way.

The route to Glen Moray involved retracing my tyre tracks from the day before. The sun even appeared. Swishing past my privately toured distilleries of yesterday, I made good time into Elgin where I was rewarded by the equally magnificent aroma of cooking shortbread from the Walkers factory. I just caught the 12.30 tour.

A hot chocolate and much food later, I went in search of Forres. I was not going to use the A96, however, and had planned a route of quiet B roads. Miltonduff and Pluscarden Abbey slipped by and I was thoroughly enjoying the warmth and glorious cherry trees. It couldn’t last, though.

The rain made an encore appearance and I had to adopt rain gear. The temperature meant I could do without overshoes and hood but I just got wetter as I passed through Forres – my B&B lying on the northern outskirts. I arrived to find no-one at home. I was quite chilly by this time, pondering how I was supposed to find my dinner and stay reasonably dry. My landlady returned from her walk and everything was accommodated for: a shed for the bike, rags to clean it, a washing machine for my filthy things and an exceedingly comfortable room.

If you like to put away 3000 calories over the course of your evening meal, go to Chapter One in Forres. My burger with all its trimmings was enormous. I left not a speck on the plate, however; much to the amazement of the couple dining next to me. I should have left it there, but the dessert menu looked too good. I ordered the meringue nest, thinking it would be maybe the size of an orange. It wasn’t. It was the size of a rustic country bread loaf. It beat me, it humiliated me. I could only eat a third of it, and regretted forcing in that much. As I waited for the bill, passing in and out of consciousness, a wondered how anyone could manage two courses, if even a touring cyclist couldn’t manage them. Great grub, though.

***

Forres to Nairn: 26 miles

I spun this day out a little. The initial distance suggested less than 20 miles and that would leave me with far too much time on my hands. I wanted to see the sea, in any case, and headed to Findhorn Bay. It is a profoundly beautiful place, and the whole of the landscapes over the last few days had begun to acquire more rugged, wild demeanours. This was no exception. I think I could retire to Findhorn Bay, with Forres nearby for my bowls and Tesco.

My landscapes were all beginning to look rather wild and bleak, and they would only get bleaker. In a good way, you understand.

Benromach is a very stylish little distillery and offers one of the best smells from the outside. See my review below.

After I bought my lunch from the above supermarket giant, I had little to do but make my way to Nairn in my own time. I ate the purchased sandwiches on the cycle path beside the Findhorn river.

Nairn arrived a little slower than planned, but I was glad when it did. I had been climbing along single track roads for quite some distance, duking it out with motorists and insects, when the hedges of gorse fell away on my right and there was the Moray Firth. A more dramatic stretch of coastline I had hitherto not encountered. It was jaw-dropping.

I bought a book, an apple turnover and a cup of tea in Nairn, then watched some more snooker. Unlucky, Steve Davis.

Before the football came on I made my way to the beach as the clouds and the setting sun exercised their artistic characters over the sea and the coast which I followed to the horizon with my eyes, knowing that Orkney was at the end of it. Internazionale v. Barcelona evolved into a bit of a damp squib in the first half so I watched Monty Halls in the Uists and went to bed. The Highlands proper demanded my full attention.