The Crask Inn to Bettyhill – 31 miles
The day dawned bright. Brightness and sunshine nudge this landscape heavenwards. Having processed ourselves through breakfast, we left The Crask Inn without much ceremony, almost by stealth. There were no goodbyes, bonne routes, where are you heading today etc. None of that. We just got our bikes from the shed, clipped on our panniers, and continued up the one track road. I read later that the road had been improved by Thomas Telford in 1819. My mind travels back to that time and I see a group of navvies, toiling in the mist, in what was, for Thomas Telford and most people in Britian, Outer Mongolia.
Now we were gliding along the fruit of their efforts, up the hill behind the Crask where a large wind farm was being built. Energy must decarbonise, I know that, but I found myself hoping that all those metallic copses of giant wind turbines wouldn’t rob the landscape of its wildness, not all of it. Wind farms and re-wilding should go hand in hand, but how? I have no idea.
We glided down through the morning sunshine to Altnaharra, passing its one and only hotel, an old but recently refurbished relic from the great dawn of Scottish tourism, which came after King George and General Wade had defeated the rebellious clans and tamed the Highlands, after Wordsworth and Walter Scott had made the idea of wilderness appealing, and at a time when many of the native people of Scotland were being evicted from their homes and forced to migrate to other wildernesses, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand. We hung about the top of the drive down to the hotel, hoping to see someone who might know if it was open and serving coffee. In the end, a man loading sacks of laundry into a van told us that it was open, but didn’t serve coffee at this hour. Wildernesses and convenient opening hours needn’t go hand in hand.
Though the N7 cycle route continued due north to Tongue, we’d been advised by Douglas at the Crask Inn to turn right and take the smaller road along Loch Naver. Not as busy, he’d said, and just as beautiful. And, as it happened, shorter too. Urged by Phil, we contemplated a swim, but couldn’t summon the hardiness and brawn required. Instead, we found a soft grassy verge overlooking the loch and boiled some water to pour over Jools’ coffee bags. I was sceptical about coffee bags. The combination of those two words just sounded wrong. But they made a surprisingly good brew, more than halfway between Gold Blend and Lavazza…
And the loch, the loch. The woman whom we had met on the shores of Loch Lochy, the one who was working with the logging team, called this land God’s own country, and she was right. The water of the loch behaved like intelligent glass, so smooth at times and sending back reflections of such purity that it was hard to know where earth ended and reflection began, and subtly rippled by the slightest breath of wind at other times, changing its texture and colour at the flick of a finger. Above us, hawks, kites, maybe even an eagle, hovered, swooped, rolled in wide curves like the point of an artist’s pen. Logging lorries trundled past on the road behind us; Hi-Lux pickups emblazoned with the logo of a clean energy company; camper vans. We lazed in our very own enactment of la dolce vita, Highland style. The Vikings called this land Sutherland because, for them, it was to the south of Orkney, Shetland, Faroes, northern Norway, and no doubt, for them, it had a more southerly flavour, more trees, more shelter, more ease. We were feeling that now.
It’s also a country for fishermen and there were signs warning off poachers at intervals all along the loch. At its northern end, in the Forest of Naver, we came across a suspended footbridge that had been erected to allow fishermen to fish the other side of the river. The bridge bounced like a trampoline at every step. Tim politely declined to have a go and contented himself with dipping his feet in the ice cold stream. The water was of a blue so deep it was almost black, flecked with white foam. The sun was high, playing peekaboo with the clouds. Today of all days, in this place of all places, so far north we were close to falling off the northern lip of Britain, we had been graced with this weather, better than anything we had experienced in ‘sunny’ Devon or Cornwall.
The valley narrowed as we approached Bettyhill, the river curling its way past fields of grazing sheep. A bird of prey sat proud on a telegraph pole, seemingly unconcerned by our approach and only flapping lazily away when I reached for my phone. I don’t know how, but you could feel the coast approaching. Something in the air was changing, a special freshness, a faint whiff of brine. Just after our B-road merged with the A386, the so called ‘North Coast 500’ or ‘NC500’ for short, we were passed by a convoy of souped up, low-slung, window-tinted BMWs, about nine of them in various shades of black and grey, all driven by young south Asian men. Part of me thought, that’s a strange sight in this remote place. The other part thought, why not? This is God’s own country, all welcome. Then it soon became clear that the NC500 is a favourite road for speed freaks and thrill seekers, on motorbikes, in cars with loud engines, which made it more than a little nerve-wracking for pedallers like us, especially when the road narrowed to a single lane with passing places.
Our first sight of the sea was on a par with the rest of landscape–immense, wild, cinemascopic. It reminded me of Cornwall, only more epic, with rolling waves lining up the wide beach at Torrisdale Bay and crashing against the cliffs beyond. Old ruined crofts provided focus points for picture book photos. We panted up the steep rise to Bettyhill and came to a halt by The Screen Machine, a mobile cinema that roams the far north and west of Scotland bringing a taste of urban life to those remote places. We were looking for the Store Café but lost our way by the school playing fields. A group of kids who were kicking a football about on the pitch saw us and came to offer directions. The way they talked was eager and guileless. Jools remonstrated with one of them for wearing a Man Utd shirt and they bantered for a while, until a teacher came over, slightly suspicious, to find out what we wanted. ‘Won’t your parents be missing you,’ she said to the kids.
The Store Café turned out to be another winner, its tables full of day-trippers and tourists. Tim ordered no less than three cakes to eat alongside our cheese and haggis ciabattas, prompting the owner to say ‘Now you eat those all up…You promised me!’ as she came past our table. I asked one of the young waitresses where her wristbands came from and she told us she just been down to the TRANSMT festival in Glasgow. The Chemical Brothers headlined, but she hadn’t enjoyed their set very much. For her, the music was almost secondary to the heaven-sent release of going crazy with thousands of other youth. Social distancing? Nah, she was having too much fun. I sensed the effort involved in getting your kicks for anyone who lived in a place like this.
Situated high on the hill looking west with wide views over the bay and the headlands beyond, The Bettyhill Hotel was our (almost) end of journey treat. It had celebrated its 200th birthday in 2019–another relic, like the Altnaharra Hotel, from the earliest days of Scottish tourism, now run by a single family, most of whose members work there. The welcome was warm and familial, the place classy in a low-key way but cosy and well-tended. The bar had the feel of an unpretentious community pub. Perfect for us. And there was a dining room that served a copious three-course dinner, black pudding a speciality. All in all…a big tick at the end of our day in God’s own country.
After dinner, I was lying on my bed, blogging away, when Phil came into the room we were sharing. ‘I’ve just seen the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,’ he said. ‘The strangest, strangest bloody thing.’ ‘What was that?’ ‘We were outside smoking, and suddenly we noticed that all the sheep in the field in front of us were standing stock still, not moving a muscle. And they stayed like that for ages. Totally still. We just could not believe it. It was like we were in a weird Scottish sci-fi movie or something.’ He looked visibly perplexed, shaken even.
The mystery of the immobile sheep taxed us over the next few days. Had it been a strange form of mass sheep hysteria? Had they all been immobilised by an alien spaceship that was hovering just above the clouds? Had there been a wolf behind the dry stone wall? We couldn’t find a plausible answer and, to be honest, we were happy for it to remain a very entertaining mystery.
Andy Morgan.
