The Scottish part of the trip is now complete. For most of the time I was accompanied by Tim, an old university friend and roommate from the 1970s. My DR650SE is no match for Tim’s newly acquired Pan European (1993 reg, in immaculate condition.) but it is still be a nippy beast when needed. It does have some quirks and peculiarities, though. The side-stand is ridiculously long for the bike. I’ve had an inch and a quarter taken off it and it still makes the bike unstable if it is leaning into even a very moderate up-slope. The problem is even more acute now that the rear shock is weighted down with full panniers. I'm also told that the screws on the neutral sensing unit under the clutch casing apparently have a habit of working their way loose and disappearing into the engine, and the upper chain roller is known to break off after a time, taking part of the frame with it. More personal to my own bike is its disinclination to change once it has been running in one gear for a while. It has to be forcibly persuaded.
17 March: A fast and chilly motorway ride (M5/M6/M74/M8/A82) from Malvern up to Tyndrum, north of Loch Lomond. The A82 from Glasgow to Tyndrum is always a lot of fun, especially the twisty northern section, where it becomes jammed in between vertical cliffs on one side and the shores of Loch Lomond on the other. I discovered today that I eat about three times as much food as Tim and need more frequent food breaks. Tim is discovering that I also take about three times as long as anyone else to do anything. (I’ve never understood why this is. I'm really quite impatient and don't dawdle over things.) He is handling this realisation with patience and good grace. Apart from Tim and me, there was only one other person staying at the hostel in Tyndrum this evening. Her name is Tasmin, and she has driven over from Aberdeen for a day’s climbing. Both Tim and Tasmin are musicians and just happened to have woodwind instruments tucked away in their packs, so an short Celtic-flavoured jam session enlivened the hostel dining room this evening.
18 March. Another day of riding. From Tyndrun we headed north for Rannoch Moor and Glen Coe. We’d made such good progress yesterday that beyond Glen Coe we had time to take a scenic detour round the Moidart peninsular via the ferry. The road round Moidart soon turns into a bumpy, twisty single-track affair that had it not been for the glorious scenery would have felt like a fairground ride. I’m sure there are some ugly places in Scotland, but if so I have yet to find them. We had lunch in Fort William before heading up the Great Glen to Inverness and then on to a campsite at Dornoch. By mid-afternoon it became clear that my expensive brand new camera had stopped working – so no pics then. Similarly it became clear that the fan on Tim’s Pan was kaput when the bike overheated in rush hour traffic in Inverness. Tim worried discretely about it for a while and then got on with the ride. I fumed all the way up to Dornoch about my camera. We got separated in Inverness, with me doing most of the fretting on this occasion, but managing to give the impression that I was taking it all in my stride. We met up again on the outskirts of Dornoch where we hoped to find a campsite. Dornoch, which looks on the map like a small and not very significant town, surprised us with the remains of a medieval city centre, complete with castle and tiny cathedral. More immediately practical were a welcoming pub and a Chinese chippy.
19 March. We packed up the tents early and set off up the A9/A99 coastal route to Gilles and the ferry to the Orkneys. We breakfasted comfortably in a chintzy café in Wick. On the way to Gilles we passed through John o’Groats which has always seemed less like a town to me than a large field with a few houses half-heartedly scatted about within it. The ferry pulled into St Margaret Hope in South Ronalsay. The island guards the southern entrance to Scappa Flow home of the British naval fleet in times of conflict, and its southern shoes are spattered with gun emplacements and other wartime constructions. South Ronalsay is connected to the main Orkney island of Mainland via three ‘Churchill Barriers’, causeways which serve to block seaborne access to Scappa Flow from the east but which also carry the road between a string of islets. On either side of the barriers, the remains of rusting hulks poked out from, the water. We rode to the capital, Kirkwall, found a supermarket, an information bureau and a hostel on the edge of town.
20 March. We got up early and rode to the Ring of Brognar to watch the eclipse. The ring is a dramatic Neolithic stone circle on a narrow spit of land between two lochs, one fresh, one saline. About seventy people had already gathered there waiting for the big moment, and were sharing eclipse-watching tinted glasses and home-made biscuits. Tim was expecting to find a bunch of ‘hippies’ and travellers, but for the most part they turned out to be Orkney folk, who were making a morning of it with dogs, hampers, cameras and a lot of bustle. Half the people there seemed to be civil servants. (If you aren’t a farmer, a craft worker or a shop keeper in the Orkneys, then it’s likely that you will work for the government.)
Far from obscuring the eclipse, the thin layer of cloud scudding across Orkney skies (and they are vast), eliminated some of the harshness of the sun’s light and made the event easier to watch. By wearing my lid and watching through my tinted visor any remaining glare was removed and gave me a ringside view. As the moon ate away at the sun, the air became colder and the day darkened, though not as much as I had expected. I was astonished that the sun’s penumbral energy is so great that even a 98% eclipse can do no more than dim the daylight. My one disappointment was that in an island full of sheep there were none nearby. I’d been told during an eclipse they lie down and go to sleep. The small child in me really, really wanted to see that.
Later that morning we rode up to the west coast of Mainland on a road that was almost lost among the island’s pale green rolling hillsides. It wasn’t an entirely pleasant ride. On an island with no trees, the Orkney blustery winds can do some interesting things to a motorcycle’s line of travel. We’d come to see the Neolithic village of Scarra Bray, which is billed in the tourist brochures as the best preserved site of its kind in Europe. And it was seriously impressive. As the wind continued to thrash around us, one of the wardens, wrapped up from head to toe in an enormous black windcheater so that only her eyes peeped out, gave us an extended history and explanation of the site. Like other native Orcadians we met, her speech was slow and soft but with an attractive lightness. I can see why so many people fall in love with these islands.
A new brewery miles from anywhere and keen to attract the tourists provided us with a restaurant lunch – one of the best meals I’ve had in a long time. The bread was wonderful, light, fluffy and melt in the mouth. Orcadians certainly know how to keep you happy and sell you stuff. From there we continued our Neolithic ramble, stopping off at the Stenness stones and getting an eccentric guided tour of Maeshowe, one of the best preserved neolithic burial chambers in the area.
The guide books are keen to point out that the Orkneys have a mild climate. Most of the Atlantic depressions that affect Scotland and the rest of the UK miss the islands, so the summers are warm for their latitudes and the winters are brief. If snow does fall, it doesn’t linger. The two most noticeable features are the winds and the skies. The winds are inescapable and the skies appear to have been stretched out in all directions. They are vast. From an Orcadian’s perspective the world must look very horizontal. We rode back into Kirkwall and spent a while in the city’s Norse cathedral, getting an impromptu guided tour who was clearly in love with the place and wanted to show us its carvings of Green Men and its Sheila na gig. After dark we rode out to Deerness, a peninsular on the eastern side of Mainland, where we were told we would find the only campsite open at this time of year. It turned out not to be a campsite but a big lawn behind the Deerness Community Centre, which welcomed campers. After parents had picked up their children from an evening event, the cheery warden showed us round the centre and gave us the keys – just in case we wanted to let ourselves in to make a cup of tea. ‘Just hang the keys behind the door and close it when you leave in the morning’, she said. How often do you find such trust!
21 March: We rode back from Deerness to the ferry, along country roads, stopping off to look at the ‘Italian Chapel’ on Lambs Holm, one of the small islands between the Churchill barriers. The Italian Chapel was originally a Nissan Hut, converted into a place of worship, and decorated by Italian prisoners of war held here in the 1940s. It was a bizarre place: very Catholic; very Italian, (very kitsch - somewhat between a strawberry flan and the Sistine Chapel) and completely out of place among the islands’ bare and washed-out, protestant hillsides. After the ferry crossing we rode down the A9 to Inverness and then on to Fort William where we stayed the night at The Wild Geese, yet another hostel, which offered the most luxurious and comfortable bath of the trip.
22 March: From Fort William, We rode down to Glasgow and then on to Edinburgh. I’ve never been to either city before. Glasgow impressed, but Edinburgh grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. We didn’t have time that afternoon for anything other than a quick look round. We wandered up Princes Street in the New Town and down the Royal Mile in the old one, and then spent the rest of our time in the Scottish Art Gallery. On the way out of the city we parted company. Tim was on his way to stay with some friends and I was heading for a campsite at Musselborough. The parting was an unceremonious affair. I caught sight of my turning and veered off while Time rode straight ahead. I’m not sure he even sore my going. ('Sore'?! I think I must have been thinking of my bum when I wrote that.) I don’t like staying at holiday parks as a rule but the site at Musselborough was an exception. There were a few occupied campervans or mobile homes, but I was the only camper there with a tent. The warden conducted me into a small walled enclosure, full of daffodils and inhabited by birds and rabbits. The wall was tall and ancient, looking, built from deep red sandstone. I woke up the next morning to the sound of a woodpecker in a nearby tree.
23 March: I wasn’t yet ready to say goodbye to Edinburgh, so caught a bus back into the city from a bus stop just outside the campssite – and then did all the tourist things: I admired the castle on its basalt plug; walked up and down the Royal Mile; visited Charlotte Square; got a certificate for climbing to the top of the Scott Memorial; did a walking tour of the old city; looked in St Giles cathedral; went to Greyfriars cemetery and rubbed the nose of Greyfriars bobby; visited statues of David Hume and Adam Smith; pored over exhibits in the spectacularly interesting museum of Scotland; and yes, I even had a cup of tea in the café where JK Rowling wrote the first volume of Harry Potter. What a city! It’s as monumental as Vienna, but with a happy, human face – there is little that is pompous and overbearing about it. I was told that Glaswegians say it’s all fur and no knickers. And that may be so, or maybe not, but I loved it. It’s the most beautiful city I’ve ever visited.
24 March:I woke up early, intending to ride back down to Hertfordshire in one go. I didn’t get going though till after 11.00, partly because I woke up feeling groggy and not really ready for the day and partly because the café in Musselborough where I had breakfast took nearly forty minutes to cook my scrambled eggs. I didn’t mind though, I was happy just to sit at the table and watch the world go by, or read the joke book that they left on each of the tables. (Maybe waiting 40 minutes for scrambled eggs is a common occurrence.) I couldn’t help thinking that Musselborough sounds like something out of James Joyce or JK Rowling, but I couldn’t make my mind up which.)
The ride home was cold and wet and occasionally miserable. Throughout the morning and early afternoon, it rained or hailed and the wind blew and blew. On this occasion the wild and beautiful hillsides of the Scottish Lowlands failed to work their magic for me. On reaching the border, the weather changed dramatically and almost instantly: rain and grey cloud yielded to bright skies and skimpy sunshine. But it didn’t make much difference. I was still cold, and the traffic volume rapidly quadrupled, demanding my full attention. I had my only real panic of the trip at a service station on the M6 in Cumbria. It was miles from anywhere. I’d stopped to get fuel and something to eat only to discover that my debit card had stopped working. I tried to ring my bank from the public phone. (I had, of course, forgotten to take my new mobile.) The phone, however, failed to put me through and ate up the last of my spare cash. Eventually, one of the staff in the restaurant leant me his mobile so that I could ring the bank and get it the problem sorted.
The rest of the ride home remained cold and windy, growing chillier as the day wore on and the sun went down. I lost count of the number of times I had to stop off, and the number of cups of tea I drank at service stations to try to keep warm. I got home just after 11.00 pm, feeling a bedraggled and exhausted but far to wired to go to bed, and ready for more. Much, much more.
