Richard Guise - From the Mull to the Cape: A Gentle Bike Ride on the Edge of Wilderness

Och, yer show-off ! the lady selling me the sausage roll had said. I can show it you on a wee postcard here an save you the bother.

This had seemed an odd response at the time. What could be less bothersome for a Saturday afternoon in April than a little bike ride beside the sea? Well, it was now a few hours later and Id had the bother. The last six miles to get here had turned out to be less bike ride than bike push, during which Id lost sight not only of the sea but also of any other road users. Indeed, for the last hour, of any other human. The heavy hills, darkened by the remains of last years heather, had been closing in on all sides around the single-track road as I pushed my bike to a weary halt where progress was blocked by a locked gate with a faded yellow sign announcing in barely legible letters: WARNING: THIS HILL IS DANGEROUS. As if the previous six miles hadnt been.

I left the bike on the safe side, jiggled on foot through the narrow gap and stepped onto a grassy knoll to the right of the tarmac. And there it was. While, at the same time, there it wasnt.

There was the lighthouse: a distant, white, stumpy building at the end of a ragged line of old-fashioned telegraph poles. There, a fair distance below the light, was the choppy grey of the North Atlantic, stretching to a hazy horizon, where lurked two shapes. The darker one lay on the sea like a brooding alligator: Rathlin Island. To its left a distant, hazier shape rose steeper and wider, hinting at a larger island beyond: Ireland.

What did not seem to be there was what Id set out to reach today, what the sausage-roll lady had wanted to show me on a postcard instead: the Mull of Kintyre.

*

Sitting cross-legged on the knoll, I pulled her squishy snack out of my bag and, munching eagerly, examined the map in the plastic pocket on the bags top. If you can force the strains of 1970s bagpipes to the back of your mind for a moment, let me put the Mull of Kintyre into context. On a map of Scotlands west coast, Kintyre is the long, thin peninsula dangling over Northern Ireland like the ugly, misshapen nose of an old cartoon witch. The tip of her nose is the Mull, barely twelve miles from Ireland. The one sizeable drip from the nose is Sanda Island to the east and I think perhaps wed better leave the nasalogy there. To get here Id taken two ferries, with Arran as a giant stepping stone in between, from Ardrossan in Ayrshire to Claonaig on Kintyre, cycling down the quiet but beautiful east coast and staying overnight in Campbeltown. That mornings ride had taken in the village of Southend, home of the sausage-roll lady, and the push up to the Mull.

And what is a mull? Er, um, now let me think and apart from that its a promontory, of course. Now that I looked at the map again, I had to admit that a tough route might have been expected: the six-mile track to the Mull did cross from white area to brown area quite quickly and did end up near an impressive spot height of 428 metres at Ben na Lice, impressive since zero metres was only about a mile away. This rose on my right as a high, impenetrable wall of dark moss and heather. But where was the Mull? Id expected a windy, Flamborough-type headland with grand, 360-degree views over the North Channel and Kintyre. Well, on my left lay an even more massive lump of the same glowering undergrowth, sturdy and solid, blocking the view and saying, I now realised, Hey, dunderhead, its me Im the Mull.

Ah, yes. Now looking at the map for the umpteenth time, I recognised that the track signposted to the Mull didnt actually mount the thing, but sneaked alongside it for a mile or two before veering off towards the lighthouse. I was sitting as near as you could get to the Mull of Kintyre without actually diving into the Atlantic and crashing against its cliff s. This would do for my purpose, which was to travel the length of the Highlands from their south-west corner, here at the Mull of Kintyre, to their north-west corner at Cape Wrath in Sutherland, 264 miles away as the crow flies or as a crow mad enough to make such a journey would fly. As an extra challenge, wherever it was viable I intended always to take the route closest to the coast, thus making my route considerably longer than the mad crows: probably around 600 miles. (Viable to be defined en route.) I reckoned Id be able to do it in three stages.

And why was I doing this? Well, firstly I just needed a project. Since retiring from proper work a few years before, Id dipped my toes into those activities you always promise youll indulge in when you finally step off the nine-to-five treadmill trace family tree, learn guitar, tidy attic, save world but somehow none held my attention for long. None was exactly a physical challenge. When a friend only slightly younger than me had launched himself into the London Marathon, I decided Id better do something marathonian myself before it was too late. A few years before, Id done one of those subtropical charity bike rides without too much bodily torment and so a bike ride it would be.