Following the Sun: A Bicycle Pilgrimage from Andalusia to the Outer Hebrides

by John Hanson Mitchell

  Not far from the battlefield was a group of three chambered cairns, known as the Stones of Clava, each of which is surrounded by a stone circle. The cairns, which were originally burial chambers, all have an inner room built of large stones that can be entered along a passage. The two entrance passages align with two of the stones outside the central area and align with the position of the midwinter sundown.

  That evening I wheeled into the quiet city of Inverness and found a quiet hotel on a quiet street above the River Ness. I was in the mood, after the bad food and hard climbs of the Eastern Highlands, for a little softness and spent a long time in a hot bath, soaking the aches out of my muscles. In the subdued hotel pub I nursed a single malt whiskey and then repaired to the high-ceilinged dining room and ordered a broiled local salmon, boiled potatoes with parsley butter, and green peas cooked with lettuce leaves and butter. It was still light after dinner, with a calm, pearl gray sky hanging over the cityscape, so I walked through a park along the river laid out with a winding path and ancient firs and larches interspersed with emerald green sheered lawns and beds of flowering annuals. Then I sat on a park bench and admired the gray rippling waters of the Ness, and then I strolled some more, and then I sat down again and watched some old men fishing from the banks.

  The crossing of the Eastern Highlands had been completely unlike the leisurely ride through the lowlands of western Andalusia, or the gentle roll of the Loire Valley or the Downs and plains of Salisbury, where, as I slowly pedaled along, I always had time to think. But here on a park bench under the dark firs I finally was able to let my mind wander, and quite naturally, since I was in the heart of the Highlands, I began thinking of the old Scottish ballads I used to know—Thomas the Rhymer, who was kidnapped by a fairy queen on a milk white steed, never to be seen on earth again, and the king in Dunfermline town, drinking his blood-red wine, The Twa Corbies, and Lord Randall pleading with his mother to make his bed smooth. And then I thought of my own dear mother across the seas, and then it struck me that actually she was not that far away. She was visiting close at hand, more or less, just across the waters in Denmark. So I went back to the hotel and called her up.

  Where have you been and what have you done, she wanted to know.

  “I’ve been to Kintore, and have seen the graves of the family,” I said with balladic cadences. “And before that the Lakes. And before that London. And I’ve just crossed the Eastern Highlands and lived to tell the tale.”

  A good Ma in the old style would have wept bitter tears and bade me come home, but she laughed and wished me a safe journey through the Western Isles, where I told her I was headed. She must have been having a good time herself; normally she would worry. I asked her about her own journey.

  “Interesting,” she said, “but we’ve had to witness the most horrid Bog Men and grave goods and the like.”

  She was traveling with two friends, one of whom was interested in antiquities.

  I woke up tired the next morning and decided to rest up here in the city for the next onslaught of mountains, the higher, rainier Western Highlands. I had not, however, calculated that this was Sunday in northern Scotland.

  The Scots, it has been said, have inherited a great deal from their landscape. The burr of their accent is derived from the whirr sound of the red grouse as it bursts from the moors. The great glens and mountains isolated the crofts and communities and encouraged the formation of clans. The deep valleys and wide moorlands called for a musical instrument, such as the bagpipe, whose sound could travel for miles. And the bitter, intemperate, and unpredictable weather—“God’s country and the Devil’s weather” as it is said—engendered a taste for a warming dram of whiskey. And all of this, mountains, valleys, granite rocks, deep, cold lochs, chill streams, and cold weathers, begat a cold, pure, unforgiving religion—the United Presbyterian Church. By decree of this church, when Sunday rolls around the world closes down.

  I realized that I had made a good decision by staying on. Had I left and, as I had done over this entire trip, taken my chances with finding a place to stay rather than booking something in advance, I might have encountered closed doors. No one works on Sunday.

  Since everything was closed in Inverness, I took a ride down the scenic road above Loch Ness, hoping to catch sight of the curvéd neck of the beguiling monster that is known to live there. Traffic was light and the banked forests above the steep shores smelled rain washed and sweet and I stopped often to peer down into the mystery of the gray, choppy waters, where I hoped I would see the infamous looped neck and small head. I saw nothing. But at one rest stop and overlook I met up with a young couple who were part of a Loch Ness monster watch team who said that once—they thought—in the gloaming, they saw a long V-shaped ripple in the still waters.

  “Was some kind of a head. And it was not a duck. That much we can say.”

  The grouse moors about Inverness stand at the head of one of the ancient folds that splits the landscape of this part of Scotland in a vast northeast-southwest chasm known as the Great Glen. The deep rifts in the earth in this place are an extension of the folds of Norway and were shaped during the vast upheavals that marked the second of the two mountain-building ages of Britain. The shifting tectonic plates in this area subjected the earth to great interior tensions and created a long chasm that eventually became the rift valley of the Great Glen. Running toward this glen from all across the hills of the Highlands are smaller, wilder glens, which pour in waters from the eternal rains and fill the rift with deep lochs that run down the length of the break—Glen Urquhart, Glen Roy, Loch Lochy, Loch Leven, and Glen Coe.

  All this occurred over the five-billion-year life of the unquiet earth, and is due in part to the hydrologic cycle in which the heat of the sun draws up moisture from the seas and lakes of the world, thus forming clouds, which subsequently condense and fall to earth again as rain.

  After gorging on what is known as a “full breakfast” the next morning—a pot of tea, scones, strawberries, oatmeal, scrambled eggs, toast, jams, bacon, and brown bread—I set out northward toward the town of Achnasheen on the west side of the Western Highlands. The meal made me logy and at Beauly I had to stop for coffee to fire myself up for the hard ride, but was forced to settle for more tea. As I rode westward from the Beauly Firth the land began to rise and soon I was falling into the rhythm of pumping or pushing the bicycle up long, sloping hills, resting at the top, and then sailing back down, passing all the while the high shores of lochs, with beech forests and firs and larch, and, farther north, the treeless barrens and windy stretches of moors. Once again, out here on the small roads, under the vast geologic upheavals of earth and the wild stretches of moors, I was alone.

  At one point, pedaling along a valley floor, staring up at the immensity of the hills ahead of me, it struck me that my bicycle was too small for this vast country. I had counted on high hills. I had not counted on wilderness.

  All across the Western Highlands I encountered mists and fogs, hard showers and drizzle, and then, like a calming sleep, a burst of clear clean rain-washed light. It took me days to cross, partly because whenever I found a sheltered place and a period of bright sun, I would pull over, settle myself on some warming rock, and bask out all the cold and dank, stripping off my sweaters and anorak as the sun blasted down. I watched the sky continuously and learned the meaning of different types of clouds and wind direction in this quarter of the world. I got so I could predict the onset of a blue break, and three or four times I actually deserted my bicycle altogether to hike down shaded mountains, through narrow valleys, and up the other side, so that I could get to a sunny spot to bask for a while.

  It was here, during these short excursions away from my excursion, that I came to better appreciate the landscape I was moving through.

  Once in a flat valley, a herd of red deer scattered like phantoms across the moors. At stream banks where I stopped to rest I saw wagtails and a ring ouzel, and I surprised leks of red grouse out on the moors. I saw
a blackcock, or perhaps the capercaillie, and once I thought I saw a dotterel, a rare nesting bird in these parts, standing on a rock at the edge of a heather-covered hill. Periodically, as I lay on some flat rock in the sun, I would hear an odd cackling and cuckooing, the call or song, I believe, of the blackcock. Back on the road, flights of corbies and hoodies, as the ravens and hooded crows are called here, often sailed down the slopes with me, and once or twice I think I saw golden eagles over the peaks.

  All of these birds and mammals are well adapted to the unique harsh habitat of the heather-dominated moorlands. The red grouse feeds on the green shoots that grow on the underside of the heather, even in winter. Their eggs can endure a frost, and in deep snows the grouse treads down the snows under the heather, packing it so that the bird rises with the deepening snows. Red deer browse on the heather in summer, and in winter help maintain the treeless stretches by nipping off the stems of young trees that have made a start in this hard land. Heather is all brown and gray and dull most of the year, but in early summer it goes into bloom and transforms the Highlands into a rich carpet of reddish purple, the source of much song and verse of the balladeers: “The heather was ablooming, the meadows were mawn, our lads gaed a-hunting ae day at the dawn,” as Robbie Burns would have it.

  Scottish verse and song seem melded with nature and landscape. Beeches and birches and thistles and harebells and red deer and grouse, ravens, and the blooming of the heather figure as background to all the storm and strife and dying knights and fairy queens that weave in and out of Scottish stories and songs. For all its wildness and emptiness this is actually a very human, if not humane, territory. All the Highlands, with the famous grouse moors and heather, are in fact the product of human activity. This land was once covered with forests of birch and pine and its decline to a treeless state may have begun as early as two or three thousand years ago as Neolithic farming peoples moved northward, clearing trees for crops and sheep. Even now, the forest would return slowly if the moors were not grazed or burned periodically to keep the trees out.

  Heather—and of course sunlight—is the principal player in this ecosystem. It shades the ground so that it is difficult for even so much as a harebell or buttercup to grow, much less a tree—although they do try. But if the heather were not pruned by fire or sheep it would lose its compact, dense form and grow toward the sun, spreading itself higher and becoming leggier, putting out three-foot-tall feathery fronds. The sun would then be able to reach the ground between the heather plants, and in these sunny open patches the bird-and wind-spread seeds of sun-loving trees such as rowan and birch would take hold. These would grow taller, offering a dappled, filtered shade where pine seedlings could grow, and in the shade of the pines the heather would disappear, the sun-loving birches would wither, oaks would move in and begin to dominate the lower slopes, and forests of beech and alder and oak would cover the lower valleys. Only at the higher elevations would the heather and the birch trees endure.

  From Achnasheen west the land grew higher and rougher before dropping down to Loch Maree, which I had heard is one of the prettiest of the Scottish lochs, with many places to stay. I was planning to ride out to the town of Gairloch, where there was said to be a garden with palm trees, the farthest northern range of these decidedly subtropical plants. From here, I could get a good view of my final destination—the connected isles of Skye and Lewis and Harris.

  I began to descend once more, and came into the little village of Kinlochwe, where I had a heavy lunch of cheese and bread with a glass of bitters, and then began riding out along the south shores of the loch. On the way, under a canopy of lush, deciduous trees, I spotted a long green drive and found a little white hotel on the banks of the loch with a lawn and birch trees and an un-Scottish feel, more like the Lake District, or Vermont. Here I stopped and rested and tucked into another dinner of salmon and peas. Around nine-thirty, the sun had not yet dropped over the mountain ridges to the northwest, so I wandered out along the loch.

  Coming down a narrow path along the shore, dressed in a Black Watch plaid skirt, sensible shoes, and a frilled white shirt, I met a woman who could have emerged from the pages of Robbie Burns. She had all the Scot features, the wide cheekbones, fair blue eyes, a peaches and cream complexion, and curling strawberry blond hair.

  “Staying at the hotel, are you,” she said with a thick Highland burr.

  I explained that I was. And she asked if I was having a good stay and where had I come from and where was I bound. She worked at the hotel as a clerk in the day and was a chatty friendly sort who, for all her Scottish Highland affect, had family in the United States, not far from Boston in a town that I knew. She had been there a few times.

  “It’s a dreadful place, if you don’t mind my saying so. I could’na’ get a cup a decent tea in all of America.” Her husband was a musician, she said, who worked the tourist pubs along the western coast, and she herself could sing and sometimes accompanied him, and knew many of the old Scottish ballads, having learned them from her grandmother.

  “He’s here now, my husband. Stopped for a pee.”

  No sooner said than her husband appeared. Out of the gloomy forest emerged a dark tall man with a Mohawk haircut and doubled silver earrings, dressed in tight dark jeans, heavy kicking boots, and a black leather jacket with silver studs on it. Had I not the protection of gentle Mary I would have turned and run.

  “Come John,” she said. “Here’s a man come all the way from America on his bicycle to meet you.”

  In contrast to his appearance John extended his hand and smiled with crinkling blue eyes.

  “Pleased to meet’cha, then. All the way from America, is it?” he said.

  “Yes, just a little touring.”

  “I heard about you,” he said. “Bloke at a pub I met today said he had passed a Sassenach”—he meant an Englishman—“on a bicycle in the middle of nowhere, back in the hills. Must have been you.”

  “Could have been,” I said. “But I’m from the States.”

  “Right, I’ve been there. Played Boston. Springfield. Hartford. I like America. I like your blacks. We don’t get your blacks here in Scotland. That’s why the music is so bloody boring.”

  He loved blues music, as do many rock musicians in the British Isles, and according to Mary he played a “mean” guitar.

  “But he can do your ballads too,” she said. “We knew Sandy Dennis before she died. We used to do that kind of traditional number, ‘Little Matty Groves,’ ‘Tam o’ Shanter,’ that kind of thing. John even backed her up for a couple of gigs. But John here, he goes for blues now, and so does the pub crowd.”

  “No more sad ballads then?” I asked.

  “Na,” said John. “The crowd don’t like it.”

  “We do though,” said Mary.

  “You do,” said John. “I don’t.”

  Mary kept her silence.

  “Well I’m off,” I said, and made motion to take a walk.

  “What’re you doing up here anyway?” John asked. “Just having a look around?”

  I explained my solar pilgrimage.

  John made a grimace. “I hate the bloody sun,” he said.

  Out along the lake, the light slowly began to alter. A golden yellow atmosphere crept into the sky and by ten-thirty or so the sun had dropped silently behind a saddle between two hills across the loch. I noticed that it was far up into the northwest by the time it set. The light remained above the hills though, and the whole landscape began to shift color, from bright yellow to a paler yellow, to red, and then slowly to a dark sort of haunted blue, with a shaded blue black up in the valleys of the hills. I walked on for a while and then finally turned around lest I be caught out here in the dark, where I would perhaps meet the likes of John, alone, without nice Mary to temper him.

  The next morning I rode out to Gairloch, found a place to stay, and then carried on out the peninsula, toward Poolewe and the gardens of Inverewe, where the palm trees grew, a site that I had been thinking a
bout ever since my visit to the green subtropical palm islands of the Everglades in south Florida. The road climbed and then wound down into a little valley, where there were larches and firs and deciduous trees, with a stream bubbling through. It was a pleasant little glade, so I hid my bicycle, a more or less unnecessary precaution since there was no one around and this part of Scotland was not exactly famous for thieves. I dawdled here, pointlessly putting off, I suppose, my arrival. And then I rode on and within a few miles came to the gardens.

  I was almost as far north here as I would get on this journey. The latitude of the garden is the same as Labrador in North America, and Siberia in the east, and in fact not that far from the Arctic Circle itself. And yet here, in luxuriant splendor, all flourishing and green and sweet-smelling, was a wealth of subtropical plants from all over the world. There were plants from the east, from Australia and Tasmania, New Zealand, China, and Japan. There were rhododendrons from the Himalayas, and many species from temperate zones of South America and North America, including the palm trees. Because of the long light, the plants in this garden achieve a luxuriance that seemed to me more lush and larger and seemingly greener than plants of the same species that I had seen in Central America and Florida.

  Inverewe Gardens was started in 1862 by Osgood Mackenzie, who was the son of Sir Francis Mackenzie, the laird of Gairloch. The garden is located on a barren and rocky promontory on Loch Ewe, which is about the same latitude as Hudson Bay in Canada. The subtropical plants are able to flourish here because of the warm Atlantic currents of the Gulf Stream that sweeps up from the Caribbean and swings near the coast at this point. The site is far warmer in winter than any of the surrounding areas and, because of its latitude, rarely very hot in summer; the highest temperature ever recorded was 84° Fahrenheit, the lowest 14°.