Loch Hourn

Arnisdale to Fort Augustus

We stumble out into the calm morning air around 7.30am to see not a soul. Clouds hang low. It 's Dave's birthday, so we wish him a good one but breakfast starts at gone 8 and that’s what we had on our minds.

We pedal back to the Glenelg Inn, where a few guests have already made their way down to the dining room. We get our ten quid’s worth.

It's good being able to use the toilets to clean up after a night in the tent.

Debbie tells me she’d got all the bags as I come out from brushing my teeth, so we set off to ride towards Arnisdale. It is at 9.30, which gives us one and a half hours to get there, to meet Peter, and get his boat all the way up Loch Hourn, saving us a trek over the peaks, following a rough trail that climbs to over 500m. No thanks.

The road rises steeply pretty early on, not giving us much time to limber up. I stop to take a photo. Where is my camera?

Debbie didn’t pick it up off the dining table. I'm pissed, riding back the couple of kilomters to get it, knowing we’ll subsequently be late for our 11 o'clock rendezvous.

There's no phone signal here, in the back of beyond, and maybe Peter won’t wait for us. Then we’ll be screwed - what with Dave's painful knee and swollen ankle.

Camera slung over my shoulder, the climb turns out to be a long one. It warms us all up. I press on and made it to Arnisdale only a couple of minutes past 11 to find Peter standing on the village's one lane, right in front of his white-painted bungalow, a place he’s built himself.

Debbie says he looks like George Clooney and I take a snap of them.

Peter shows us where the jetty is. There are some people on it, just colorful little dots in the far distance. They're the English absentee landowners who come up now and then to stay in a huge lodge that also overlooks Arnisdale By, a sweeping arc that faces rolling hills rising up on the south side of the calm loch.

A few craft are moored just off shore. Peter points out his small boat and says he’ll wait for the landowners to leave before using their private jetty, just so as not to court any condescending comments. He reckons the rich lodge owners have 80% of the land around the vast, wild area.

After about 30 minutes the chug of a boat’s engine tells us they’d set off and it's now OK for us to ride over there and wait. In that time we learn that the biggest shrimp – a langoustine - caught in these waters was some 26 inches long (50cm).

Peter had been concerned his boat wouldn’t cope with three bikes and passengers. He’d quizzed me about weight on the phone and said speed would be slow if he couldn’t plane across the loch. He seems to think this won’t be an issue as we load the bikes on carefully, packing cloth between each and the sides of his expensive vessel.

Then we set off, cruising slowly at first. The nose soon comes up as we accelerate westwards, the view of dinky Arnisdale left in our wake.

This isn’t just an A to B trip.

Peter turns out to be an excellent orator, as well as a man who knows a thing or two about life in general and the whole area - its history, culture and ecology. He takes us to see some seals resting on rocks by the north shore, their large eyes looking back at us betraying their bewilderment. He points out birds. He tells us of being disoriented when diving and getting entangled in a massive school of jelly fish as we sail through hundreds of them occupying a large swathe of the water, their translucent bodies floating near the surface.

We pause by one of the half dozen cottages that are only accessible by boat. It stands by the bank and he Peters says how a Mrs. Williams had once occupied it. The local postman would row a boat for a whole day to deliver her mail once a week. When he eventually got a small motor, the Post Office cut his wage. He said these simple places now change hands for at least a couple of hundred thousand pounds, bought by the rich from England or Sweden, by people who wanted to get away from it all, but maybe for just a weekend.

He then demonstrates how easy it was to catch mackerel by tossing a thick nylon line overboard and then reeling it back in. There are six fish on it, which get thrown back into the water.

Peter says he gets paid to cull deer, which eat far too many of the saplings and strip all the undergrowth, pointing out the stark difference between the fenced areas and where they can roam. We hear about the rare Scots Pine trees that have been proven to predate the last Ice Age, the cones of which sell for a fortune. Peter collects them at certain times, climbing the remote trees and sending them off to a research center.

It's 80 quid well spent.

We get off to find a narrow strip of tarmac. It hugs the shore, curving around a bend and in the distance we can see there’s be a big hill. The head of the loch is enclosed by high peaks.

We soon pass the end of the hiking trail that winds its way from Arnisdale, dropping sharply from the hills to the south, and know it’d have taken us hours and a lot of hard effort to get over it to where we now stand.

Coming to a painted sign offering coffee tea and snacks is a nice surprise. We place our bikes against the stone farmhouse wall and walk across the cobbled yard. Inside the small tea room decorated with large photos of the area are two other customers, a pair of 30-something Germans who are driving around Scotland.

We have a pot of tea and chat to the owner, a man in his 50s whose accent is split between Scottish and Yorkshire, a place he’d spent a lot of his working life. Now here he is, about as far away from it all as it’s possible to get in the UK. He loves it.

The German’s vehicle is the only one we see for hours. The cul-de-sac single track is a rarely traveled one.

The road is in decent condition and wiggles around contours, rising higher for a few kilometers. A stream trickles down below us. We cross it on a cute bridge which stands by the ruin of a cottage, which is no doubt a relic of the Clearances in the early 1800s.

This old drovers’ road would have seen the men from the Highlands herding cattle southwards a couple of hundred years ago. Sheep were introduced to the area and proved to be more profitable, so the cattle drovers’ jobs disappeared. The less well-off families who lived in the rented houses got kicked out, many subsequently emigrating to faraway USA and Australia, and turning the Highlands into one of the least populated areas in Europe. We didn’t see a soul.

Coming to a large, modern bridge is a shock, with its mass of concrete seeming at odds with the otherwise perfect landscape. A few houses appear and at one point we pass a large, quite elegant building with the word Hotel on its wide, stone front - a Victorian place built for tourists who likely never materialized. It would have been a long journey. There is also a remote, red telephone box, which I seriously doubt i in working order.

After joining the main road and riding along it for a while to Invergarry, it's great to find the hotel there serving food. And it is good stuff.

One of the three waitresses tells us about a track at the back which would cut out some of the busy road to Fort Augustus. We later find it. It is a narrow overgrown trail, but eventually leads to a logging road, one that's quite flat, before dropping down to intersect with the A82.

We not on it to long before reaching a bridge that gives access to the canal path heading north to Fort William.

It's getting late when we arrive in the town. The first B&B we knock at has rooms and the rates are OK. The shower feels good, and the beer in the pub around the corner goes down well.

Dave's birthday ride has been one to remember.

Today's ride: 80 km (50 miles)
Total: 290 km (180 miles)

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