Stirling to Aberfeldy – 44 miles
We heated up the left overs from our curry feast in the youth hostel’s large and empty dining area. Only one other guest was in there when we arrived, which was baffling. Surely that wasn’t just down to the effects of Covid. Phil drew a line at curry for breakfast, which left more for the rest of us. I was reminded how, when I used to travel in the Sahara, a savoury breakfast no different from what you might eat at lunch or dinner seemed to be better for my energy levels than the kind of breakfast sugar feasts of pain-au-chocolat, Frosties or marmalade what we’ve become use to in the west. I finished my microwaved dal feeling well fuelled for the day ahead.
The route out of town took us past Cambuskenneth with its ruined Augustinian abbey and up to the Bridge of Allan where we began to climb up into the foothills of the Highlands. We rode along the side of the lush Kippenrait Glen, which ended in a waterfall, then doubled back to the outskirts of Dunblane, passing the usual bland urbanscape you find on the outskirts of any small town: cheap modern hotels, a supermarket, a car dealership or two, modern housing estates. I thought about the tragedy that darkens the name of this place and probably will do so for centuries to come, maybe even forever. Google ‘Dunblane’ and the second word you’ll see is ‘massacre’. How unfair that this otherwise unremarkable little town, where have people lived, loved, grown old and died for hundreds of years, should be so permanently damned by that day of terror and madness, forever be haunted by its past. That’s what haunting is, when old horror and pain clings to a person or place and won’t let go. We cycled through without any desire to stop.
The road kept rising. The land around was tame and agricultural, with widening vistas down the valley down which the Allan river meandered. We found an open gate and lazed in the lush green field beyond for a while, delving into Tim’s stock of energy bars and supplementing them with wine gums and sheep’s droppings, our affectionate nickname for Jules’s chocolate covered raisins. Then it was “wagons roll…” or “shall we…?” and off we went, Tim and Jules cocooned in the music that flowed through their earbuds, Phil and I listening to the clatter of wheels, the sound of an approach tractor, the rhythm of our own breath.
We found a very inviting coffee shop in the village of Braco, where our B road merged with the A road that went due north. The selection of cakes seemed too lavish for such a little place. We fell into conversation with the owner, a cheerful woman in her forties (at a guess). She asked where we were going. We were often asked that question and it was always hard to know whether to answer with the name of that day’s destination, or come clean and say ‘John O’Groats,’ which sometimes sounded a tad boastful. Upon mention of that legendary place, she was impressed and when she heard we were doing it for charity, she gave us £5. The kindness of strangers. We ate our cakes and downed our coffee on the green opposite the café, and left town with glowing impressions of the little village of Braco.
After stopping in Muthill to take pictures of the old ruined church and tower, we rode on to Crieff and stocked up with sandwiches, wraps, wine gums, muffins, bottles of juice and cigarettes at the Co-op, attracting the curiosity of large groups of school kids who looked at us as if we were a bit crazy, or suspect, or both. Crieff is a typical B-list Scottish market town, pleasant enough with its old turreted and gabled buildings, its town centre green, prospering shops and cafés and gentle surrounding hills. Perhaps not worth a detour, but still. When we cycled up the steep hill to the town centre and turned right onto the A85 I realised I’d driven through Crieff several times already with the family, on our way from Edinburgh to the Ardnamurchan peninsula on the West Coast.
This is the gentle heart of Scotland. There’s none of the fierce grandeur of landscape that you get further north, but rather the pretty and unassuming cosiness of hills and fields and woods. Not far out of Crieff however all that began to change, as the mountains reared up around us, old, barren, bare-backed. The road rose steeply, the horizons opened, and that archetypal vision of Scotland that occupies a permanent place in the popular imagination reasserted itself. The craggy wildness of that heathery tundra was expressed in the names of the hills we rode past: Gualani na Faing, Craggen Voain, Meall Reamhar, Crom Chreag, Craig na Hash. We passed the remains of an old Roman fort and signal tower that overlook the Almond river, dating back to around AD 80. I tried to imagine a legionnaire from one of the North African provinces, or sunny Cappadocia, coming here to do a tour of duty in the dead of winter, and thought of Jon Snow in Game of Thrones, battling the White Walkers in the wilderness beyond the Northern Wall. Place names are a history lesson in themselves. You ride through a little hamlet called Newton, and you know from the very Englishness of that name that it’s a thorn planted in the otherwise Gaelic nomenclature surrounding it.
We pedalled for what seemed like an age looking for a place to stop and enjoy the onset of the golden hour, but the road was hemmed in with barbed wire and padlocked gates. Eventually, just short of Amulree we saw a chain free gate, with a grassy slope behind it that went down to a river. The views to the east were gorgeous, the sky vast and the air light and soft. We ate our sandwiches and then dozed in the warm sun. It was perhaps the first time that the landscape said ‘Scotland’ with conviction.
Then came a steep climb, or what we like to call a ‘bastard hill’, up the length of Glen Cochill to a pass in the woods near Creag Loch. We huffed and puffed…or rather, I huffed and puffed…powered in the final stretch by brute determination and not much else. Phil, who seems to have the lungs of a free diver, remained perfectly capable of talking normally throughout the climb, a feat utterly beyond my capacities. And how Tim was able to race up these hills with his chain on the largest front cog is something I never could understand. Jules trailed us all on his eBike, out of pure consideration for our morale and wellbeing. After the pass, there was a long and blissful downhill glide that took us all the way into Aberfeldy, like surfers on the golden light, the Tay valley rolling out as far as the eye could see from east to west below us. These are the rewards in cycling, the pay back moments.
We’d spent the day thinking that our final destination, the Bunkhouse at Glassie Farm, was on the southern slopes of the valley, off the main road before Aberfeldy. But it became apparent late in the day that it was in fact on the northern side, up an extremely steep track that looked forbidding, or rather, totally impossible for touring bikes with panniers. After we’d crossed the old bridge over the Tay, we turned left and rode a little way to the beginning of the track in question, but then our resolve hit the buffers. The hill above us looked practically vertical in places. Jools rang Julian, the owner of the Bunkhouse, and delivered a polite but effective plea for assistance to the background strains of a metaphorical string section, full of corroborating arguments about aching limbs, mushed muscles and coruscating thirst. Julian, who was just preparing a barbecue dinner for his family, soon relented and promised to come and pick us up after supper. The joy and relief were overwhelming and we headed for the bar of the Ailean Chraggan Hotel, just down the road in Boltachan. It was the dream location for an arrival pint and evening meal. While we drank and ate, we gave Tim a short history of the Highland clearances. He seemed very surprised that such cruelty could have been commonplace in this beautiful land not so long ago.
After a superb dinner, Julian ferried us up the hill to his farm in two lots and told us of his dream of building a bike lift (like a ski-lift except for bikes) up the side of the valley. He had a vision of turning Glassie Farm into a mecca for mountain biking, with world class trails plunging down the valley in all directions. What became blindingly obvious is that there was no way we could have climbed that track on our own, without jetpacks at the very least. But the views at the top were majestic. The place had that rarefied, weightless, widescreen atmosphere you get at the top of ski lifts.
We had a bunkhouse designed for a least 20 people all to our selves. In fact, the infrastructure that Julian and his partner had managed to put in place after many years of graft was truly impressive. Perhaps that dream of mountain biking meccadom wasn’t so starry after all.
Andy Morgan
