London

I don't think I realised the extent to which adrenaline was fuelling my cycle ride in the last few headwind-plagued days. Now though, back in London, it is out of my system and I am utterly and completely exhausted, described by my partner Julie as a broken owl. It's an unusual image but feels oddly appropriate as I hunker down, my feathers fluffed out, my achiles tendons aching, staring wide-eyed at the wind bending the branches of the London plane trees outside.

John o Groats to Land's End was certainly a journey, though it is not immediately obvious where to. It was packed full of immensely valuable experiences - of nature, of the scale and variety of the country, of the people and places encountered along the way - but what did it all amount to as a complete endeavour? Did it have any meaning, and is it even important whether it did or not?

It is interesting of course that we started in Scotland - the country where I lived as an adolescent and young adult - and finished in England, where I now live. Interesting too though that the countryside where we ended up was so strongly reminiscent of the countryside where we began - not just Bodmin Moor with its trackless expanse of sheep-shorn grass tufted with gorse but the wild immensity of the Atlantic seen from Land's End itself. But in a sense the whole endeavour was time apart and divorced from the normal rhythm of my life. I simply cannot now imagine myself getting up tomorrow morning, pulling on cycling shorts still damp from the previous night's washing in the sink, and clipping on a pair of wet and muddy cycling shoes before heading out through unknown tracts of Britain to some distant bed and breakfast and the prospect of a hot shower and a meal involving chips.

Of course journeys have often been seen by religious and philosophical traditions as central to spiritual development. There are symbolic journeys, like the Pilgrim's Progress or the Ramayana or even the Odyssey, but physical journeys are also often seen as valuable or even compulsory undertakings for any devotee. In the Christian tradition there is pilgrimage to sites made holy by a variety of saints, in Islam the Haj, and in the Hindu tradition a huge variety of such undertakings, to and around a whole range of sacred rivers, lakes and mountains.

And it is undeniable that there is some sense in all of us of travel as a metaphor for something to do with our development as people. We talk about 'voyages of discovery', of making 'a great leap forward' in our thinking, or by contrast of being 'stuck in a rut' or 'bogged down' by problems. When we are working through those problems we feel that we are 'really getting somewhere' and 'forging ahead.' So there must be something intrinsic there that we are tuning in to. Journeys really must be good for the soul, in one way or another.

And for me, I am really not sure that it matters where my particular journey led me, because it led me forward. I thought about things, looked at things, experienced things. And then came home.

One word I didn't consider in my somewhat teacherly post prior to setting out was in a sense the most obvious one: voyage. Voyage has its root in the Latin word for a road, 'via', and maybe it encapsulates the essence of what a true voyage is all about. It's not really about the destination at all, or about the challenge of reaching it, or even about the purpose for doing so. It's about the road. About the setting of one foot in front of the other.

Or in my case, the endless repetition of the pedal turns.

Land's End

So we made it, and when we got there who should we see but Michael Portillo filming a piece to camera for a series called Coast to Coast. Land's End is altogether more of a commercial operation than John o Groats, with a fairly ghastly looking theme park and a photography business set up at the signpost. It is a stunningly beautiful place though, and the Atlantic stretches out, wildly beautiful, to eternity.

We were greeted by Martin's family and friends and my own daughter, whooping and whistling and bearing bottles of Prosecco. I felt rather sorry for an Australian end-to-end cyclist who arrived at the same time and was met by no one. Later, as we were being driven back to our accommodation we overtook him cycling back to Penzance.

The last day was actually one of the hardest, with torrential rain in the morning and the strongest headwinds we had encountered all trip. I had reached a sort of mental exhaustion too, and a couple of times on some of the last big hills I almost fantasised about getting off the bike and walking. Seeing the hill stretching on up and feeling my legs burning and my heart pounding I would quite vividly imagine myself admitting defeat and walking the last bit of the hill, pushing my bike.

The weird thing was that my legs simply didn't seem to get the message. They just carried on turning the pedals and before I knew it I would be at the top (and hit by the suddenly even more ferocious headwind). Maybe it was what my late wife called my Mastermind complex: "I've started so I'll finish."

I started this ride, so I finished it.

Dunmere

Nearly there now, though going over Bodmin Moor was rather disconcerting. Sitka spruce plantations, dry stone walls, bracken, gorse, sheep. I thought I was back in the highlands again. In fact though the flowers held the clue: the gorse (in full flower in the highlands) had completely gone over, and the foxgloves were down to their last few florets at the end of long flower spikes. Also the sheep were all shorn, and the lambs almost as big as their mothers.

Today was the day to which words such as 'challenge' and 'battle' were most appropriate - nearly ninety miles and a constant series of sharp ascents and descents ( we climbed a total of 5,500 feet today apparently) and all in the face of a consistent headwind. I had known this all along of course (apart from the headwind), and a part of me had been dreading today, and wondering if I was physically up to it. Yet the odd thing was that in the end it was a bit of an anti-climax. Yes it was hard, and yes, some hills had me pretty much at the limit of what I was capable of. But the fact was, each hill was just another hill, with nothing particularly special about it. And at the end I didn't get a great sense of elation at having passed a personal milestone.

The thing is, (and this may sound odd coming from someone who has recently done the London to Brighton 100k single-day walk and the JoGtoLE end-to-end cycle ride) that I have realised that challenging myself physically is really not something that motivates or even interests me hugely. Yes, I am competitive and yes, I am pleased that I have demonstrated to myself that I can do it, but I have no interest for instance in doing this cycle ride again and beating my time. Or running a marathon. Or anything of the sort, really.

Some people clearly are hugely motivated by discovering and then extending the limits of what their bodies are capable of. I admire such people, but I am not one of them, I have realised.

So why did I do this? It's a big question and I haven't quite got there in answering it yet, but some of it certainly is to do with getting a sense of the whole country - how it changes and how it connects. Some of it too was probably about the symbolism of setting myself a task that was long and arduous and then ensuring that I achieved it. But some of it was almost akin to mindfulness, I realise now. It takes a while, but eventually you do stop thinking about the pain in your backside or the ache in your ankles, or about how far there is to go and how long this climb will last, and you just let your mind go free. And you see and hear and smell things and the incessant rhythm of the pedal-turns frees your mind. For a while. Until the burning in your legs is so bad you can no longer ignore it.

Tiverton

A day of persistent heavy rain and 12 degrees Celsius welcomed us into the West Country. I am sure it was an utterly beautiful ride but its charms were lost on me. We stopped for lunch in a Sainsburys in Bridgewater and sat shaking with cold in the unheated cafe, eating soup and drinking hot chocolate and staring blankly at the rain pounding down outside. The cleaning lady asked us to tell her when we were leaving so she could mop up the muddy water under our chairs . Still, nothing a hot bath at journey's end can't fix.

The route we have been following is a 'safe' route that avoids main roads and makes extensive use of cycleways. It is my first experience of these really - in London I ride in the road, regarding my bike as another vehicle - and they give a completely different feel to the experience of cycling.

I wouldn't choose cycleways if I was in a hurry, but they are often really lovely. Many are on canal towpaths and abandoned railways, and not only are these guaranteed to be more or less level and traffic-free, they are also wonderful corridors of biodiversity through farmland and towns, which is ironic really given their original purpose as the arteries of industrial Britain. Cycling them is also more sociable than belting along head-down beside the traffic on the A38.You see fishermen, canal boaters, dog walkers, elderly couples, families - all human life is there. And everyone says hello (or regional variants).

The problem is that though the best are superb, some are truly atrocious. In towns they can lead you to busy junctions then simply stop, or require you to cross and recross busy roads, or be simply a narrow section of potholed, gritty tarmac delineated by a line that drivers simply ignore. And canal railway paths are hugely variable both as to their surface and the frequency and nature of the anti-motorbike barriers. Some are smoother tarmac than an A road, but others are impossibly rough, muddy, rutted, or even impassable even by mountain bike. The barriers can be such as can be simply rode through (carefully) or they may require you to get off and lift the bike over.

And the thing is, you simply can't tell. There is some (fairly minimalist) signage on cycleways nowadays and they are marked and rouetable on Google, but nowhere is there any sort of indication as to quality, or indeed rideability. So you can head down National Cycle Rout 63 (or whatever) and suddenly find yourself in ankle-deep mud or on a grass towpath with a single four-inch wide meandering smooth line that takes immense concentration and good bike-handling skills to follow.

It's a shame, because I reckon as a country we have made huge advances in encouraging cycling and we're 90% there. The problem is, the other 10% can turn a nice day out into a bit of a epic struggle.

Clevedon

Not much to say about the ride today, or too tired to say it, which amounts to the same thing. More endless rolling miles of country roads, more headwind, more beautiful ancient villages and more contented dairy cattle chewing the cud in lush meadows bordered by neatly trimmed hedgerows. Aside from the industrial areas round Bristol it was largely Shires England at its poshest. Lovely to ride through but I wouldn't want to live there, despite being white, native English speaking, middle aged and relatively well off (which I reckon are pretty much all prerequisites).

So instead of writing about the ride I will write a little about why we are doing it - or why Martin, my ride companion, is anyway. Martin is 61 and has had type 1 (insulin dependent) diabetes since the age of 20. It is clear that the diagnosis came as a bit of a shock to an active, sociable, beer-drinking student back then in the seventies, and it is apparently only recently that he has talked to anyone much about it. His wife and kids knew, of course, which was handy in case he went into a hypoglycaemic coma, but it really wasn't something he ever mentioned. He had learned to handle it in his own way and has always done so very effectively, thanks to good common sense, a sound understanding of food (he cooks for the family) and a handy bag of jelly babies.

I didn't really know any of this of course, but there is nothing quite like spending hours and endless hours grinding along endless country roads to encourage conversation. I also didn't realise to what extent he is set on proving to himself that diabetes (well managed) is not a disability and does not stand in the way of a full and active life. So he swims every morning of the year in Hampstead ponds, cycling up there for 7 am rain, wind or snow.

And so he set out to achieve a lifelong ambition and cycle the length of the country, and I am very pleased to accompany him in doing so. We have to be careful to time food breaks sensibly and I have come to notice when his blood sugar is dropping (simple really - he slows up and goes quiet) but he is unquestionably going to do it.

Martin is raising money for Diabetes UK and has a JustGiving page at https://www.justgiving.com/Martin-Ransley/

Worcester

Canal boats here in the Midlands have a whole different set of connotations from those in the Lea valley in North London. There the inhabitants are often young eco-warriors unwilling or unable to enter London's ridiculous rental (let alone mortgage) market for property. Up here the owners seem much more likely to be men and women of a certain age who see their boat as an idyllic hideaway and quaintly old-fashioned. Instead of stacks of skip-salvaged firewood and nests of well-used mountain bikes, on the roofs of these you will see hand-painted traditional tin jugs and drifts of petunias planted in wooden mock wheelbarrows. Instead of Peruvian alpaca earwarmers the canal-boaters here sport wide-brimmed canvas sunhats, and in place of the ubiquitous solar panels here you tend to see elaborate TV aerials.

The odd thing is that the boats look very similar (though a tad neater and more pristinely painted round here) and have the same sorts of names - 'Free Spirit' and 'Rosie Lee' and 'Jenny Wren' and the like. There is also much more in common than first appears in the atmosphere around them. Here too there is something apart about the canal boaters. They are a small, physically isolated community living out their days on these corridors of tranquillity while twenty-first century life rushes past on either side. So maybe the dreadlocked eco-warriors of Hackney and Walthamstow have more in common with this particular band of Midlands retirees than would initially appear the case.

The canals really are corridors of tranquillity too. Nowadays often quite heavily wooded on both sides, except where they wend their way half-invisibly through post-industrial towns and cities, they are alive with wild flowers, dragonflies and even kingfishers. On one occasion we raced a kingfisher for the best part of a mile. It wasn't much of a race to be honest, except that every hundred yards or so the bird would perch on an overhanging branch and wait for us to catch up. The electric blue of its back against the dark water was magical, and sometimes as it faced us from its perch I would see the contrasting deep red of its breast. Truly gorgeous.

For the rest we passed through a lot of what looked like Archers country, with enamelled signs on farm gates proudly proclaiming the quality of their pedigree Holstein herds. One place boasted a 'Well kept village' award that I am sure was largely the work of a local Linda Snell (and woe betide anyone whose hanging baskets remained unwatered). Mind you, they also had a scarecrow competition that I am not sure Linda would have been happy with: one of the exhibits was a man seated on a toilet with his Y-fronts round his ankles. I mean, maybe that sort of thing is acceptable in Penny Hassett, but really!

One last little incident to recount. As we were getting ready to leave Stoke-on-Trent this morning I was wondering aloud to my ride companion where I could get some black insulating tape to hold in place the end of my handlebar tape. Suddenly I was interrupted by a white van driver who had been parked nearby. Clearly having overheard us he walked over holding out a new and unopened roll of said tape he had got from the back of his van. He said, 'here you are. I've got plenty,' then got into his van and drove off before I could give him the roll back.

Not sure that would happen in London.

Stoke-on-Trent

Today we were cycling right through George Osborne's northern powerhouse and the predominant sense was of industrial decline. Our (no main roads) route took us primarily along canal towpaths and abandoned railways, with one section round the side of a vast slagheap. These were often serene and beautiful (if occasionally muddy and unkempt) places but I couldn't help remembering that they would once have been alive with freight transport of various kinds.

Alongside our route much of the landscape was post industrial. We saw a few old potteries, with buddleia growing out of the bottle chimneys and a couple of unidentified factories that looked shut up and abandoned. Incongruously though this is also the region of the multi million Cheshire mansion and some rural stretches made their way past what could only be described as stately homes for the twenty first century, with thoroughbreds grazing in beautifully kept rolling pastures.

Being largely on footpath / cycleways we met lots of people, a large proportion of whom greeted us with a cheery "how do" and pulled in to the side of the path to let us through. There were dog walkers, men with fold up chairs fishing in the canal, kids making the most of the start of their summer holidays and mums with pushchairs and a gaggle of kids.

At one point we stopped for some bike fettling near an old lady who was chatting at length with an old gent as her dog waited patiently down the path. Eventually she set off again, and about 50 metres on met another old gent and stopped again. I could almost see her dog sighing and wondered how long her morning constitutional took.

The other sort of person I kept seeing was  men in their late forties or fifties walking alone without dog or fishing gear. They wore saggy workmen's trousers and faded baseball caps and though many were tall and had once clearly been well built they all stooped slightly, their shoulders slumped.

It is easy to read too much into a pair of faded trousers that have become loose and shabby but these men became symbols of industrial decline too, for me. They looked like the kind of man who should be working in some sort of heavy industry, operating a lathe or a sheet steel press, rather than walking down a canal towpath to some crappy zero hours contract job.

I have on occasion felt sorry for myself because my career as a head came to an end with no send off. But as I cycled past these men on my carbon fibre framed road bike I certainly found myself counting my blessings.

Preston

We were slowed up a little today because a friend wanted to join us for a stage, but that just gave more time to appreciate the gorgeous scenery, especially on the first half of the day through the Cumbrian fells and skirting the Lake District. Londoners would call this the North, but actually we are half way down the country now, and compared to what we have been cycling through this feels much more southern. The hills are softer, greener, more rounded. There are meadows dotted with Fresian cows and even the hill farms are neatly divided into fields with drystone walls. In the verges cranesbill and meadowsweet are in full bloom and the elder bushes, which in the North were white with flowers are, down here, studded with tiny green berries.

Even the smells are different - the thinly spiced aroma of the Scots pines replaced with the fruity reek of dairy farms (a smell instantly familiar and comforting from my childhood in Berkshire). The Irish Sea, when we reached it, was a placid grey green and smelled of estuary mud, with not a trace of the harsh salty tang of the North Sea. On three or more occasions people have overheard conversations about where to go and which direction to take and have simply butted in to volunteer the information, with none of the cautious reserve I still associate with highlanders.

The impression of approaching the South was rounded off this evening when we went for dinner.The friend who had joined us is Greek, as was the proprietor of the restaurant in which we ate. Cue much expansive conversation about the old country, the only words of which I could follow were 'ndaxi' and 'epharisto', sudden appearance of multiple dishes we had not ordered and generally much conviviality.

Now I am emphatically not saying that unexpectedly convivial hospitality like that would be less likely in Scotland, it's just that the whole scene was so unmistakably North London that I would not have been surprised to open the door of the restaurant and find myself in Green Lanes. Instead of Preston, Lancashire, birthplace of Wallace and Gromit creator, Nick Parks.

 Mind you, Mr Google tells me that the UK's first KFC was opened in Preston (in 1965) so there you go. Practically London.

Shap

Just a short one today because I only rode the last twenty miles of today's stage after driving back up from London. The contrast in modes of travel was interesting though, from the hecticness of the M6 to the tranquillity of bowling along through the Cumbria hills with that rarest of things, a tailwind, making the road roll smoothly backwards below my wheels.

There is a rhythm to cycling, in a very explicit and physical sense. Your legs have a natural favoured tempo and I fell back into mine with a strange sense almost of coming home to it. After a while they move in that tempo so automatically that a downhill section where you stop pedalling actually feels disruptive. And if it wasn't for the arse pain and an irritating bit of incipient tendinitis in my ankle I begin to feel as if my legs could carry on that rhythm indefinitely.

It's a pleasant feeling really, and after a time frees you up just to look around and to listen, and to let your thoughts drift. Listening is an interesting aspect actually, because another surprise has been how bloody noisy it is a lot of the time, so periods of relative quiet are particularly blessed.

When you cycle beside a main road (our route means we hardly ever cycle actually on one) the noise from the traffic is almost overwhelming. And it's not so much engine noise as a sort of incessant swishing rumbling roar from the tyre noise and wind of passing of the endless speeding vehicles.

Even away from main roads though, if you have a headwind then the roar of it in your ears drowns out any other sound and you can only converse in shouts, or more likely not at all. And even when there is no wind noise, cycles are rarely actually a silent mode of transport. There are the ticking noises from the gears, the soft swish of the tires on the tarmac, and the thin scratchy whisper of a chain in keep of oil.

But you can tune those out, and so when you're away from traffic and there's no headwind, and the gears are properly adjusted, and the garmin isn't chirping at you, and you're not freewheeling them you do get something like silence.

And finally you can hear the birdsong and the soft rustling of the creatures in the hedgerows.

Queensferry

Another tough day, with pissing rain, some big climbs and a near constant twenty to thirty mph headwind all the way. All finished off with an even stronger headwind crossing the Forth Road Bridge. However we made good time, which was just as well for my complicated travel arrangements. I am now interrupting my journey to attend my daughter's graduation while my ride companion carries on, his son temporarily accompanying him on my bike.

So this is a halfway point for me in a sense and a chance to reflect on whatever I might have learned.

First, it turns out that the world is quite large, but not incomprehensibly so. Cycling as we have been is not that much quicker than the speed an enthusiastic traveller of previous centuries might  have achieved, given a fit and willing horse. And the pace of our journey would not have been beyond the imagination of even our prehistoric ancestors.

And the thing is that travelling at that pace seems to make you far more aware of how far you have gone, and how much landscape, day length and weather have changed as a result. When you fly you barely notice these things because they happen in the blink of an eye. Even going by train or car isn't the same because during the journey you are insulated from the world.

Making your own way through the landscape though really shows you, not just how much of it there is but how much of it we can explore - how far we can go. No wonder exploration seems to have become something of an addiction for so many ancient peoples. There is something uniquely empowering about it- the sense almost of having potential access to the whole world, if only one took the time to venture out.

The other thing I have learned applies I feel to all sorts of journeys, physical and metaphorical. It was someone like Confucius who said that a  journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but that is only partly true. Because single steps is all it is really, beginning, middle and end.

The idea of cycling nearly a thousand miles can be a daunting one as you study the maps in advance. But after a few days of actually doing it you realise that the next day, and the next, will just be days, maybe a little tougher, maybe less, than today, but all in all just days.

Similarly when you see a big climb ahead you begin to understand that it is just another climb, and simpler than that, that each pedal turn is just another pedal turn -  no harder or more intimidating than any of the countless thousands you have already done.

What this realisation gives rise to is two feelings. The first is a sort of phlegmatic acceptance that the next pedal turn is not of itself going to either cripple you or finish the ride, so you may as well just do it and stop worrying. The goal of the day is too remote to concern yourself with so you might as well just live in the moment. And, surprise surprise, do that and you actually start enjoying the experience. Sort of.

The second feeling is subtler but more empowering still. Once you can really stop focusing on the goal and the destination, and start instead to enjoy the experience of turning over the pedals (and looking at the view, listening to the bird song, chatting with your ride companion) then paradoxically you begin to find that before you know it the goal has been achieved anyway. You find yourself in your evening rest spot glowing with physical exertion and starving hungry.

Which is a pretty damn fine set of sensations too.

Blair Atholl

A tough day today, with a strong headwind all day and little shelter on the uplands, including on the twenty mile slog up to the Drumochter pass. A beautiful day too though, particularly the first half through the forests of the Cairngorms National Park.

Forest is a word with negative connotations in much of the Highlands, implying those vast tracts of dark green sitka spruce plantations that spread like a malign rash over hundreds of square miles, only to be replaced when they are clear-felled by a landscape as desolate as the Somme.

These were different sorts of forests though, at once completely still and alive with a mystery that no bare heathland can approach. In some places they were forests of stately birch and oak, with hazel and willow crouching at the edges where the woodland petered out into heather moor. Elsewhere though it was Scots pines that predominated. Superficially similar to sitka spruces they give a much more open cover, their reddish trunks bare of branches right up to the crown and mottled with silver-grey lichen.

And this openness allows more light, and so more life down to ground level. So the forest floor was textured with soft mounds of spaghnum moss and undulating carpets of heather, just coming into flower. Elsewhere there were great spreads of blaeberries in fresh green leaf, drifts of multicoloured foxgloves and even clumps of lupins, the predominant shade a deep blue.

Though you could sense that the forest was alive with birds and small animals it also provided plenty of cover so I actually saw very little, aside from a jay that sprang up out of a small bush just as I approached, and on one occasion an adder sunbathing on the road.

Whatever else a journey like this does, if it gives you the opportunity to meander on quiet byways through forests like those then it is worth the hours battling headwinds alongside the A9, in my book.

Tomatin

In a sense it was more of the same today: more space, more time, more sheep. Also more hills, more wind and more incessant arse-ache.

More dreary music too, whenever we stopped for a cup of tea and a restorative bacon sandwich. It was only when I hear Dido's White Flag for the third time that I really noticed it: recent chart hits of a certain type have become the muzak for our times.

All of which suggests that I might not have enjoyed today, but I certainly did. There is something quite unlikely about setting out to cycle nearly a thousand miles and oddly pleasurable to find oneself actually doing it. Nice to picture one's progress on an actual map of Britain and to realise that one has already done the top triangle that is one of those things that gives the island a recognisable shape. There is something uplifting too about seeing a great long hull ahead and instead of feeling one's heart sink thinking instead, 'well I did the last one. And the one before that. And the one before that...' and setting to to labour up this one as well.

This morning over breakfast we got talking to a woman who works for an organisation called something like Scottish Heritage, working mostly with the Outer Isles, Orkney and Shetland. She explained the massive issue she is having at the moment with the Orcadians and Shetlanders objecting (quite justifiably, in my view) to the fact that all of the organisation's letterheads and so on are bilingual, in English and Gaelic, Gaelic never having been spoken in Orkney and Shetland.

For her this was an example of parochialism and the inability to see the big picture but for me it reminded me of how pressing concerns can become for one group of people while others are barely aware of them or dismiss them as trivial. How many londoners, or glaswegians even, would know or care that Orkney and Shetland are not and have never been Gaelic speaking? And yet clearly to the islanders it is an important issue of identity and distinctiveness.

What was also interesting though was the woman's suggested solution to what she regarded as parochialism and I saw as lack of sensitivity. "More people should do what you're doing," she said. "Get on their bikes and cycle the length of Britain."

I didn't point out that a Shetlander might be offended by the suggestion that we were cycling the length of Britain. Because fundamentally I think she was absolutely right.

Golspie

So day one done and time to reflect before sampling whatever culinary delights Golspie town has to offer.  It occurred to me quite early on today that doing a ride like this places one in a club of sorts - defines one, at least for the duration of the ride. It's not a club I feel any particular affinity to, to be honest, but I have to recognise that membership has a certain cachet, particularly to some non members.

In an otherwise deserted gift shop and cafe in a rainy Lybster harbour we were served tea and mushroom soup by a teenage girl who had obviously not had many customers that day, and did not expect many more. She wanted to know all about our ride and at one point said, with real wistfulness in her voice, "I'd like to do something like that one day. It's just, you know..." and turned back to stacking paper napkins.

It is in many ways a futile and nowadays pretty ordinary sort of challenge to undertake, so what is the attraction? Maybe by the end of it I will know better. What today at least has provided me with in abundance is three things notably lacking from the typical London life: time, space and sheep.

Time has a different weight and texture up here. The village shops and Claymore Arms Hotels (other bleakly functional boozers are available) look exactly as they did back in the seventies, the lichen-mottled drystone walls could have been there since the last ice age, and horsedrawn harrows rust outside farm outbuildings that appear both entirely derelict and still in use.

This sort of journey forces different attitudes to time too. Nothing happens very quickly - we are not racing or even pushing particularly hard so ten hilly  miles can  take an hour. On the other hand we are only doing seventy miles a day and have nearly twenty hours of daylight to do it in, so what's the rush?

And the thing is that the combined effect of these two counters to the London view of time is pretty healthy. It's not so much about taking things slower as accepting that time really has very little relevance at all.

Space too, on the scale one experiences it here, is good for the soul. The vistas are enormous, with little in the way of visual detail to distract the eye. And so one notices more: the herd of red deer on a far hillside or the unexpected drifts of red and white foxgloves against the heather. And travelling like this one traverses space slowly enough to appreciate its scale and the slow rate at which the landscape changes, from peat bog to lowland meadows, to marran grass covered dunes. And that too is food for the soul.

And the last thing - in many ways the best of all- is the sheep. Pretty much everywhere, sheep. Sheep have a simplistic view of life really. To misquote someone or other (without data connectivity I can't even find out who), sometimes they stands and chews, and sometimes they just stands. Occasionally they will all set to to baaing about something (or quite conceivably, nothing) until an entire hillside is a cacophony, but mostly they just lumber phlegmatically around chewing at dry - looking stuff that clearly even the wild deer have turned their noses up at.

For some incomprehensible shepherdy reason on some of the lowland farms great herds of what looked like last year's lambs had been herded into large enclosures and, in at least one case, left there untended. The herding itself is a great excitement of course, with madeyed sheep leaping and sprinting everywhere, but once contained, shoulder to shoulder in a sea of grubby wool they just stand there, apparently content. Or at least accepting of whatever incomprehensible fate life had lined up for them.

I'm not saying I envy them. The life of a sheep is dull, brutish and short (to misquote Stella Gibbons this time) and nowadays they don't even get shorn for the summer, but have to mooch around with last year's fleece falling off in unattractive straggles. But what I do envy, sort of, is the attitude (something between resignation and disdain) with which they regard pretty much every aspect of their existence.

John o Groats

One thing I didn't give much thought to is what direction my journey would take as I set off on this adventure and oddly the initial direction at least has been backwards : back into the Highland Scotland of my teenage years.

Partly it was the looming imminence of the mountains glimpsed from the train and the flat immensity of the sky, and partly the eternally outdated looking station platforms and the clusters of pebble dashed bungalows round every village and small town.

The sun was setting at ten pm as we approached Thurso and that too brought back memories of endless midge-clouded summer evenings and the last touch was the seen-it-all minicab driver who regaled us with tall tales of bonkers travellers he had ferried from Wick to John o Groats or back: cyclists on penny farthings and seatless bmxs, or his favourite group, who took two weeks to get there from Edinburgh, stopping at every distillery on the route. Aside from the strange near-Orcadian accent he could have been any of the dryly humorous Muilleachs I remember from my youth.

So I started by going backwards then, and maybe before I go forward again I should rest here a while. Not literally - we have seventy miles to cover today - but metaphysically. On the ride down to Golspie I anticipate encountering very little that will define this as the twenty-first century. So maybe for today it can be the seventies again and I can be a lanky teenager with all my life still ahead of me.

Heading Off

So tomorrow I am heading off to John o' Groats, in order to cycle thence to Land's End (or as my daughter put it, I'm going from John of Oats to Man's End). Why? Good question. It's not for the physical challenge really, but to experience what it means to travel the entire length of the (mainland of) the island on which I have lived for all but four years of my life. Travelling long distances has become so easy and so quick that we often fail to connect with its fundamental importance: people repeatedly tell us that it's a small world, and sometimes it takes travelling at moderate pace and under our own steam to make us realise that really it isn't. The world is just as large as it always was and we are just as small.

I shall attempt to post occasionally to this blog (at least if anything interesting occurs to me) but before starting I thought it worth reflecting on the language we use to describe what I am setting out to do. 'Travel' is of course from the old French 'travail', still in existence in modern French meaning work, and in English carrying even stronger connotations of hardship and extreme effort, reflecting what an onerous business any sort of travel used to be (and still is for commuters to and from London). 'Journey', oddly is from the French word 'journee', indicating a day's length, yet has come to carry connotations of much longer trips (or hops- which was the original meaning of that word).

So neither travel, journey nor trip seems the appropriate word for what I am undertaking. What about 'adventure'? Definitely getting closer. That is from the Latin advenire, meaning to come towards, or arrive, and it carries connotations of looking to the future (in French, l'avenir means the future)- connotations carried even more strongly in the related word Advent. A true adventure (whether in fiction or reality) has the adventurer arrive somewhere utterly different from their place of departure, whether physically or metaphysically, or both.

The word 'pilgrimage' is an interesting one, not that I am suggesting that that is what I am embarking on ('embarking' of course implying getting onto a boat). Its root is in the Latin word for a foreigner or stranger, 'peregrinus', and there is a strong sense for me in the notion of pilgrimage of someone lost in a strange land, seeking meaning through an arduous quest. So not a pilgrimage then, I hope.

What it will also not be is a challenge. 'Challenge' is from the Latin 'calumnia' (also giving root to the word 'calumny') and had originally all sorts of connotations of false accusation, confrontation and the need to prove one's worth. It is an aggressive and disputatious word and I want nothing to do with it on this adventure.

So how about odyssey? The Odyssey has come to be an archetype of the symbolic journey-narrative but its meaning is neither simplistic nor especially comforting. Odysseus' wanderings seem interminable and he is manifestly powerless in the hands of the Gods to whom he is no more than a pawn. Famously also, when he arrives home he finds it utterly changed. Yet maybe because of all that the poem has caught human imaginations for centuries, its central idea perhaps best summed up Tennyson in the lines "I am a part of all that I have met;/Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'/Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades/For ever and forever when I move."

This is a related notion to the ideas in the word 'adventure' and maybe that is partly why we all want to travel /go on a journey/trip/pilgrimage/ move from one place to another from time to time. Maybe we all get a sense sometimes of something just out there, a little beyond the horizon, that might be interesting to explore. As Browning wrote, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/Or what's a heaven for?"

And oddly, just to finish, the word 'explore' is from Latin and originally meant to shout out. A suitable exuberant term I think for what exploration can and should be.