Journey Through Britain by John Hillaby 1968

Tags

Bill Bryson, Caithness, Cornwall, John Hillaby, Land's End to John o' Groats

British Travel Books Part 5

As far as I regard myself as a travel writer I owe a great deal to a lot of other writers but none more so than to John Hillaby. This is the man who brought travel writing within reach of the ordinary mortal. The man who showed that you didn’t have to be fluttering in exotic places and the man who finally struck the balance that has been adhered to by almost all who came after him. He is very much a part of his own story but not the star of it. He’s present but not obtrusively so. At any point the reader can swap places with him and imagine themself as being there. Something you can’t say of many. He provides the eyes and ears and we do the looking and listening. He disappears from the surroundings every bit as much as we do ourselves.

John Hillaby on the very first day of his walk on the Cornish coast. Careful planning can reduce the size of your rucksack.

The balance is between the journey, the traveller and the things we encounter along the way. Hillaby lets us experience the entire route, the changing faces, the rain and the shine, from Cornwall to Caithness. He is our expert, sharing knowledge to make us expert too. It’s the same technique that has made Bill Bryson so popular. No coincidence that Hillaby is one of very few travel writers Bryson references, and about the only one he does with esteem. The key is a tremendous amount of research. To become an expert before we even set off and to build on this expertise as we experience it all and then to put on a third layer of study once we come back. Hillaby was an almost permanent fixture in the London Library for weeks and months before he set off. Bryson does the same and it’s the model I’ve followed.

It was stunning, almost awe inspiring to be travelling through the pages with one who seems to know so much. It’s the journalist’s art. To become an expert in order to share that expertise. Lazy writers can rely on Wikipedia these days. But it shows. It is also entirely pointless. The acquisition of knowledge and understanding is why we travel. It has to be real if it is to serve any worthwhile purpose. There is no substitute for delving deeply into books, articles, papers. Both Hillaby and his more celebrated successor work the hard yards. Both are from a background of newspapers; rigorous newspapers; The Times, The Independent, The Manchester Guardian. Papers where facts matter more than prejudice; where the story takes precedence over the storyteller. (I’m talking about the pre-murdoch Times here though I have to admit that even under the steely gaze of its current proprietor it is probably still Britain’s best newspaper if you want to know what is going on (though you may have to filter it first).

Land’s End

We were blessed with great travel writers in the middle of the last century: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Jan Morris and Eric Newby to name but three. They were brilliant wordsmiths with the common touch. But they wrote about places you simply couldn’t visit unless you were very privileged. I’m not sure I’d claim that Hillaby was right up there with them in terms of literary merit (though the boy could write) but he was the first to bring this readable style, this researched expertise and his gentle personality to bear on The British Isles. When he set out to walk from Land’s End to John O’ Groats in 1968 he was by no means the first to do the walk. But he was the first to make it a truly shared experience.

Chun Quoit

“If…you decide…to walk across your own, your native land they tell you it’s been done  many times before. Men have set off on foot, on bicycles, on tricycles. Somebody even pushed a pram from Land’s End to John o’ Groats.” Journey Through Britain p10

What made John Hillaby’s walk different was that he was going to avoid all roads (he mostly succeeds) and he was going to turn the walk into a beautiful and inspiring book. He isn’t interested in whether it could be done. The beauty of the book is in its human size. An average human; someone very like the reader. We can be inspired by those whose talents, strengths and abilities dwarf our own. I’m more inspired by people who more resemble myself, in all my great mediocrity, achieving remarkable things. Hillaby is an almost perfect Everyman figure.

Tintern Abbey

“For me the question wasn’t whether it could be done, but whether I could do it. I’m fifty. I’m interested in biology and pre-history. They are, in fact, my business. For years I’ve had the notion of getting the feel of the whole country in one brisk walk: mountains and moorlands, downloads and dales. Thick as it is with history and scenic contrast, Britain is just small enough to be walked across in the springtime. It seemed an attractive idea. There was a challenge in the prospect.” (ibid)

He expected to be one of the last to do it. In fact he is probably responsible for thousands of us amateur writers and wanderers for setting our personal challenges. Challenges which, in this age of blogs and social media, can be professionally recorded and shared following the Hillaby model.

Hillaby looking across a loch at Beinn Eighe

By the time the book was planned I was 9 years old. I’d already clocked up several Lakeland peaks, sections of the newly created Cleveland Way and a day or two’s slog along the Pennine Way. My dad liked walking as a day out sort of activity and I liked walking along side him. He taught me how to use a map and compass and he took me to the sort of places where you need them. It instilled a life long passion for getting from A to B by the oldest method of all; that of putting one foot in front of the other. I imagine that John Hillaby came by his love of the hills and byways in the same manner. It is a love that shines through. This man likes walking in the same way that I do. The exercise, the way it allows you to get to places cars or bicycles can’t take you, the freedom, the aches and pains. And the country he walked through has changed remarkably in that time. 

Larach

Long distance paths are a new idea. In 1968 the path may have followed established rights of way but that didn’t mean that a right of way was provided. Landowners and farmers were yet to be shown the advantages of having walkers cross their land. I know of a farmer who still keeps a bull in a field to deter ramblers from a path where they are legally entitled to wander and which is clearly marked on the Ordnance Survey map. In 1968 there were fewer paths and more obstacles. This book played a part in increasing the former and eliminating many of the latter.

He crosses many counties. The intention of avoiding walking on roads and Bridal Ways is a considerable challenge all along the way but it makes the story. He spends the vast majority of his time alone; so much so that when on Wenlock Edge he copes with the heat by indulging in a few miles of naturist strolling. No exhibitionism here. He was a shy man enjoying the freedom and would have covered up at the slightest hint that there was anyone else about. That there wasn’t anybody else about shows how times have changed.

Base of a Glenelg broch

I like the information we get along the way. The storyteller’s art is an ancient one and the storyteller has to know where to start and when to stop; when to satisfy expectations and when to surprise. All that time in the British Library allows him the choicest fruit from obscure stories and the journey is heavy-laden with such offerings. We pass tin mines and are given a history lesson, pass stone circles and are amongst the archeologists. And all the time his feet move through Cornwall, across Bodmin Moor and into Devon and up onto Dartmoor. The history is brought to life and the present set out before us. It really is the next best thing to walking it yourself, and certainly whets the appetite.

I’ve covered much of the ground myself, either on foot or on a bicycle and these are the sections I liked the best. Because they confirm what I’d felt from the first paragraph. That all is true (incidentally the sub-title of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII which  is far from an accurate record). I’ve read the book twice. The first time was the best part of 30 years ago. I picked it up again to skim read in order to write this piece. There was no skim reading. I began at the beginning and pretty much didn’t move until I reached the end. I liked and admired the book the first time around. I loved it the second. Simply because it is telling the truth. No rosy wash, no fictionalised encounters, no effort to present himself more heroically.

Thurso

He’s excellent company, a truly admirable man, a fine writer (who had to work hard at it, as elegant prose apparently didn’t come easily) and a trail blazer. I’m not sure what he’d think of the mass participation charity fund-raising walks of today. He wasn’t one to condemn. He’d have admired the aims and the exercise and struck off in a quieter direction.

Journey Through Britain has been out of print for some time now but it is still relatively easy to get hold of a copy for a few pence and the price of the postage. If you began your walking life in the middle of the last century and want to re-live what it was like back then, if you enjoy knowledgeable company and a sense of challenge, all written in language, which if it isn’t literary, is at least a fine impression of literary, then I think you’ll enjoy it too.

 

All photographs are from the book.

Day 416: Turning for Home

Tags

Berriedale Braes, Caithness, Flow Country, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Helmsdale, RSPB, Scotland, Thurso, Thurso Castle, Thurso River

A Journey into Scotland : Part 54

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet*

I made two phone calls on my evening in Thurso. One to my father where he found he had more to say than he thought, and rang me back. It was as well I’d found a quiet phone box or there would have been quite a queue. He wished he could be with me and his reminiscences gave me a map and a plan for the morrow. The second call was my daily report back home. On these I’d catch up with events and state my new location. By the time I got back home a large scale Shell Road Map of Britain, hanging in the hallway, was adorned with coloured pins marking out my route.

On this occasion there was some extra news. The theatre company who had commissioned music from me had confirmed a contract and wanted to meet up. The beeps sounded** and, amid the hasty goodbyes, she remembers that a lecturer from the university had called and was also keen to talk to me. I’d been away for a fortnight and I couldn’t afford another two weeks. The ride had been to find a state of mind that would help me make the right decision about taking a job in teaching. A greater part of me wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of my life doing what I was doing now. But doing what I was doing, though not extravagant, cost money and I wasn’t earning any. My university colleagues were now banking first pay cheques. I had the offer from the theatre company and a good chance of more of these to come. But these were for smaller amounts, came sporadically and couldn’t guarantee to supply the needs of a growing family.

I’d come to journey’s end. Now was time to turn around and get back home as quickly as I could. All the same time I was aware that there was a lot of countryside to see, a lot of mind clearing miles to pedal, and , once I got back to England, a number of old home towns to cycle around. Just because the need to earn some money was looming up didn’t mean that the adventure had lost a single jot of its importance to me. It did result in some hard-hearted decisions in order to be back in Devon (and Yorkshire) in time to attend those meetings. Some of those decisions I now believe I got wrong. And the first of these was not to cycle out to John O’ Groats and to follow the coast down through Wick. Both these places held strong memories for me: both would have been worth a short detour.

The bonus was that I got to cycle across the interior of Caithness. Not many would regard Caithness as the most beautiful of our counties but then, not that many, relatively speaking, have been there. It is a different sort of beauty. An austere sort of beauty. Perhaps the last genuine wilderness in the British Isles.

But first I had to drag myself away from Thurso. I’d cycled over five hundred miles to reach this town. I’d waited nearly a quarter of a century to get here and I was in no rush to leave. I walked out to the castle and along the beach. Memories of coming here with my mother as a three year old came flooding back. My entire time in Thurso had been like a Proustian recollection. Everything I saw or touched brought memories and those memories inspired further memories. I wandered the old town and the estates with a constant smile on my lips and a steady tear in my eye.

The rain fell steadily and a stiff breeze blew in from the south west. I took a seat in a café and, over a cup of coffee that tasted of the early sixties, read my first newspaper since leaving Exeter. I glanced over the football results and fell into conversation with a lorry driver.

The sea had kept me company for much of the journey and now I was turning inland. The road was all I could have wished for; well paved, slick, flat and empty. After five hundred miles of hills I had finally found a flat bit of Scotland. If the wind wasn’t slanting cold rain into my face I think I would have been perfectly happy.

The town disappeared almost as soon as I was over the bridge. The Thurso River is rather beautiful. Upstream it is prized for its salmon. The road largely follows the line of the river, though rarely within sight. As you’d expect, the Caithness on either side of this main route is more cultivated, but even here it is tough pasture and occasional crops. Further out it quickly reverts to wetland. Caithness is the home to the Flow Country; the largest area of blanket bog in Europe; some 1500 square miles of it. A wonderful wilderness and home to many species of birds and insects. At the time I was cycling a terrible period of exploitation was coming to an end. Once again the conifer was the culprit. Or, more to the point, those who saw the profit in planting millions of non native trees in this country were to blame. The results here were catastrophic. The wetlands were ploughed and planted and the trees simply sucked up the water and dried out the bogs. Vast fortunes were being made. Many a pop star and light entertainer was offered tax breaks to invest. The damage soon became apparent. So much so that Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, scrapped the forestry tax reliefs and the devastation slowed. In recent years the RSPB has acquired a large area of the damaged land. The young trees have been felled and left to rot in their furrows. The hope is that the protected land will revert to its natural state. I hope so. This is a place of wonder.

A road sign, just before Halkirk, maps out my journey for the next two days. There is only one road I can take and everywhere on the sign is a place I will visit; Latheron, Helmsdale, Brora and, the lure at the end of the line, Inverness. My schedule said I could be in the capital of the Highlands by teatime tomorrow.

The wind and rain were more at home over these bleak and lovely lands than I was. I got into a rhythm and pedalled and pedalled. Two weeks of good exercise were firmly in my legs. There is an exhilaration in churning out the miles and I began to smell the sea air once more. I knew I was getting close to Sutherland; the hills had returned. Scotland had given me my thirty flat miles and was now going to show me what ups and downs really meant. I’d been told about Berriedale by the lorry driver in the Thurso café.

“Aye, it’s all flat enough until you reach the sea and then…” he sucked in his cheeks and let his non verbal skills intimate an ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here’ mien. He seemed to take the same time as anyone else in saying the word ‘Berriedale’ but he managed to get the ‘rr’s rolling like a pneumatic hammer.

“It’s nae so bad these days, though by that I mean it is merely difficult. Difficult in a car, never mind on a bicycle.” He was enjoying laying on the  doom that awaited me. “In the old days the hairpin bends made it like an alpine mountain. They’ve widened it now and eased out some of those bends. Lorries used to get stuck on there every winter.”

In the old days the Berriedale Braes had been a formidable obstacle. The railway line had been taken inland (over the Flow Country) to avoid them. I’d been so warned of the dangers that when I merely found a severe downhill, with bends and vertical drops, followed by  a half hour of pushing the bicycle up the opposite slope, I almost felt disappointed. I’d been led to expect the entrance into the valley of the shadow of death and got a spectacular piece of coast road instead.

Between Berriedale and Helmsdale the road continues to go up and down. I hadn’t covered a huge number of miles but I’d blown myself out. Helmsdale had a youth hostel and I welcomed the chance to dry out and rest. The rain hadn’t stopped and neither had I. I hadn’t taken a single photograph.

 

In lieu of photographs I’ve found this short film on Youtube. I’ve made every effort to contact the film-maker to ask permission to include it but the addresses seem to be out of date. It’s a lovely film and one that I am sure he would be happy to share (he has put it on Youtube after all).

* from Inversnaid by Gerard Manly Hopkins

** beeps sounded about ten seconds before your money ran out and the line went dead on public pay phones.

Day 415: God Save the Queen: I’ll Drink to That!

Tags

Caithness, George Mackay Brown, Pentland Hotel, Peter Maxwell Davies, Royal Yacht Britannia, The Queen, Thurso, Thurso Bay

A Journey into Scotland : Part 53

“While we sit bousing at the nappy,
And getting fou and unco happy”*

School started badly for me but wasn’t all unhappiness. I loved singing lessons and learning a clutch of Scottish folk tunes. I can still sing the first line of many before becoming stuck. One day the school was more bustleful than usual. Things were in preparation for something big. I had no idea. My family are not ardent royalists and a visit by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh didn’t register on the family calendar. It certainly registered on the school’s. I seemed to be the only one of my fellows without a little union jack. I also seemed to be the only one who was surprised when lessons were abandoned for the day to allow us to line the streets of Thurso to pay our homage.

My brother was chosen to lead the crocodile of children. Proud as Punch and adopting the natural leadership qualities of a future Woolf or Churchill, he soon had the rest of the school following him along the main street and, thinking it would save everybody a good deal of time, over the rough ground, round the building site and was just leading his men into the ginnel that was our short-cut home when he was caught up by the first of the classroom teachers, lifting their skirts and running full pelt in a fair impression of Dorothy Hyman and Fanny Blankers-Koen. The crocodile was reversed and my bother found himself at the back as we took our places along the main road to watch the big black car go by. I was very proud to be his brother. He had been within an ace of us missing the royal procession and ending up with two hundred children on the grass in front of our house.

The union jacks were waved. The Thurso streets are not wide and we were right at the front as the procession went by. The smiling female face in the car was very close. We didn’t have a television so I didn’t recognise her. Not having a flag, I drew out a well used handkerchief, and waved that instead. A life-long attitude towards royalty was set in stone in that minute.

On returning to lessons we were led in procession up a back staircase, of the adjoining big school, to take it in turns to view the Royal Yacht Britannia at anchor in Thurso Bay. It was a pointless and cap-doffing gesture. The ship (I was always confused why such a big, sail-less vessel should be called a yacht) was visible from just about any vantage point in the town.

I rode my bicycle along the front trying to find where we must have stood to wave. The most likely place offered a far better view of the entire bay than the pokey window on the second floor of the school. It also showed me a wide stretch of green that already had two tents on it. It was a municipal camp site and it solved my accommodation problems. The tent was up, the tea was brewed and the Scotch pie I’d bought from Collett-MacPhearson’s  was enjoyed with a tin of baked beans. The food tasted good, the view was incredible (Thurso has one of the best beaches in all of Scotland; and beyond this, rugged cliffs all the way to Dounreay in one direction and John O”Groats in the other…and that is to ignore the Orkneys sitting out there close enough to be a lure, far enough away to be semi-mythical) and, this being Caithness, the wind was blowing fit to freshen the weariest.

Showered and neat in a change of clothes I set out to explore the old town. My Thurso was the remembrances of a five year old. Not surprisingly they included the estate where we lived, the shop and the school. The town was more of a mystery. I remember being taken in a few times on a Saturday morning by my father and always ending in a wood panelled bar room that smelt badly of last night’s drink. I’d be given a glass of lemonade and allowed to sit rigid and bored as grown men discussed materials for casings and chambers in power stations while downing pints of beer. After a while, having nothing better to do, I’d start to read the front page of the newspaper which drew patronising comments from the drink affected men. “Look at the little chap reading The Times. He almost looks as though he understands it.” And I was confused. And wondered if the understanding I got from the words was some sort of second rate grasp of what the words really meant. Thank goodness for a patient mother and older brothers and sister who encouraged me with my reading. There seemed to be a conspiracy of other adults to put me off the trail.

After a while some well meaning chap with breath like a brewery would take it upon himself to entertain the glum faced child. This invariably meant some demonstration of scientific principles. “Now, would you like to see your lemonade bubble all by itself?” and not waiting for an answer would proceed to drop a teaspoon full of Demerara sugar from a sugar bowl into my drink. It bubbled and the great man would stare at me as though he were Pierre Curie. “Well what do you think of that?” he would ask expectingly. I’d offer up signs of amazed appreciation while thinking that the one compensation of this Saturday ritual had just been ruined. The pop now tasted horrible  and was as flat as dishwater.

Thurso is a handsome town. Like New York or Paris it was all laid out to a master plan in the nineteenth century. The streets are narrow and the stone of the buildings shows different colours depending on the weather. In summer it can almost be honey like but under glowering skies it was grey and cold. It seemed self-contained to me. Small shops selling things they probably sold when I was last in town; wool and knitting needles, hardware, guns and cartridges and fishing rods. Up here if you ask someone if they are a sportsman they will presume that you mean hunting and fishing. To take the field means literally taking the field not running onto an acre of mown grass with a leather ball.

Bill Bryson writes about the weekly migration of women shoppers by train to Inverness to experience the delights of Boots and Marks and Spencer. For me there is everything I could need up here. Good architecture, big skies, and a hundred thousand acres of solitude to explore (just so long as you don’t get caught by the ghillies**, which I believe can be very painful!).

I felt proud of my association as I wandered along the early evening streets. With so much of Britain becoming homogenised, here was a place that was defiantly different. Here is a part of the world where independence is part of the DNA. Locals claim to be  descended from vikings as much as from anyone coming from the south. It had been an important viking port for hundreds of years and its very name derives from their most famous god.

It is a town where powerful land meets powerful sea. The Romantic poets wandered the English lakes and made excursions to the Alps. They were never up here which is a pity. They would have loved it. We have George Mackay Brown and Peter Maxwell Davies showing us what Orcadian air does for the creative imagination. I’m in search of a Caithness poet who can catch the magnificence of this place. So far I’ve only found ones who use the words ‘bonnie’ and ‘lassie’ a bit too often.

That night I go to the Pentland Hotel and recognise the scene of my childhood torment. I fall into conversation with a nuclear engineer from Princess Risborough and an officer from the United States Navy. (There was a large American military base just outside the town.) They buy me a pint of McEwan’s 70 Shillings. Some fresh blood is readily welcomed into their bar-prop philosophical group. They are extremely intelligent and obviously well remunerated men with a lot to say about the world. They don’t, however, appear to be happy people. I enjoy two pints of beer with them but have the feeling I’m taking part in a discussion that has happened before and will happen again.

As I curl up in my tent two final memories sweep into my mind. One of a band of the Royal Marines marching up our street on an evening in the early sixties. The second of being awoken by my brother to look at the sky at midnight. The sun had gone down but the sky was still showing day. Not quite the land of the midnight sun but a land where the problem is still what to do once the sun has passed the yardarm.

Photographs:

• My big brother’s school: Miller Academy, Thurso
• My granddad on the beach at Thurso. The apparent snow is neither weather nor the age of the film. All pictures taken on my granddad’s camera revealed a snow storm.
• The Episcopalian Church, Thurso
• The Thurso River
• A Caithness landscape with three children and a deer
• The family Johnson somewhere in northern Scotland with new baby and Grandma Johnson (taken in yet another summer blizzard by granddad)

*from Tam o’ Shanter by Robert Burns

**Ghillie: a gamekeeper who may also act as an expert companion when stalking (deer) or catching salmon.

Day 413: Remember It? I Could Walk it Blindfold

Tags

Caithness, Dounreay, Farr Bay, Farr Bay Inn, fast breeder reactors, hangovers, nuclear reactor, Thurso, whisky

A Journey into Scotland : Part 51

Bringing it All Back

The Caithness electricity pole four were making solid progress on the bacon, the white pudding and the runny egg. The cyclist from England was going more slowly. Of all the meals in the day breakfast is the one to be savoured the most. There are many reasons for not drinking to excess. Being able to enjoy breakfast has to be high on my list.

That I was hungover was certain. But, it was a different sort of hangover. I knew the effects of beer on my system. I was never one of life’s natural drinkers and by the time I’d drunk my peg I was ready for bed. This was usually long before any serious level of drunkenness was able to come into play. My constitution simply didn’t allow me to drink enough beer to over-scramble my brain. When I awoke I was always a good deal less inebriated than when I went to bed. Beer went through the system and the head cleared. Whisky was proving to be a different proposition.

With beer you go to bed drunk and wake up sober, relatively speaking. With whisky it was proving to be the other way round. I’d woken with a head of concrete and a mouth as dry as a Saharan breeze. I used the glass above the sink to re-hydrate and had suddenly been moved into a state of intoxication that was new to me. I made it back onto the landing before the floor began to move. The choice of the five doors didn’t seem so important now. I had to sit down to stop the world from beginning to rotate. I’d felt a novice when it came to drinking the supposed “water of life”. I was proving equally inept at coping with the aftermath.

Realising I couldn’t stay out on the landing and not being in any state to try the wrong door, and find myself fumbling around in the dark of somebody else’s bedroom, I went down the stairs and out of the unlocked back door.

My bicycle was standing red and proud against the whitewashed wall of the inn. It was night but clouds were skeetering across a moon that, if not quite full, was quite as full as I was. I wasn’t dressed for moon bathing. The long distance cyclist doesn’t carry brushed cotton pyjamas and I was wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a tee shirt. This didn’t matter as much as it might to a totally sober man. I was relishing the coolness and some ground that stayed where it was when I walked on it. I re-trod the path down to the bay and stood for as long as it took. I had no sense of time. It sounds quite Romantic now but it wasn’t. I had found somewhere to be alone with the most unpleasant of feelings. To be stumbling in both body and mind. I wish I had been able to enjoy the bay under a magical sky but I wasn’t. It was horrible: a nightmare state of mind that I couldn’t switch off or wake up from.

Eventually I felt clear enough to go back to the hotel. The door remained unlocked and those at the top of the stairs no longer seemed an unfathomable mystery. By now I was clear-headed enough to comprehend the concept of room numbers. I curled up in a warm and welcoming bed and willed myself back to sleep simply because being awake was much too much.

 

The breakfast was glorious and I still feel some guilt about not being able to fully appreciate it; to do it justice. It did me good though and so did getting back onto the bicycle and heading east.

The mind is a complex and wonderful thing. At one stage it has me sitting on a rotating staircase or a shoreline where the ocean lies flat and motionless and the sand rolls in waves. A few hours later it is remembering things that had lain forgotten in some quiet and dusty shelf of memory. The first fifty miles of my journey had been on roads that meant something to me. The next were all opening out like the next page of an unread book. And now I was back where the turn of the path, the twist of the light, the frame of a wall meant something. I have a small selection of photographs from the early sixties when we lived up here. Very few, but enough to trigger memories of days out. But this was a forgotten world. As I approached a river mouth it was just another fine and noble sight until, suddenly and unexpectedly, I remembered it with my former mind. I knew there was a bridge down there. A suspension bridge. A bridge that wobbled as you walked on it. As children, we called it the wobbly bridge. We came here often. Had picnics here. Here were sand witches as well as sandwiches. I felt like Scrooge on being taken back to his old school.

The old bridge had been washed away in winter floods some time before. The new bridge was more solid but much smaller. In my infant memory, this bridge had been as big as The Golden Gate. For thirty minutes or more I sat in the dunes and watched small ghosts play on the sand. The memories flooded back and tears of simple happiness sprang from my eyes. For the second time in just a few hours I was glad I was alone to absorb the moment.

We measured our days out along that coastline; it was invariably towards Sutherland that we went. A big black Wolseley with four children in the back. Crossing the county line “Now we’re in Caithness,” my father would declaim. “And now, we’re in Sutherland.” The most prominent landmark wasn’t Dunnet Head  with its lighthouse (mainland Britain’s most northerly point), nor the Orkneys lying offshore. The most familiar and friendly sight was a nuclear reactor. A series of low lying buildings, some chimneys and a huge green ball. Like a monstrous ball cock from some giant’s cistern. This was Dounreay and this was the reason we lived up there.

The green ball is a 139 foot high steel sphere. Inside this almost comical landmark was Britain’s first water cooled fast breeder reactor. There were eventually five nuclear reactors on the site. What my father’s role was has remained something of a mystery. There were civil reactors and military installations at Dounreay. I do know that there were an awful lot of people from Barrow up there. Barrow people have long been world leaders in engineering. A great deal of Dounreay was built by Barrovians. It was to test the generation of power for domestic use and for the fuelling of submarines. The whole plant always seemed very peaceful to me. Always a friendly sign that we were nearly back home. And yet, a major reason it was built there was a genuine fear of explosion. If anything had gone wrong it would be a terrible disaster but it would be a terrible disaster nearly 700 miles away from Westminster.

Caithness is flat and windswept. I was coming in with a strong breeze behind me but the wind was knocked out of my sails when the town of Thurso came into view. The whole journey, the imagining, the planning, the riding had been leading up to this moment. Five hundred and fifty miles of cycling, a near lifetime of waiting had led to this moment. This very place in space and time. And once again the memories started to tumble into place. I suddenly knew that I was about to pass an old house painted white and if I turned up the road past this then I would be heading back towards my old front door. I had only just started school when I was last here and yet I suddenly knew my way around. It was both wonderfully exhilarating and not a little bit scary.

“Fair seed time had my soul and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.”*

William Wordsworth from The Prelude

 

Day 411: The Entire North Coast in Two Glasses

Tags

Bertand Russell, Bettyhill, Caithness, Farr Bay, first record player, Sutherland, Thurso, whisky

A Journey into Scotland : Part 51

Usquebaugh

I’d passed through Tongue with the speed of a proper cyclist and the stamina of one in serious training. I’d even turned down the opportunity to sink a glass or two with another who had pedalled a long way to be here. It was the first day of my entire ride when I was trying to hurry along. The end result was inevitable. I was getting to the point where I could cycle all day at ten miles an hour. This included getting off to push the laden beast up steeper hills and stopping to brew tea on any vantage point it seemed a pity to miss. Whenever I found myself in company with another pedaller I found they wanted to go along at twelve miles an hour and this was outside my ability.  I’d need a new training regime, to lose a bag or two or to invest in a new bicycle. One with an engine on it.

At twelve o’clock I felt fine. By two I was gone. My hopes of reaching my goal before sundown were blown away on the south-westerly. Thurso had managed without me for 23 years. It was going to have to manage an extra day. I dropped down into a place that had those glimmers of memory. We had been taken, as children, to an hotel at Bettyhill. Our parents had been treated royally while we children were entertained as though we were the most special in the world. A waitress was given over entirely to us and kept us happy with games of hunt the thimble and musical chairs before showing off the piéce de résistance. The first record player I had ever seen and the first records. I have no recollection what records they were. It doesn’t matter. The lady put the magical black discs on the spindle and the music poured out. A lifelong love of listening to recorded music was born there and then. Not happy with merely changing entire outlooks, she wanted to show that the record player could start itself. The 7 inch single was positioned at the top of the spindle and some switches pressed or tweaked and the plastic disc dropped onto the turntable and the arm swung across.

I can almost hear the background hiss and the tump as the stylus touched the record. She still had one trick up her sleeve. The loading of five records onto the spindle at once and watching them drop, one at a time, as each finished its song. By the time the fifth record was playing the drag was considerable but the delight of four young children was undiminished.

We begged to go back and we did. For my brother’s fifth birthday.  (That would make me three and a quarter.) The same lady looked after us and I have yet to go to a party that I enjoyed more. Without the aid of photographs I can still see the cake being brought in with the candles blazing. It was a magical occasion at the time and the magic has probably grown a little in the memory of intervening years. It isn’t difficult to find the Bettyhill Hotel and I’ve already decided that I want a glass of lemonade and a slice of sponge cake to try to re-live a special moment from early 1961. The hotel is closed.

I don’t know if it was the disappointment or the onset of tiredness but my legs had lost all interest in turning pedals. The smallest and slightest uphill stretches were a slog and downhill merely prefaced another uphill pull. The urge to get to Thurso was strong but the day was dimming early and an open bar at the Farr Bay Hotel drew me in. A roaring fire and a friendly welcome from a mildly eccentric elderly man with a Bertrand Russell shock of white hair made me want to stay. I began with a pot of tea and took the table nearest to the fire and listened while my landlord regaled me with information he felt any visitor to the north coast should have. He had an infectious enthusiasm and a way of holding you with a stare that punctuated his monologue, mid-sentence, and held you with a raised bushy eyebrow. There was more than a touch of Private Frazer (as played by the brilliant John Laurie) from Dad’s Army about the man. I couldn’t be entirely sure if he was genuinely pleased to see me or if he was shamelessly sending me up. He showed great interest in my Thurso childhood and expressed glowing admiration for my long journey up the west coast to get here. He had a way of making me wonder if I was making the right decisions by popping in the question “Are you sure?” or “If you really think so?” or “If you’re quite sure?” It was really quite unsettling.

I’d spent the last week sleeping in a tent on moors and lonely foreshores interspersed with youth hostels with cold water and shared dormitories. Now I’d finally got to the gates of my destination I decided to treat myself to a night in a comfortable room. “Well, if you are really sure?” he questioned as he showed me a room out of the ideal home exhibition, perfect cottage bedroom range. Floral wallpaper and watercolours in frames. A big fat comfortable double bed and a wash set of bowl and ewer on the washstand.

“The bathroom is just down the corridor. There’s plenty of hot water if you want a bath. That is if you’re really sure you want to stay here?”

I did. I bathed, I changed and I walked out and followed the path that brought me to the unexpectedly perfect beach of Farr Bar itself. I was the only person there and I followed the curve of the narrow bay as far as the incoming tide would allow a person who is respectful of such things. The last of the evening light was fading as I re-entered the bar. By now it was well patronised by a handful of locals, some more late season tourists and four engineers who were staying there while erecting poles to carry electricity to parts of the north that didn’t yet receive it. They accepted me into their circle, bought me a pint of heavy and shared stories of how we came to be in that bar. Three were from Aberdeen and one was English. After a couple of beers they went off for a prearranged meal and I was left with the landlord as my sole interlocutor.

As with most old pubs in the north it had the most fabulous array of whiskies behind the bar. I didn’t drink whisky myself but couldn’t help be impressed with the range of bottles. Some were ancient, some modern. A few I had heard of, many that I couldn’t even begin to pronounce. I’d occasionally wished I liked whisky. There seemed something very wise and grown up and peaceful about taking a “wee dram”.

The landlord caught my stare and put my thoughts into words. “Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but, you look like the sort of man who doesn’t often drink whisky but are wondering whether you shouldn’t make some kind of an exception this night.”

I admitted that he’d read my thoughts pretty well but added that I was a little afraid of my capacity to drink it.

“Och, don’t worry. I’ll pour you a glass of the gentlest of all the whiskies. This one (he said taking a particularly ancient bottle from the second shelf) is the only single malt whisky distilled in the county of Sutherland. Sip it slowly. It’ll melt your tastebuds.” He paused with the tip of the bottle touching the lip of the glass, looked at me with his cocked bushy eye-brow and added “That is, if you really think you should?”

He poured without a measure and the measure he poured more than doubled the quantity of whisky I had drunk in my life up to that point. He taught me that the pint is the chaser and the two drinks lasted me a pleasant 45 minutes or more. The bar filled up. Conversation flowed and the fire and whisky filled me with a warmth I hadn’t felt on that journey. When he saw my glass was empty he pulled down an even older bottle and said. “How about a wee drop of this. It’s the only single malt whisky distilled in the county of Caithness. By the time you’ve finished that one, you’ll have done the entire north coast in two glasses.”

The second measure was more generous than the first. I sipped slowly. I never got over the heat and strength of the drink. Always felt a ridiculous novice and had the sense to pass on storytelling and to become an auditor.

That night I slept well until, waking, I felt drunker than I had ever felt before. I also had an urgent need to use the bathroom, which was down the landing. On returning to my bedroom I found myself drunk and alone at the top of a strange staircase with five doors to choose from. One of them was my cosy bedroom. The other four weren’t.

Day 409: When You Get to the Sea, Turn Right

Tags

Barrow in Furness, Caithness, Cycle tour of Scotland, Durness, Loch Eriboll, Smoo Cave, Sutherland, Tongue

A Journey into Scotland: Part 49

I Can’t Remember My Earliest Memory

It was 1987 and September had become October. You could almost add a month on top of that for how far north I’d pedalled. Twelve of the fourteen newly qualified English teachers, I’d spent the last twelve months with, were banking their first pay cheques and contemplating that it might be all worth it after all. My life was in a crisis. I’d been either brilliant or incompetent on teaching practice and was finding it hard to sign on for a full career. It wasn’t the fear of failure. It was something greater than that. I’d only go into teaching if I thought I could do it better than most who had taught me. As a pupil I’d had a rough deal from the system. It just wasn’t set up for somebody like me and I wanted to make sure that those, of a curious, independent disposition, who followed weren’t let down too. I’d set off to cycle fifteen hundred miles to every place I had ever lived in the hope, that the re-tracing of my life, and the sheer exhaustive scope of the challenge, would clear my head. I had offers as work as an actor, a musician and a composer. I’d grown fond of the idea of marching to my own drum. On the other hand the country was in recession and we had two small children and no dependable source of income.

I’d set out from Barrow-in Furness and spent half a day revisiting eleven of my first fourteen years on the planet. The missing three years were four hundred and fifty crow flown miles to the north. It had taken me eleven days to hit the north coast. (If you weren’t following this in the spring, then you can catch up on as much or as little as you wish in “Journey into Scotland” on my home page.) It had been a hugely enjoyable adventure. I wasn’t feeling the absence of a classroom or a salary. I’d had a scare when a large silver coach from Surrey had knocked me spinning off the road. My initial fear was that I’d torn ligaments or badly sprained my ankle. The fact that I was gingerly riding my bike again within an hour and back on the grand tour within 48 suggested that I’d jarred and bruised it. It hurt but it did little other than slow me down for a few days. I set off earlier and arrived later but I kept to my schedule. (Barring an enforced day off experiencing the palm fringed delights of Plockton and Loch Carron.)

All the way up the west coast (and a few diversions inland) I’d marvelled at a simple magical fact about Scotland. No matter how glorious the scenery, the landscape and the air, the following day would beat it into a cocked hat. The Southern uplands of Dumfries and Galloway made me want to linger but were soon forgotten as I rode along the western shore of Loch Lomond. Rannoch Moor became Glencoe and I was sure I’d reached the peak of perfection. Nowhere, surely, could beat this. And then I rode the road to the Isles from Fort William to Mallaig.

Mallaig was one of a hundred towns and villages, I’d never heard of before, but which I’ve longed to return to ever since. Kilmacolm, Crianlarich, Achnasheen, Plockton, Dalry are all now part of who I was and that makes them a part of who I am.

The moment when I started quoting Shakespeare unprompted,

“Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!
For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night”

arrives in Sutherland. Staggering rough hewn beauty in a landscape so vast it is difficult to conceive of in a country as small as ours. To be here was a feeling of jubilance; to have pedalled every yard under my own steam* was one of my greater achievements.

After 48 episodes, I quietly left this journal aside in June and wandered around England for a while. My 1987 self was left quietly on top of a Sutherland hill brewing tea and looking out over the Kyle of Durness and away towards Cape Wrath and the entire top left hand corner of these islands. I’d pedalled further in a day than I had at any point of my journey. My tweaked ankle made me walk with a John Wayne lurch but was happy to turn pedals for hours at a time. I was back inside the lands of living memories. I know the north coast in that pre-umbra of memory from earliest childhood. 

On teaching practice I had a class writing about their first recollections. Writing is the most wonderful of tools for exploring the mind and twenty five heads were bowed over their tables and twenty five pens were uncovering thoughts that they would later share with some pride. One boy wasn’t having this though. He was fearful of writing and saw it as just another of his inadequacies. Another way to fail. He sought reasons not to put pen to paper. He measured his success in lessons by the blankness of his sheet or the subversiveness of his doodles.

“I don’t know what to put.”

“Write about the first thing you can remember.”

“I can’t remember being born.”

“Neither can I. Just the first thing you can remember.”

“Like my earliest memory?”

“That’s right. Your earliest memory.”

“I can’t remember my earliest memory.”

And neither, young Robert, can I. I thought I could. I lived here on the north coast of Scotland between the ages of two and five so I’m pretty certain that my consciousness of who I am and what I’ve done dates back to here. That cold northern sea looked over the change from a thing that ate and slept and cried to one who read and walked and wandered off alone. Who sledged down an icy road and who skimmed stones on lochs and paddled in the surf.

I stayed the night in the youth hostel at Durness. Ironically I can remember very little of this other than a cold floor. In the morning a fellow cyclist and I made our way to Smoo Cave and tested the acoustics by singing into it. He was a fitter and faster pedaller than I was and set off over the hills saying he’d meet me again at Tongue. He was there outside a pub enjoying his second pint by the time I got there. It wasn’t quite mid-day.

Having spent a fortnight at a leisurely pace I was infused with a desire to get to where I knew best. I’d snapped a gear cable and was without the larger cog at the front. It didn’t make a great deal of difference as I turned back south to ride against a stiff breeze along the shores of Loch Eriboll. It was here that some of the greatest discoveries were made that unfolded the geological history of the planet. I had my head down into the wind and was attempting, for the first time on the journey, to ride quickly. The speedometer on the handlebars made a mockery of this. Many of the sea lochs have been bridged but the few hundred yards that a seagull flies to get from one shore to the other is the best part of twenty miles for the cyclist. The uplands between there and Tongue are amongst the most beautiful in Scotland. I confess to missing the opportunity to soak in that beauty. Like a cyclist on the Tour de France, I flew through the grandeur more aware of the desire to reach my destination than take in the views.

I didn’t join in the early lunchtime supping in Tongue but headed in my determined way towards the county boundary that would bring me back to where I once lived. I’d cycled hundreds of miles to reach the most magnificent part of Scotland and all I wanted to do was to get to the flatter, bleaker, boggier, windier lands to the east. I wanted to get to Caithness because that name had been on the very first home address I’d ever written out. The one that ends with Solar System, Galaxy, Universe. The world was huge. Those were the Orkneys out there to my left. I was going home.

 

*Give or take a couple of ferry rides.