The Cycle Path
Cycle Log
Day 18 - Tuesday 6th July 2004
To The Lighthouse ...
An unbelievably sunny day! Having researched journeymen diaries recalling trips to Cape Wrath reading like Scott of the Antarctic expeditions the weather was truly stunning. I felt blessed. Breakfasted on buttered toast and marmalade, black pudding, rashers of bacon and chanterelles (to represent the lands I had travelled through) I stripped the bike of panniers and non-essentials and met Ronnie Lansley of the Mackay Country Project on the slipway, John the minibus driver and the Turners from the hotel. The tiny ferry for just 7 people was captained by John Morrison and his son. The first people were over by 09.30 crossing the oh so blue and clear sea and landing on a little jetty next to the two white minibuses. The buses are rafted over at the beginning of the tourist season and rafted back at the end...then the Navy blows hell out of The Parpbh as a gunnery range. There used to be 8 families living here and their buildings still exist but now the MOD has erected jaunty black & white checked garden sheds for observers to sit in. They probably have en suite toilets. The buses roared off and I followed, nursing my split tyre against damage from the stones scattered across the two narrow belts of tarmac that made for the 11 mile road to Cape Wrath. I was not making good time but the treeless landscape was wild and how could I not resist talking to the German who sat calmly by the roadside sketching the mountains. He was waiting for a bus he explained. I gave him some water from my camel-bak and pushed hard on the cranks to get to get up the last hill. The minibus came towards me, stopped, and went back to the lighthouse. A kindly deed so that the occupants could clap me in to Cape Wrath. I switched around my shirt (a Father's Day present from my lovely children) so that it could read 'IOW to Cape Wrath Summer 2004'. I cycled into the lighthouse yard...it was high noon. I was now a member of the Cape Wrath Fellowship...
Hvraf...a loose Old Norse description of a turning point. For them as Viking raiders, and later settlers, a turning point down the west coast of Scotland. Sutherland, meaning south lands, a place below their northern bases on Iceland gives Nordic tones...compounded by the numbers of Swedish visitors in Volvo estates. But no Volvos on the Parph just incredible views to the Orkneys 60 miles away and the Butt of Lewis 50 miles in the opposite direction. Vertiginous cliffs with specks and scraps of fulmars and kittiwakes swirling in the upcurrents and rising like feathery elevators to within touching distance before descending to the foaming, sea-sucked basement. The highest mainland coastal cliffs rose just around the corner and carniverous plants clung to the cliff top turf. A toot from the bus meant it was time to leave the benignly sunny cape for the white-knuckle ride back to the ferry before John Morrison knocked off for lunch. My supporters at the end melted away to their jobs and holidays leaving me to the beach, a bottle of Traquair House ale (thanks Nigel) and a self-constructed cheese roll. I took out my leaving card from my gorgeous wife Viv which carried the quote of anthropologist Joseph Campbell: "Follow your bliss". And here I was, having followed it, on a beach on the Kyle of Durness in the sun. It is no longer amazing to me that you can just pick up a bicycle at your home and cycle round the world if you wanted...every turn of the crank putting you a little bit further on. Why park and ride when you could cycle and sail? A heron lazily flapped onto the beach seaweeds and began to poke about...that reminded me that I hadn't given my bike a name. A Birdy Grey must have a feathery name...at some points, hurtling downhill, it had seemed like the Aztec feathery serpent Quetzalcoatl; at others just gracelessly awkward; but, generally typifying that slow and plodding flight with regular stop offs to furkle about for something to eat. Heron would be a good name. I wondered how to address it in Gaelic. I thought of all the people who had helped me prepare; helped me; worried for me; fed me; funded me; cycled with me; talked to me; cheered me on and been hugely positive about the ideas and the philosophy of the ride throughout Britain. It was a Good Thing.
Durness Youth Hostel is a symmetrical pair of ex-military huts united by some well mown grass and a washing line. It is run by Ken who handed me a parcel from the Isle of Wight...above our heads on a shelf was a tea tray from the IOW too! Local produce gifts from Terry Butchers who had seen me off from Culver Point...a card from Yaverland Bay below Culver where the dinosaur bones wash out...Rosemary Vineyard rose...a stick of rock...cream fudge and IOW biscuits! It felt like Christmas but reminded me that I needed to hand over my gift to Ronnie too for the Community of Durness to keep. It was my beach smoothed pebble of dinosaur bone...a section of rib from some Jurassic dragon...the stuff that local collectors and jewellery makers call 'black crunchie'. It was a unique representation of 'genius loci', the spirit of place, that Ronnie immediately recognised when we met briefly in the pub overlooking Sango beach...already he was turning over its seductive smoothness in his hand like Frodo with that ring. I had already picked up my new pebble from the lighthouse and would now transport it back to the IOW. A turning point of stones and a new tradition created.
