And a happy new year to you …

… which was the message that I got from WordPress yesterday when they provided some statistics about this blog in 2012. They even offered me a method of uploading their report to the blog but it didn’t work properly so I gave up after two failed attempts and a lot of irritation. The report was big on graphics but poor on functionality – possibly a metaphor for the UK in 2013 – so my apologies if you’ve tried to access it but here’s a summary:

–  the blog had 89 posts, 185 pictures and about 9600 views

–  the busiest day was the day that I finished (17th July) with 220 views

–  80% of the views came from the UK but the rest came from 23 other countries (but perhaps those from Russia, Hungary, Romania and the like were just looking for friends)

–  the posts on 16th, 17th and 18th July generated 42 comments

–  Cornish Sexgod (a crowdpulling name if ever I saw one!) led the comments race with a total of 73; silver went to John Moore (52) and bronze to Deri (27); Jill and Christine were not far behind but left their final sprints too late

So there you have it.

But while I’m writing, a few end-of-year snippets:

I have decided to publish the paperback and it’s with the printer at the moment. I’m frustrated by silly and trivial delays – I had hoped to have it on circulation before Christmas. It will be available direct from me, from Amazon or from the publisher and I’ll post and email details as soon as copies are available. The cost will be in the £10-£12 region and I expect to be able to donate at least £2 per copy to Christian Aid. It has the same title and cover design as the electronic version but there has been some redesign of the inside and a little updating.

Donations continue to trickle in – my heartfelt thanks to everyone who’s helped to push us over the £10,000 target. In particular I was very grateful for the decision by my old school Association to donate the collection from its annual carol service. I went to Bristol for this and it was an enjoyable and moving experience.

The JustGiving donation site is still open and will remain so for the time being. So will the website though the information there is now rather out of date. I am booked to give some talks about the walk later this year and these will no doubt bring the walk alive again.

And 2013? I really don’t know. I veer between ‘never again’ and ‘wouldn’t it be good to …’. You’ll be the first to know if I decide to do anything like this again. In the meantime I must work off the excesses of the last few days – I may even go for a walk.

Back to the blog to tell you about the book that includes the blog….

This is a weird feeling – I’ve forgotten what it was like to write posts for this blog! I feel as though I’m back in a B&B room, rain falling outside, searching for some inspiration. At least I’m not balancing a netbook on my knee and peering at a small screen.

I’ve come back to tell you about the book, which is finished in its on-line incarnation. We’ve emailed everybody who was on any of our contact lists and spread the word around other contacts but, just in case you happen on this blog and want to know more, this is another trailer for the book. It’s called Something worth walking for and the cover looks like the picture on the right. It describes all aspects of the walk – the birth of the idea, the planning and training, the choice of the route and the equipment that I took. It then describes the walk on a day-by-day basis with extracts from the blog, a good deal of other information and many more photographs.  You can download gpx files and plot my route in detail on mapping software such as Google maps or OS Getamap. I give details of where I stayed each night, what the whole excursion cost and how much money we’ve made for Christian Aid and the education of children in poor countries.

The book is available in three pdf formats (differing only in the quality of the pictures) and as a flip book (which is the easiest to read on screen). Full information and the download details are on my website, so go to www.wilmut.net/lejog and follow the links.

How does the walk look now from the perspective of almost 3 months? SWell, people are still asking me whether I’ve recovered and whether my feet are OK!  Somebody this morning said how slim and fit I looked (it was a gloomy room). And I’ve been asked whether I’m planning another walk.  Shortly after I got back my answer was ‘never again’ but I’m not quite so sure now. I really miss the walk; despite the rain and the discomfort it gave me a freedom that was very congenial. Freed from the things that normally occupy my time, I was able to focus on one goal and deal with one set of issues. I notice that the friend why cycled from end-to-end last year is now about to do another ride across part of France – he’s clearly got the bug and I can understand the temptation to repeat the experience.

So we’ll see. But for the time being it’s the book that matters so, if you like what you see, please leave a comment and tell me whether a paper version is worthwhile, even if it would cost £12 or more a copy (which is the best estimate that I’ve had so far).  And thank you again for reading this blog; there may be another post but, maybe there won’t.

July 27: Aftermath

Cornwall

I’ve been home for a week and the walk seems like another world as I adjust to the more everyday issues that have piled up whilst I was away.  It is ironic that, as soon as I got back, the weather improved across most of Britain, to the point where I now feel the need to re-acclimatise.

I more or less closed this blog a week ago, not intending to write any more. But things have moved on a bit and I thought that I needed to share some of the developments of the past week. I won’t keep doing this – without the collection of new experiences to write about every day it’s not easy to compile new posts and I will probably become quite boring if I try. However ….

To my surprise a welcome back party had been organised for me at our community centre which is a superannuated Victorian school. I wasn’t supposed to know about it and was to be enticed there on some pretext, to be confronted by masses of local supporters. Inevitably, I did hear about it but was still overwhelmed by the number of people who came and the degree of enthusiasm that they showed. It was a rather wonderful evening which added (through new donations and the proceeds of a raffle) more than £500 to the sponsorship and boosted my ego (and my level of embarrassment) very considerably. It’s made me look at the walk in a new light – seeing all the people who have donated, given encouragement, offered supporting prayers, stood in for me whilst I was away, given me accommodation, read and contributed to the blog and in many other ways, as collaborators in a jointly owned project. I may have been doing the walking but I no longer think that I own the walk. It’s a good feeling.

What I have also been doing is to try to organise the information from the walk into a form that can be published. In the course of doing this I have a few revised and updated statistics to offer.

• I actually walked 1087 miles in 68 days and had 9 rest days
• My daily average distance was almost exactly 16 miles
• The shortest daily distance from Appleby to Dufton (June 15th) was 4.1 miles; the walk was curtailed by bad weather
• The longest daily distance was 24.5 miles from Carr Bridge to Inverness on 8th July
• I did 28,144 metres of ascent which is 3.2 times the height of Everest; I also did almost the same amount of descent
• The lowest point was sea level (at several points in Somerset and Gloucestershire and in Scotland) and the highest at 835 m (2740 feet) in Lairig Ghru
• 57% of the walk was on tracks and footpaths; 29% on lanes and minor roads (those coloured yellow on OS maps) and 15% on A or B roads (of which two-thirds was in Scotland) ; these are approximate figures.

You’ll see that I’m still using this unsatisfactory mix of metric and imperial units; this is to keep a consistent presentation in the blog. However, this will now stop and I’ll use only metric units (with imperial in brackets where it helps); this means that I walked 1750 km at an average daily distance of 25.7 km which looks a whole lot better than when quoting distances in miles.

Which takes me to publications. I was urged by quite a number of people to publish the blog as it stands. I’m not convinced that this is worthwhile; separated from the interest in the walk as it happened, the blog will probably look rather unexciting. But I would like to produce an account of the walk, incorporating some material from the blog but adding background material and explanation and a more complete description of the route for each day. I would also like to make the route available either as maps or (more probably) as plottable files that can be added to digital OS maps or Google maps. I’m working on this now and will be discussing details of production, publicity and promotion with Christian Aid in a couple of weeks’ time. If it’s to be useful, it has to be got out quickly and if it’s to be cost-effective it will almost certainly need to be a digital book rather than on paper but that part of it has yet to be finalised. I’d like to use it to enhance the sponsorship income but not to penalise those who havealready donated generously; this needs to be thought through. Assuming that this goes ahead I will advertise it as widely as possible, including on my website and on the blog, so keep a lookout for something in the next few weeks.

And finally … someone has said that they’d like a picture of the feet that walked more than 1750 km.  I’m not about to indulge this sort of fetish – here is a picture of the left foot which performed well; the picture of the right foot has been withheld as a punishment and to protect the innocent.

July 18: It was buttercups all the way

From Inverness, having come down here on the train today.

I don’t think that this whole thing will come into focus for some time. I am neither elated nor depressed at the moment – just wanting to get home and to stop living out of a rucksack, planning routes and organising B&Bs and being a slave to the nightly blog posting. This post is just a reflection on yesterday, to bring the report of the walk to a proper conclusion. I would have written it last night but was so tired that only a very short post was feasible.

As days have gone, yesterday was one of the best – not just because I got to the end but because of my route, what I saw, the weather and how it all went. In the end it was 20 miles and I had called the lady organising the welcome the night before, so say that I’d get to John O’Groats by 4 o’clock. Well, that turned out to be optimistic. I left Wick good and early along the A99 past Tescos and the airport and stomped up to the point where the road crossed the pipeline railway. This was a railway track built to assemble and then move long sections of oil pipeline down to the shore to be laid on the seabed connecting the rigs to land. It’s derelict now but there is still a cluster of buildings at the site, presumably servicing existing pipeline installations. The access rod also leads to Sinclair Bay which has a beach to dream of. It’s a couple of miles of wholly unspoiled, unoccupied sand; some sun and a palm tree and you’d have a tropical paradise. Instead it’s the North Sea which, yesterday, was gentle and blue.

I went from the bay through the village of Keiss and things then got more difficult. The cliff path started well enough but got less and less clearly defined and my progress became slower and slower. Parts of the path had collapsed so I had to take to the fields, climbing fences and wading through long grass though the buttercups glowed  cheerfullyas they had in Cornwall over two months earlier. The chances of arriving at JOG at 4pm looked increasingly remote so I gave up on the clifftop and went back to the A99 and marched northward as quickly as I could, eventually phoning to change the arrival time to 5pm. That enabled me to walk through Stirza and out onto another clifftop path that was considerably better and much more interesting.

There are geos along this coast – inlets in the cliffs, some of which go back 200 or 300 metres and are home to many nesting sea birds. They are spectacular with the clearly bedded sandstone creating shelves and stacks that make the whole very impressive. I could see the lighthouse on Duncansby Head in the distance and was able to stride across the heather and grass towards it – a very satisfying way to read a goal such as this.

There were quite a lot to people at Duncansby (there’s a road out to it from JOG); they were walking the cliffs looking at nesting gannets and seals basking on rocks, walking dogs or just looking at the lighthouse.I took some photographs of myself draped over the trig point. Then it was a mile or so west along the cliff, looking across the Pentland Firth to the Orkneys, to the muddle and mess that is John O’Groats. The famous hotel is being revamped and, with its towers surrounded with scaffolding, it could be a perfect Hitchcock gothic horror film set. But my welcoming party marched over and it was wonderful to be greeted, photographed, given coffee and have the walk enthused over. I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds.

I stayed the night with Christian Aid friends at Dunnet but wasn’t the best of guests – I think that I was just too tired to be properly sociable. Then Jane kindly took me to Thurso this morning to get the train down to Inverness – and I was on my way home.

July 17: Well, that’s that then

Wick to John O’Groats; 20 miles

I am pleased  .. very pleased … relieved … very relieved … to say that I’m here – at sunny John O’Groats which looks remarkably like Lands End. I walked, partly on the road but largely on a cliff path above a blue and glistening North Sea, to Duncansby Head (which is as far from Land End as you can get) and then on to John O’Groats where I was met by a very friendly group of Christian Aid supporters who took my photograph, bought me coffee and said some very complimentary things. I am overwhelmed by all this and the enormity of finishing the walk has yet to sink in.

I will try to write a more comprehensive post tomorrow; in the meantime I will go to bed to sleep off the physical and emotional stresses of the day.

Goodnight.

July 16: Upbeat and informative. That’s me.

Swiney to Wick; 15 miles

I have been encouraged to be more positive in these posts and instructed to include conversations with locals. Though this is the penultimate post of the walk (though not, I expect, the last word) I will try to comply. However, I would say that it was not the purpose of this walk to try to hold conversations with people in bars or cafes, I have not been in many bars or cafes except in pursuit of essential sustenance, many of the people I’ve met have not been local or have not had much of interest to say (apart from complaining about the weather) and I hope that I’ve made it clear that this walk has had its share of ups as well as downs.

I am, at the moment, in a B&B overlooking part of Wick harbour and out to the North Sea. The sun is shining, the sea is blue and all the locals that I can see are smiling. As a last B&B of the walk this is precisely what I could have hoped for, particularly since the walk this morning was in unrelieved gloom and rain. Neither the gloom nor the rain nor the sunshine was forecast – I was led to expect light cloud and dryness. I am in an optimistic mood because of the weather and the outlook, because I have located somewhere to have a meal this evening, because I’ve managed to get some clothes washed that will dry quite quickly, because this B&B has WiFi (so that I will easily complete this post to the blog) and, especially, because I have less than 20 miles to go tomorrow before I celebrate at JOG. I couldn’t be more upbeat.

There is little enough to say about this morning’s walk. I did it along the road because I was so brassed off with the weather that I wanted it finished as soon as possible. I tramped into Wick in the pouring rain and made for the station where I stripped off the waterproofs and ate my lunch. That alone was sufficient to encourage the sun to come out so I walked around Wick, found a cafe and a cappuccino and read the newspaper. I have not been to Wick before and may not come here again; in the sunshine it looks reasonable enough but in the rain it would not be my holiday resort of choice. But Wickers or Wickmen or Wicks (or whatever they call themselves) look pleasant enough and I see in the guide to Caithness that Wick in the 19th century was Europe’s largest herring port with 1000 boats working out of the harbour. Indeed, such was its importance that Thomas Telford, no less, redesigned the harbour which I’m looking over now.

One local accosted me as I was heading for the B&B. He was of my age I think and had probably been having a pleasant time at a bar somewhere during the morning. He had a nondescript dog with him. “Are you on a walking holiday then?” “Yes, sort of.” “Are you having a look round Wick?”  “Yes, I’ve not been here before so I thought that I’d take a walk around.” “Did you know that Wick has the shortest street in the country, possibly in the world?” “Yes, I had heard that.” “If you go along there you’ll see Mackay’s Hotel – it’s where two roads meet at an apex and that’s Ebenezer Street that’s just 6’9″ long. The Hotel is no 1 Ebenezer Place – there’s a 1 on the doorway” (I am paraphrasing here – the description was a little less succinct and I think he said 9’6″). “Yes, I saw Mackay’s Hotel earlier – I’ll go and have another look.” He was, I think, about to show me the way.

Mercifully, at that moment, a car pulled up and someone hailed my local gent – he was distracted long enough for me to make my escape. Consequently, we didn’t get onto the topic of Scottish independence or the status of women in the kirk but I’m sure that he had information and views on both matters. I didn’t speak to the dog.

So tomorrow is it – the last day of this walk and I do hope that the sunshine stays with me all day – it would make the whole experience that bit more memorable.  I will do a short post tomorrow evening  or on Wednesday and then another when I get home. Once I’ve gathered my wits I’ll decide how I’ll follow up on the walk and on this blog so do keep monitoring the website www.wilmut.net/lejog to see what’s happening. I will try to upload some recent photographs later this evening.

If I forget to say it tomorrow, thanks for reading this and many many thanks for the comments and encouragement. The walk wouldn’t have happened without all the support of all kinds and I’ll always be grateful for that.

TTFN (younger viewers will need to Google that).

July 15: I march into Caithness

Helmsdale to Swiney; 21 miles

Yes, this is my last county; beyond this I have to swim.

It chucked it down soon after I left my B&B in Helmsdale and I had to go for the full wet gear. It’s a three-mile uphill haul out of the village and the rain had stopped by the time I reached the top; the sun came out and the North Sea appeared bluish in patches. So off with the gear and a nice day for a walk – even along the A9. In fact, there was little traffic during the morning. The lorries and white vans were all still in their beds and only a few cars disturbed my peace. It’s a splendid coast with tiny harbours at Berridale, Dunbeath and Latheronwheel and a roller-coaster of a road connecting them. Being road walking, it was possible to make quick progress and I knocked off the miles in 8 hours that included a lunch stop and a couple of other short breaks.

This is wild country. The road, with nowhere else to go, hugs the mountainsides above the sea, slowly giving way to farmland as I walked north. It’s a very open landscape and, for much of the way, I could see the road snaking away into the far distance. There are snow gates on each section of road and, once shut, these would completely isolate the small communities. There is a steep drop and several hairpin bends at Berridale which is a very lush valley enclosed between the bleaker hills. There were, of course, escape lanes on the hills – I had never before seen them referred to as ‘soft escape beds’ which conjured up quite the wrong sort of image. Then, as I neared my B&B, farmers were cutting, turning and bailing grass – taking advantage of the relatively settled weather, which I hope will persist for two more days. After that, I don’t care!

I passed the track down to Badbea which was one of the settlements established by the displaced victims of the highland clearances. Here they attempted to scratch a living on the very marginal land at the tops of the cliffs and it was said that parents used to tie down their children and animals to prevent them being blown off the cliffs int the sea. The settlements were doomed from the start – there was no possibility that the villagers could scratch a living from that land and people gradually left, mostly as emigrants to North America or Australia. I haven’t seen Badbea (something else to come to on a more leisured visit) but I understand that it’s a sad and ruined place – a monument to the grossest inhumanity.

I was not the only traveller to John O’Groats. I passed a group of cyclists getting ready to depart from Helmsdale and they later passed me as we all ground up the long hill. They were expecting to make JOG today but I was secretly pleased to see that their baggage was being carried in a support vehicle – it makes me proud to be a walker!

The A9 doesn’t boast much in the way of cycle lanes – only the newest parts of the road have a lane marked off with a solid white line where cyclists and walkers can travel in reasonable safety. Otherwise there are pavements in the villages and towns but these are relatively limited. Everywhere else one treads the white line at the edge of the road, trying not to stumble off the tarmac onto the verge or over the line into the road. I prefer to walk on the left of the road, only crossing to the right when I risk being out of sight on a left hand bend. That way, I can legitimately plod on, leaving the drivers to either swerve round (which most do without slowing) or to slow behind me until it’s safe to pass. Facing the traffic, I feel obliged to step onto the verge when there’s oncoming traffic but motorists simply take advantage of this and zoom past as quickly and as closely as possible. Perhaps the day will come when every larger road has wide pedestrian and cycle lanes along its entire length, acknowledging the entitlement of pedestrians and cyclists to safe passage.

I finally have reflections on banana skins and widgets. Banana skins first: had you realised that we are in the midst of an in-car banana consumption craze? And that, once finished with, the banana skins are thrown out of the cars (and lorries and vans for all I know)? I have seen dozens of banana skins in the gutters and on the verges and I have a confession to make. As a 14-year old I went to Bordeaux as part of the Bristol-Bordeaux exchange. I was taken out by my host family in their Citroen (one of those sleek 1950s ones that looked like a sucked lozenge). I was in the back seat alongside  Olivier, my exchange partner and we were given bananas to eat. At Olivier’s urging I wound the window down and threw the banana skin out only to be told (by a gleeful Olivier) that this had wrapped itself round the face of a cyclist whom we were passing at speed. I have never before confessed to this misdemeanour and I hope that no elderly French cyclists are reading this blog.

Mixed with the banana skins by the sides of the road are widgets. A widget is any small artefact that makes things work – it could be a bolt, a nut or a washer or a small plate, lever or pulley. There’s a huge number of these objects on our roads all, I suppose, having fallen off vehicles. How many break-downs or, worse still, crashes have occurred because a vital widget has been lost? Think what a haul of scrap metal there would be if all the country’s lost widgets were collected together. Special vehicles with powerful magnets could patrol our roads collecting the haul which could be melted down and sold to pay off the deficit. Think Osborne, the widget wonder.

And I have to say that it doesn’t stop with widgets. There is an unaccountable number of discarded rubber gloves on our verges. But never in pairs.

July 14: Another golf course and more A9

Brora to Helmsdale; 12 miles

This wasn’t the most demanding day of the walk; it was pleasant enough but did use the A9 quite a lot. It started alongside another golf course built on the dunes north of Brora where I had a very comfortable stay and one of the best night’s sleep of this whole adventure.

Before I started the walk I went to the optician to get some new contact lenses. I’ve worn contacts since the mid 1980s, though rather less since I retired, and they’re much better than glasses when it’s raining or when I get very hot and glasses begin to slide down my face. I have worn the lenses every day of the walk but, shortly after I got into Scotland, I began to get trouble with my eyes feeling as though they had grit in them. The problem has come and gone but yesterday was a bad day; one eye was very sore and I was crying as I walked along. I took the lenses out but, by yesterday evening, the eye was very uncomfortable. The good night’s sleep has more or less cured the problem but I’m wearing glasses today as a precaution.

[I should say that I’m in a cafe in Helmsdale and there’s a large family sitting opposite with a small child called Archie who is extremely noisy and who looks like a small Alex Salmond. He’s clearly stressed out by this family (especially when goaded by his older sister) and probably hungry so I can only hope that the arrival of food will silence him. ]

The golf course walk out of Brora was followed by a long stint on the A9 made easier because it’s Saturday with few lorries on the road. It is boring and sometimes worrying since many drivers prefer to swerve round me rather than slow down. I have another long dose of this tomorrow and then I think that things will improve.

It’s clear that I have moved from being an object of curiosity to being commonplace. Until Inverness most people I spoke to had never previously met an end-to-end walker. Now, I’m taken for granted – just one of the eccentric minority that chooses to walk rather than ride. I think that people are still approving though I have had a small number of annoyed horn blasts as drivers have swerved past me  on the A9. Some cyclists have also passed me, bikes laden with luggage and only a few hours away from the finish. I respect cyclists for their general fitness and girth of thigh but I can’t help feeling that the use of a mechanical aid is something of a cheat.

I passed the plaque which records the killing, in the 18th century, of the last wolf in Sutherland. The plaque was put up in the 1920s when someone presumably thought that this was an event well worth recording, though whether it signalled approval or sadness I can’t be sure. Wolves, could they see the plaque, would no doubt have a view of this.

And so to Helmsdale which is small, with a harbour with some inshore fishing boats in it and a pleasant demeanour; this is where I ate a late lunch.  Like most of the places I’ve been through recently it has a railway station on the line that winds around NE Scotland connecting Thurso and Wick with Inverness and which I will travel back down next Wednesday. It has, I think, 4 trains a day in each direction but none on Sundays and it’s strangely reassuring that a line as eccentric as this should have survived the cuts and rationalisations that beset the railways  in the 20th century.

And speaking of travelling back, I’m not sure that I’ve been explicit about the last days of this walk. So, tomorrow is a 20+ mile haul to a B&B near Lybster, all on the A9. Then, on Monday, I have a shortish walk to Wick (I had considered going to Watten but almost certainly will not).  All being well, Tuesday is then the final day when I’ll walk from Wick via Keiss to Duncansby Head and then to John O’Groats.

And that will, at last, be that.

[And the noisy family is leaving and I can enjoy my second cappuccino in peace. As people have stood up I see that Archie will shortly have a younger sibling; whether this will send him over the top or silence him forever I shall never know.]

PS (later in the evening) I’ve just inserted the photographs (which always take more time to do than writing the blog) having returned from the local chippy. This is no ordinary chippy – it is a restaurant called La Mirage and has been rated by Clarissa Dickson-Wright as one of the 6 best chippies in Britain.  If she sampled all the chippies in the country before coming to this conclusion we have an explanation for her imposing appearance. It’s not something you’d expect to find in a small place like Helmsdale but it had a very varied menu, expert, efficient and cheerful service and a wine list. The fish and chips were excellent and the place was packed, with tables reserved in advance; I was lucky to get in. It was my first and almost certainly my only fish and chip dinner of the walk and I will cherish the experience.

July 13: A two castle day

Dornoch to Brora; 19 miles

It was hard to leave the B&B in Dornoch; apart from the comforts of the place I had interesting conversations about Kansas and the Battle of Embo at breakfast, together with a check on the best onward route for me to take. It seems such a shame to leave B&Bs like this after just one night – I feel that I don’t do them justice.

But I strode out on dry roads under a grey sky out of Dornoch which, again, I haven’t given enough attention. My route took me past the local golf course, backed by a suitably impressive hotel. Not many people playing – it reminded me of a comment by my host in Innerleithen earlier in the walk who said that local gold courses were struggling to get members. There may have been few players but there was an impressive number of machines being used to mow the greens. The North Sea didn’t exactly sparkle but it made a good backdrop.

The route was along a disused railway track that went through Embo and then joined a minor road that ranm along the southern edge of Loch Fleet that is a small tidal loch at the heart of a National Nature Reserve. Along the way I passed the ruins of Skelbo Castle, which brings me to the Battle of Embo which probably took place in about 1260. A party of Danes landed at the mouth of Loch Fleet and camped near Embo. Richard de Moravia of Skelbo Castle engaged the Danes and held them in check until the Earl of Sutherland could get there with a stronger force; however, in the course of the battle Richard was killed. The Earl apparently then slew the Danish leader with the leg of a horse (detached from its body and picked up off the battlefield). Richard is buried on Dornoch Cathedral and there’s now a horseshoe on Dornoch’s coat of arms. I can vouch for the horse story as I saw this morning a drawing of the incident done on the battlefield by the well-known medieval artist Macasso.

I ten had a dose of the A9 for a couple of miles before escaping down a track through some woodland, then past another golf course (where I think no-one was playing) into Golspie which was, I thought, a bit nondescript. But it did give me access to the dunes and a seat overlooking the beach where I could have a late lunch. Lest you think that I indulge in an orgy at lunchtime let me say that, throughout this walk, I’ve dined on a mixture of nuts (peanuts or cashews) and sultanas, followed by a choccy bar (usually a Bounty but I’ve recently been seduced by the odd Snicker) and an apple, all washed down with water. Anyway, it was good to sit and look at the sea and then walk on across the front of Dunrobin Castle, the seat of the Earls and Dukes of Sutherland.

The Castle as it is today is a 19th century building in a baronial style and it certainly cuts an impressive picture. However, I’m not particularly well-disposed to Earls, Dukes, Countesses and the like and particularly not to the Sutherlands who, in the late 18th and through the 19th centuries played a major part in the highland clearances that were the brutal removal of people from the land in order to ‘improve’ agricultural production, especially the keeping of sheep. The suffering was immense with the  destruction of communities and culture and a major loss of the gaelic language that is said to now be more widely spoken in parts of Canada than it is in Scotland. So I hurried past Dunrobin despite entreaties from the Countess to join her for afternoon tea.

And so, with another small dose of the A9, I arrived in Brora where I am in another elegant B&B where I have received a splendid welcome.  Tomorrow I have an easy day that will take me to Helmsdale which will be the launch pad for the final 3-day push to JOG. I can’t wait.

Just to finish – is it my sense of humour or is this sign just a bit odd?

July 12: The outlook improves

Invergordon to Dornoch; 19 miles

All sorts of things looked more positive today. First, the weather looked better – not a tropical blue sky but a light grey one with the occasional blue streak, the temperature may have reached 15, there was a reasonable breeze and NO RAIN appeared. Bliss.

Then I had a good early start and a steady walk – too much road, but that’s going to be the story of the last few miles of this marathon (there’s only about 80 miles left to do!!!). It was an interesting walk that took in Tain, a bridge and Dornoch and plenty of interesting bits in between. And I began to see some advantages in this coastal route. I certainly won’t get bored and, although I have to put up with the A9 and its traffic, it isn’t as busy as I had expected and there’s plenty to see. I do hanker after the inland cross-country route but there would be long sections of that without much variety – just mountains, lochs, streams, mountains, lochs, streams and so on. Anyway, that’s what I’m telling myself.

So, to the details. The first part of the walk was along the northern shore of the Cromarty Firth. I left the oil rigs behind but got a better view of the 6 huge oil rig legs that stand in the water on the southern shore waiting, I gather, for the resolution of a financial dispute that’s been going on for years. They look like the fat lady’s legs on a 1950s Blackpool postcard but I guess that they may rust where they stand. Then inland, up through forestry on minor roads until I was walking down a lane into Tain which sits close to the south shore of the Dornoch Firth. As I approached I was accosted by an aggressive lamb that strutted along its side of the fence as I walked along mine. Most lambs beat a retreat when they see me but this one was bleating loudly; was it warning me off, wanting favours or just bored? I walked on into Tain, a little unnerved. As I came into the town I passed the old poor house, now converted to residences but still clearly betraying its origins. There is a wonderfully informative website about workhouses by Peter Higinbotham  (Google ‘workhouses’ to get to it); it includes a full description of the Tain Poor House which was one of three in Ross & Cromarty.

Tain is a very attractive small town, no doubt sustained by the nearby Glenmorangie Distillery. It retains some grand buildings and many smaller traditional houses and shops. With the A9 now diverted around the town it is a pleasure to walk through and I had enough time to enjoy a large cappuccino and to catch up with the newspaper. Then on to the bridge that crosses the Dornoch Firth. This was my fourth and last estuary crossing which (a notice told me) was opened in 1991 by the Queen Mother. The bridge has approach causeways on either side and then an 890m bridge that is apparently the longest in Europe built by the cast-push method. If I understand this correctly it is a process where a completed section of a bridge (such as a single span) is launched outwards on special supports mounted on a previously completed span, then joined to the previously completed sections. This then forms the basis for the launch of the next section.

There’s a sandy beach on the north shore and I had my first beach lunch of the walk, though the tide was out so that paddling was not an option. But here is another compensation of this coastal route and it set me up for a stroll into Dornoch, smaller than Tain but with many more tourists and my very comfortable B&B for the night. It is called Amalfi but the sun doesn’t shine like it should.