Talmine to Cape Wrath then on to Balmacara

The Cloisters, Talmine

This is a beautiful place to stay.  The view from the room made up for not having an Internet connection to update my blog.  

Still, I can't help feeling the geographers missed a trick by calling it 'Tongue Bay' rather than 'Mouth of Tongue.'

I set off a little later than usual on this final and shortest leg of the ride as the earliest breakfast was at eight - which is of course quite normal for B&Bs - but it was worth the wait: a magnificent Scottish breakfast (i.e. a full english plus slices of haggis.  I educated some French guests about the benefits of these meals.  Standing outside before going into the old chapel building for breakfast, a lady from this non-Anglophone family indicated that I must surely be cold, standing there in my short-sleeved shirt (flat hand chopping motion at elbow level, self-hug + mock shiver, say 'cold').  Using the same language, I indicated that a hearty English breakfast not only makes you fat but insulates you against the cold (say 'petit dejeuner Anglais,' pat stomach expansively, wipe imaginary sweat from brow and puff cheeks).  Who needs Esperanto, eh? 

Excellent hosts and very generous people

When I went to settle up, having squeezed my increasingly bloated form into the riding gear again, my hosts for the night - Bob and Audrey I believe there names are - very generously contributed the cost of the stay to my charity fund.  I'll be logging on to the justgiving.com/John-Seaman site soonest and making a paymernt on their behalf.

Oh go on; just one more bridge picture.
This one is a better shot of that last bridge over the Kyle of Tongue.

Durness

The ride to Durness was beautiful: A well-maintained road with wide, swooping curves and long straights across the high moor, (two-track up to Loch Eribol), sun on my back, snowy mountains in my eye-line, bike whispering along.  But a macabre thought kept entering my head: I had actually died in some squalid, rainy accident on the A1M and I was now actually in heaven.  Perhaps it was because an animal had died in my hands earlier in the morning.  (No, I hadn't caught my own breakfast.  One of the little birds hopping around a feeder at the B&B was in obvious difficulty on the ground.  It was clearly dying and I decided that I wouldn't cause it any more stress than it was already in by picking it up and moving it out of the path for it's last few earthly minutes.) After a little thought, I realised this could not be heaven.  As good as this moment was, it was not perfect.  Mrs S was not on the back saying 'Oo! Pretty!' and 'Look! Buzzard!' on the headset.

I called in at the Information Centre for a quick nose around and to check whether the ferry to the Cape was running.  While there, I overheard Helen here actually say 'och aye' to somebody on the phone.  This is the very first time in all my visits to Scotland I have heard somebody say that without irony.

What's that red rock doing here?

After civil engineering, it is geology that rocks me. (Sorry.) This whole area is a rock-hunter's playground, but it's also where some fundamental observations were made that effectively got geology started as a science.  At Durness in particular, something called the Moyne Thrust can be seen.  Basically, a huge wedge of sandstone was found about sixty miles from where it obviously originated, and whatever had shoved it there had generated enough heat from friction to turn some of the sandstone into other sorts of stone.  (Schists, if you really want to go anorak on this.)  This got people thinking about how lumps of rock go slithering around the earth and changing from one thing to another.


(Tell ya what, though.  Walking down fifty feet of steep path to the beech and across a couple of hundred of yards of sand had me puffing.  I need to have a good think about my fitness levels before I go hiking across the mountains with my little geology hammer in my hand.)

Cape Wrath

Finally, I rode the last couple of miles to Keoldale where a ferry carries people across the Kyle of Durness and a minibus takes them the ten miles or so to Cape Wrath.

For such a small ferry, this is a big queue.

I arrived in good time for the 11 o'clock sailing, which was just as well.  The minibus only takes 16 passengers and I got the last seat.  A couple on bicycles went across to ride out to the Cape, but otherwise, people had to wait for the 2 o'clock ferry and bus.


The road to the Cape winds its way across acres of peat bog, crosses a military range, and needles across some very old bridges that were built in the days before anything as wide as a Ford Transit had been thought of.  The boys from Time Team might be able to find evidence that it once had tarmac on it, but now, the bus has to take it very steady indeed.  Giving relief from the lurching and plunging, the driver stopped to give a bit of a commentary on points of interest along the way - and stopping was essential.  

Breath in!

At the very tip of the Cape is a lighthouse.  It was once operated by a crew of three who lived out there with their families.  It's now automated and monitored from Edinburgh.  

The lighthouse at the other end of the country (from Dungeness)

Once supporting a number of crofts, a husband and wife couple are now the only permanent residents of the peninsula; they run a bit of a cafe in one of the outhouses in the lighthouse complex.


Making a big show of checking the compass on my (very expensive gift from Mrs S) wristwatch, I loudly declared a particular bit of rock at the top of the cliffs to be the exact most North-Westerly point.  Other sticky out bits that people suggested I dismissed as being 'too North' or 'too West.'  Such is the power of loud declaration (especially if you are wearing a tie), that everybody then queued up to take each other's photos standing on the spot!  The thought crossed my mind that I'd never forgive myself if anybody went over that precarious little bit of rock, but I got away with it this time.

This is the spot...

...and me standing on it.
If I'd turned around, dived in and started swimming, the first land I touched would have been Siberia.

To while away the long hours on duty, the lighthouse keepers developed this novel musical instrument from driftwood and scrap metal.

Scratching post.

On the way back, the driver pointed out a young eagle in flight, and we saw a herd of hinds trotting across the bog with their fawns - none of which comes out in my phone-camera photos, of course.  Another more human oddity was the line of telegraph poles marching across the landscape.  These brought telephone lines to the lighthouse and to the military forward observation post.  Having erected all 480 of them, they found that they were felled by storms at tediously frequent intervals, so the cables were laid underground instead.  Many of the now redundant posts were 'recycled' into firewood by the crofters.  The driver pointed out one of the remaining ones which had become a gathering spot for the deer.  In the absence of trees, they used this to rub the velvet off their horns.  In the process, they had trampled away all the peat from around the base exposing the underlying rock.  

All done

Well, that's the journey's end reached.  I see we've raised £770 for Cancer Research UK, which is a quite respectable chunk of my £1000 target.  My sincerest thanks to everybody who contributed - especially those who allowed me a second bite of the cherry!  


The journey was also my annual holiday as well as a fund raising venture, and it has been the best ever.  And I still have the length of the country to ride before it's over!

This is typical of the scenery one passes through in the North West corner of Scotland.

In the absence of an internet connection last night, I had to wait until today to upload the Kinross-to-Talmine leg.  At Ullapool, the Information Centre directed me to the Caley Inn.  A very quiet hostelry at this time of day.

Angela and Tony's 

After Ullapool, I caught up with the really cold and wet weather I'd seen on the forecast yesterday.  On the long, long road to the Kyle of Lochalsh, I pulled over to pop the sweatshirt on and to do up a few extra zips on my suit of many layers.  Sorted.  But I was still glad to arrive at Angela and Tony's Balmacara Lodge for the night.

If the forecast promises a repeat of those temperatures tomorrow, I'll get my new heated inner gloves ready.