It all started so well.
I went on a road ride, yes, a road ride on my old Voodoo ex-mtb now gravel bike. The one famous for its 20" inner tubes.
Nice quiet roads like this.
I was quite proud of myself - Jamie could take one of his blingcycles on this ride thought I - as I pedalled the heights of the Black Isle.
But the Black Isle is too pastoral for my liking. Its USP is its fine views of the mountains to the north IMO. So north it was, zipping downhill and keeping to as many single lane roads as possible. Some of them had more gravel on them than a gravel road.
Popped into the Urray graveyard to pay my respects to the in-laws.
Now that's close to Clashie wood, isn't it? Surely a wee poke through that wouldn't count because it's pretty mild. So a wee daunder along a path was taken.
Then back on to tarmac. The gorse is lovely at this time of year, makes you forgive/forget what a right **** it is.
Whipped through Marybank and across the Moy Bridge and headed back to Dingwall on the main road.
Main roads don't half suck the joy out of life rhough, so surely I could allow myself just a wee bit of dirt and take a shortcut over the hill.
This hill...
Unfortunately the gorse had closed in, so I turned back after a few hundred yards.
I should have taken a rope, because this lad seems to have found an even better shortcut. I couldn't see where he had stashed his bike though - maybe he had already got it to the top and was nipping back down to get his water bottle or something.
(Bring a rope for our next road ride Jamie)
So I took the easy route in the other direction with the intention of coming out on to the tarmac near Loch Ussie.
Unfortunately I was starting to get an attack of the "I wonder ifs", and almost within reach of the tarmac I diverted to check what had happened to the logged area of the forest since my last visit.
It used to look like this - hard mucky work on a Pompino, slip, slither and slide.
But now it's been sanitised
I was quite pleased. So far the road ride had been just that, apart from the wee path pootle and the diversion into the gorse. I could envisage taking a group of frail elderly chaps on their precious immaculate Jack Taylors and the like on this ride.
Even though it did narrow down a bit, it was mild stuff and in a few hundred yards all there is to do is hop a stile, coast downhill on a grassy field and then back on to tarmac.
Easy, eh?
Alas, by this time the "I wonder ifs" were strong, and seeing as the track was no longer a bog, I wondered if I'd be able to find a chambered cairn I'd been meaning to visit for a while.
Naturally, that meant getting up a steep hill, but it was worth it.
I often wonder just how strong those guys were. No wheeled vehicles, so just what effort did it take to gather those huge rocks and then lift them up? I am pretty sure they had a far higher level of technological sophistication than our history books tell us.
And that's when the road ride stopped. Once you've been lured up one steep hill, it seems rude not to finish the job.
But...
Sir Walter Scott had it right, it was truly a dark impenetrable wood, The path petered out (don't believe everything OS tells you) and I was into a thicket of gorse, brambles and windfallen trees.
After hike-a-bike for barely a km in an hour and falling into several large bog holes I gave up and just straightlined for the top. In the process I even managed to get a puncture. Did I actually say up there something about it being pretty? I've changed my mind, it is still a ****...
'Twas not frabjous joy.
There was some joy at finding the track at the top though. A pause to fix the puncture, and by this stage the rocky singletrack felt like a dual carriage way to me.
I now truly appreciate the expression "You're out of the woods now".
Stopped to take a pic of the Chernobyl monument and take in the view. (BTW the next peak along is the remnants of an Iron Age vitrified fort
Everything was rosy now, the only snag was i had to descend that hill and climb halfway up the one in the background to get home. A mere bagatelle after fighting the gorse.
One thing I learned, I'm not going for a road ride with me again...
IMG_3015 by Jamie Dyer, on Flickr
IMG_3016 by Jamie Dyer, on Flickr
IMG_3024 by Jamie Dyer, on Flickr
