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.