Pedalling Again

Trusty steed

Summer in the Carse

People friendly roads

Campsie View

I managed a totally enjoyable cycle ride yesterday evening, completing a circuit on good quiet roads on the very best of summer evenings. I kept a good cadence and managed a reasonable pace of 16mph. I was finally enjoying my 20-odd-year-old Canondale racing bike that had been bought with the fees for being a returning officer at the 1997 General Election. It was a belated reward for never having the bike of my dreams as a youngster.  It was my first new bike since I was 7 years old

Cycling has always been a latent passion. I cycled every day as a 7 to 12-year-old on my first bike, a BSA bike with 24-inch wheels. It was too big for the first year or so but "he'll grow into it" was a common refrain when I was growing up. When I was 9 or 10 years old, I cycled 50 or more miles a day to visit far-flung towns like Lancaster and Carnforth to visit engine sheds although my parents were unaware. By the time I was 12, the bike was too small and had become an embarrassment in the bike sheds at school. Classmates were arriving on Dawes, Claud Butler or Falcon racing bikes with 10 Campagnolo gears and Weinmann brakes.

My father had been an amateur cyclist and, as money was tight, he promised me a racing bike for Christmas. He had an old 21-inch bike frame rusting in the attic. It had a slightly bent top tube and no name, although he claimed it was a GA. He stripped the rust off with emery cloth and painted it dark blue. He handbuilt two alloy 26-inch wheels, which were fine, and raided the attic to find an old Brookes saddle, a Resilion cantilever brake for the front wheel, and a chrome Williams chainset with 44 teeth. The final indignity was a 15-tooth sprocket for the fixed wheel. It would teach me to pedal with a better cadence he claimed. It also saved having to buy a rear brake.

The problems were two-fold, first, the bike had no street cred. It didn't have a name or any transfers, it was painted not enamelled, it had no gears and small flange hubs. Second, it was difficult to keep up with friends when going downhill on long rides in the Forest of Bowland, which has notoriously hilly roads and there is no freewheeling with a fixed gear. I survived and my legs were well exercised, which probably explained why I made the under 16 cross country team when only 13. The bike was never going to be nicked by anyone, so I would have to save up to buy the bike that I really wanted.

I took a paper round and cycled to school most days to save my bus fares An older boy nearby was emigrating and selling a Holdsworth bike with all the best components that cost £35 new, compared to £22 for a Claud Butler and £20 for a Raleigh Blue Streak. I asked my father if he would lend me £5 to put towards the £18 to buy it. He went to look at it, bought it and then sold it to one of his cycling friends. He had spent a lot of time making my bike and why would I want to waste money on another one? I was fairly disconsolate and my interest in cycling dipped from there on as other teenage interests took their toll.

In the summer of 1973 after arriving in Glasgow, I had to scrap my ageing Morris Minor when it failed its MoT so I bought a Mercian racing bike that I had seen advertised in the Evening Times. It had Simplex rather than Campagnolo gears but otherwise, it was well specced and I spent the fine summer evenings exploring all of Glasgow's outlying areas. There was little respect for cyclists on the road in the 1970s, they were a nuisance to the newly enfranchised car owners. It was also before the days of helmets and dayglo jackets but I survived with some near misses and my knowledge of all the areas within 25 miles of Glasgow was greatly increased. In the following years cycling suffered as football, cricket, rugby, skiing, climbing, sailing and hill running took up all my time and a car was needed to get to all the fixtures.

On moving to the Trossachs in 1987, I bought a second-hand Saracen mountain bike and for twenty years it was used regularly on the forest trails, for short trips in the vicinity and for hillwalking trips when it could save a long walk-in to the mountains. When the frame's rear chain stays finally collapsed with corrosion, I replaced it with a Trek mountain bike bought at an end-of-season clear out of stock at the local cycle hire shop. It has been used regularly for the same purpose ever since. I have buckled a couple of wheels on mountain trails and lost another but otherwise, it has performed remarkably well without any mishaps during dozens of hill walking expeditions.

Since I bought my first new bike, an eighteen-speed Cannondale with quality Shimano components, it has had little use. I was still running three or four times a week and climbing hills two or three times a month on my free days. The bike would get a trip over the Duke's Pass and around Loch Katrine a couple of times a year but the road surface was so poor that the ride was always a bit of a disappointment. In 2012 when Bradley Wiggins inspired us all with the Tour de France win and then the Olympics, I gave it a few more outings but since then it has largely languished in the garage.

Tonight was the first time it has been used with genuine pleasure as I pedalled it around the local roads, several of which had been resurfaced this year. For almost the first time I felt at one with the bike and even managed to keep a speed of 14 mph when ascending back from the carse to the village. As I am running far less this year as my feet and legs begin to object, perhaps it is time to get pedalling again in the way I have always intended.

Saracen days

Resilion brakes

Ten Blue Tories lying to be PM

'Ship of Twats' by Cold War Steve

There were eventually just ten blue Tories lying to become PM. Other wannabe PMs had failed to get the required number of Tory MPs to sponsor them. They are quite a gruesome bunch and perhaps this explains why Mrs. May had been able to hang on for so long, despite making no visible progress on Brexit, housing for Grenfell Tower tenants, housebuilding, NHS improvements, climate change, education, homelessness, community care, railways, universal credit, knife crime, drugs, or ever directly answering anyone's question at PM's question time.

The ten who went into the first round of the ballot of MPs included 5 present ministers, 4 ministers who had had to resign from Mrs May's cabinet and an ex-Chief Whip. Much to everyone's surprise Boris Johnson had a landslide victory in the first round ballot, attracting 114 votes with Jeremy Hunt second with 43 votes from the electorate of 313 Tory MPs. There were no surprises that Andrea Leadsom, Esther McVey and Mark Harvey had fallen at the first ballot and when Matt Hancock, a man who can change his opinion at the drop of a hat, withdrew so that he could join Boris's gang you began to realise that the game's a bogey.

The remaining five candidates proved in the Channel 4 debate that they had little to offer in terms of ideas or practical solutions to the Brexit conundrum. Rory Stewart won all the plaudits for being honest and speaking to the whole nation and not just the elderly and exceptionalist caucus of avarice and haughtiness that masquerades as the Tory party members. Unfortunately, they are the electorate and do not take kindly to  those suggesting that improving public services is just as important as tax reductions so Rory Stewart will be the next one of the six blue tories to accidentally fall.

Meanwhile, Boris is in hibernation, hidden from TV audiences and journalists by such luminaries as Gavin Williamson, Chris Grayling, Ian Duncan Smith, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel, Sir Michael Fallon, Esther McVey and Liz Truss. Oh, my giddy aunt, could you ever wish the support from such a  distinguished elite of duplicitous MPs, only Michael Gove is missing. Most of them have form as Ministers who have had to resign and have ambitions to return as part of a Boris cabinet. If Boris succeeds in becoming PM and ever get himself into a pickle, he can be confident that his cabinet full of liberators will all want to be Brutus. Meantime the rush to jump aboard Boris's Brexit lifeboat is truly love in the time of Cholic.

For the rest of us, what a totally demeaning time to be British. One of the very few upsides is the humour provided by  Cold War Steve, who has produced a bizarre collection of collages to capture the machinations of Brexit with an angst-driven acuity.

October 31. Grayling's last stand and Bojo's finest moment

Blog reaches 100,000 hits

The number of hits on the blog passed 100,000 this week. Not many compared to the celebrities and bloggers who seek to maximise clicks but a lot more than I ever expected for what is a diary of events, walks, holidays, places, people and politics. It is over 9 years since I started the blog. The purpose at the time was to post news from home so that our son could see what was happening as he travelled around the world. It was not open to wider circulation but limited to family and most of those posts have been deleted.

It was only after a post on completing the GR20 walk on Corsica that I made the blog available so that friends from around Europe whom we had met on the walk could see photos of the adventure. It began to receive a lot of hits and still remains the second most read post. I then decided to start logging my hill walks on the blog, people often asked me the best routes or the time required to climb the munros. I had already completed 4 rounds of the munros and I was starting a post-retirement round with the intention of finishing all the corbetts as well. I could have a complete record of all the the munros with photographs if I chose to walk on the better days. I had always kept a log of the walks but with five or six notebooks, it was becoming increasingly difficult to sort through them to find things. And the photographs were kept  separately in boxes or albums on the days that I had taken photographs

I began to get some positive feedback but I never intended the blog as a means of entering a dialogue. I became aware that the blog was a good way of capturing and saving memories so that they could be revisited when I was less active. I was getting 300-400 hits a month and the fact that the posts were read by others made me take more care than I would have done in a written log. It also encouraged me to take a camera with me on all walks. Writing a blog was a way of being more organised, it made me search for information about places I had been, read research on other subjects and learn about things that interested me. I began to include some hyperlinks.  They are a more useful reference than bookmarks because they are set in context. I could not always remember why I had saved bookmarks.

In 2011 I was working for a Chief Executive in reshaping an organisation with over 2000 employees. I persuaded him to set up a blog to inform the organisation about progress. It usually fell to me to write the fortnightly blog for him. It was short, just 500 words, and captured the main events of his meetings on behalf of the Council and changes taking place. It was slightly galling that the blog was getting more hits per month than my blog received in a year and I was posting at least twice as often but it was a captive audience. I eventually persuaded him to write it one week and he included in his post that he was getting a new puppy, a Border Terrier. It was a human interest story and went viral.

I came to the conclusion that what really mattered was what I wanted to have a record of and I no longer had any compulsion to try and increase the number of hits. I generally post 4 or 5 times a month and the number of hits has been fairly consistent over the past 4 or 5 years at 1000 to 1200 per month. I use it most days as a reference when I want to remember something, someone or someplace so it works for me. There are now 624 posts published including almost all the munros and about 70% of the corbetts. There are another 30 or so waiting to be posted when I get round to scanning in old photos or finding relevant research. 

I heard recently that Hamish McInnes, the famous climber and doyen of mountain rescue, had been hospitalised after losing his memory. It is heartening that he has recovered by reading the 14 books that he had published by way of restocking his memory. It makes me think that it is a pity the blog does not go back to those crazy days of youth but there again, maybe that would be too much for fading faculties to cope with.

Most posts seem to get 30 to 40 hits over the first month or so and then trickle along. The more specific ones such as the walks usually carry on to the hundreds, particularly the more remote hills such as Monadh Liath Northern Corbetts that rank higher on the search engines because there are few other postings or the most popular climbs such as Inaccessible Pinnacle. The biggest hit has been the Top Forty Munros, based on an article I wrote for The Great Outdoors Magazine. Apart from the walks it's Vienna that is the most read post. It is also consoling that some posts about people that I have known and respected are read regularly, presumably by family members. One post about my primary school teacher was used as the Eulogy at his funeral.

I read a post some years ago by a former colleague in his polymath like blog, The Bookish Explorer. He summarised the benefits of blogging with the critical eye and experience of a social scientist  These are captured below in one of his well crafted and researched pieces.

1. You’ll become a better thinker. Because the process of writing includes recording thoughts on paper, the blogging process makes you question what you thought you knew. You will delve deeper into the matters of your life and the worldview that shapes them. 2. You’ll become a better writer. – once, that is, you start to reread your material or get feedback which shows your text was ambiguous... 3. You’ll live a more intentional life. Once you start writing about your life and the thoughts that shape it, you’ll begin thinking more intentionally about who you are, who you are becoming, and whether you like what you see or not. And that just may be reason enough to get started. 4. You’ll develop an eye for meaningful things. By necessity, blogging requires a filter. It’s simply not possible to write about every event, every thought, and every happening in your life. Instead, blogging is a never-ending process of choosing to articulate the most meaningful events and the most important thoughts. This process of choice helps you develop an eye for meaningful things. 5. It’ll lead to healthier life habits (although my partner doesn’t agree!)!. Blogging requires time, devotion, commitment, and discipline. And just to be clear, those are all good things to embrace –they will help you get the most out of your days and life. 6. You’ll inspire others. Blogging not only changes your life, but it also changes the life of the reader. And because blogs are free for the audience and open to the public, on many levels, it is an act of giving. It is a selfless act of service to invest your time, energy, and worldview into a piece of writing and then offer it free to anybody who wants to read it. Others will find inspiration in your writing... and that’s a wonderful feeling. 7. You’ll become more well-rounded in your mindset. After all, blogging is an exercise in give-and-take. One of the greatest differences between blogging and traditional publishing is the opportunity for readers to offer input. As the blog’s writer, you introduce a topic that you feel is significant and meaningful. You take time to lay out a subject in the minds of your readers and offer your thoughts on the topic. Then, the readers get to respond. And often times, their responses in the comment section challenge us to take a new, fresh look at the very topic we thought was so important in the first place. 8. It’ll serve as a personal journal. It trains our minds to track life and articulate the changes we are experiencing. Your blog becomes a digital record of your life that is saved “in the cloud.” As a result, it can never be lost, stolen, or destroyed in a fire. 9. You’ll become more confident. Blogging will help you discover more confidence in your life. You will quickly realize that you do live an important life with a unique view and have something to offer others. The sharpened critical faculty regular blogging also brings to the reading of what others write. Henry James was spot on when he (apparently) said - “How can I know what I think until I read what I write?" You thought you knew something but, when you read back your own first effort at explanation, you immediately have questions– both of substance and style. But this also conveys itself very quickly to changes in the way that you read other people's material – you learn more and faster from a critical dialogue (even with yourself) than from passive reading. It is a fairly comprehensive set of reasons and not all of these will be applicable to most bloggers,  but it provides some cogent arguments to justify the time that blogging entails and sure beats trawling through a lot of dross on social media.

Strathconon Corbetts

Sgurr a' Mhullinn and Meallan nan Uan from Bac an Eich

Tuesday, 5 June 2019

After some miserable summer weather, Tuesday was the only day forecast to be half reasonable in the week ahead and I was keen to climb some more Corbetts. I figured that I could drive up to Strathconon near Contin on Monday evening and start early the next day to climb the three Corbetts located at the end of the glen. It would require two separate walks and, according to the guide books, would take a total of 11 hours. In the past, I could confidently take 3 hours off these guide times but I was doubtful that my hill fitness was up to this or to even attempt the two outings in a day. 

It was raining all Monday and I didn't fancy camping with the midges in the wet before a long day on the hills. I found a cheap Airbnb in Strathpeffer, a room in the tower of a villa. It was a mere 7' x7' and accessed by a ladder that was optimistically described as a stair. It was drier than a tent but not a place from which to attempt any nocturnal visits to the bathroom on the floor below, so I restricted myself to a pint in the nearby golf club bar where I had a reasonably priced meal. The breakfast was excellent and I was on the move by 8am for the drive from Marybank along the Strathconon single track road. Apparently, it is the longest 'strath' in Scotland at 17 miles. With folk heading for work and then the school run, I was going against the flow of traffic so it took almost an hour to reach Strathanmore, the start for the first two Corbetts of the day.

My Airbnb tower, a good value folly

Walk 1   Meallan nan Uan and Sgurr a' Mhuillinn

Ascent:       1034 metres

Distance:    10 kilometres

Time:          4 hours 28 minutes

c   Meallan nan Uan           838m    2hrs 10mins

c   Sgurr na Mhulinn         879m    3hrs 10mins

There is a parking place just beyond the forestry houses at Strathanmore, there was a car coming the other way that had pulled in to let me pass so I continued instead of holding up the local by attempting to manoeuvre into the tight parking spot without reversing into the adjacent ditch. I had to turn round and used the drive of a newly converted house in a former church just up the road, The American owner came out to stop her dogs barking at me and we had a friendly discussion, she seemed pleased to have a visitor to her remote abode, however fleeting or accidental. It is a beautiful glen with lots of well-maintained properties but with a 45-minute drive to get to the main road at Marybank it is far too remote for me. 

The walk begins at the car park, a narrow boggy path snakes its way past a plantation before petering out. There is then another 200-metres of climbing through more boggy grass to a broad plateau at about 400 metres. It had started raining and continued for most of the morning, there was a cool breeze so the waterproof jacket served a double purpose and there was no overheating. It was the sort of slog that can put you off hill walking and then there are another 250 metres of the same type of ascent but steeper to reach Creag Ruadh, the prominent outlier of the Corbett. From here on, it is a delightful grassy ridge towards the conical peak of Meallan nan Uan, although there was not much to see in the clouds. It is not much of a cairn with a loose pile of stones marking its well-defined summit. Nothing was visible and it was raining hard so I had a quick drink before continuing the walk.

Sadly, most of the surrounding hills were in the cloud so I abandoned any thoughts of continuing to the head of the horseshoe where the two tops, Sgurr a'  Choire-rainich and Sgurr a' Ghlas Leathaid,  are considered fine viewpoints towards the Fannaichs and Fisherfield. It was slippy descending to the bealach at Coir' a' Mhuilinn where I crossed the burn and began the steady climb to Sgurr a' Mhuilinn with little visibility. I was beginning to move more easily as I eased into a familiar rhythm but there was little to see other than the cloud ahead. The Met Office forecast had predicted no more than 10% chance of rain and excellent visibility. It is very unusual for their forecasts for the hills to be so inaccurate.

It had cleared slightly by the time I reached the summit but it was still raining. It was not worth stopping so I began the descent down the south-easterly ridge. Although steep in parts it easy going. I crossed the raging burn at the bottom of the ridge by jumping onto a wet rock midstream and by fully swinging my other leg had the momentum to land on the other bank safely. It had been risky but I had reached the stage where getting any wetter was only marginally possible so what the hell. Surprisingly and despite the rain and boggy ground, my new Goretex trainers had kept my feet dry. I was back to where I had started the climb to Meallan nan Uan and it was a quick but boggy descent to the car. I changed shoes and ate some lunch before making a ten-minute drive to Inverchoran in heavy rain for the second walk of the day.

Start of climb at Strathanmore

Strathconon from Creag Ruadh

Meallan nan Uan from the Creag Ruadh

Meallan nan Uan summit

Looking back to Creag Ruadh from Meallan nan Uan

The bealach between Meallan nan Uan and Sgurr a' Mhuillinn

Walk 2  Bac na Eich

Ascent:      776 metres

Distance:   14 kilometres

Time:         4 hours 57minutes

c   Bac na Eich      849m      2hrs 48mins

It was almost 2pm when I began the second walk of the day. I found a parking spot at the entrance of the private drive to Inverchoran Farm. There is a bridge across the impressively wide river Meig that was in full flow. The grounds of Inverchoran Farm are well kept with a field of Clydesdale horses on one side of the drive and an enclosure full of deer at the other side. The road to the farm passes by the house, which has a no entry sign that I observed to my cost. I diverted by way of the adjacent byre that is now a holiday let but then had to ford a bloated burn to reach the track up the glen. I had wet feet and I had not even completed the first kilometre. 

The track rises steeply through a gorge resplendent with birch trees that help hide the conifer plantations on the other side of the river. After a kilometre or so the track drops to the river and another ford. I looked for easier crossings but my feet were already soaking so waded across and began the long walk along a path that follows the Allt Gleann Chorainn, crossing lots of smaller burns disgorging the runoff from Bac na Eich. It was raining for most of the ascent and many of the mountain tops were in the cloud. I was walking on remote, tired from the morning walk but determined to complete the Strathconon Corbetts in the day. 

After 5 kilometres the path climbs steeply up a vehicle track at the head of Gleann Chorainn and a stalker's path joins to the right. It gains another 100 metres but is largely overgrown before it begins to drop down to the river Meig. There was a small cairn at the high point and from here it was necessary to take a bearing and climb another 300 metres over mainly grass and lichens to the summit. Earlier in the day, I had found this sort of climb a struggle but I found a steady pace and the sight of the trig point at the summit reeled me in. At last, the rain had stopped and for the first time all day, I spent some time at the summit admiring the hills of the morning as a rainbow glided down Strathconon. The white fluffy remnants of the clouds rolled across the summits and distant hills that had been invisible a few minutes earlier loomed as dark wavy blue shapes lit up by shafts of sunlight.

I decided against returning by the same route, it had been tedious and contemplated either taking a direct descent to Loch Toll Lochain below or following the ridge down to Sgurr Toll Lochain. With the skies brightening I chose the latter and it was a reasonable route although peat hags slowed things down along the ridge and the descent down the sharp eastern slope of Sgurr Toll Lochain tested the quads and knees. Thereafter there was an easy traverse down to the glen. I forded the burn as the heavens opened and gave me a soaking during the final couple of kilometres back to the car. The rain was too heavy to strip down outside so I had to change my entire clothing inside the car before beginning the 200-mile journey home. I was pleased that I had managed the two walks in just over 9 hours and thought I would struggle to stay awake on the drive home. On the contrary, the A9 was quiet and it was one of the rare times that it was possible to put the car into cruise control and give my feet a rest. I made it home by 11pm feeling pretty good considering the toil of the day.

Key for Munro and Corbett Posts

Looking across the river to Inverchoran Farm and Gleann Chorainn

Gleann Chorainn

Bac na Eich summit looking northeast

Another version of the rainbow over Strathconon

Clouds dispersing at the summit

5 minutes later as the next shower approaches

Loch Toll Lochain from the summit

Sgurr a' Mhuillinn and Meallan nan Uan from Bac na Eich

Sgurr Toll Lochain (left) and Bac na Eichh

Strathfarrar hills finally emerge from cloud