THE SORE FEET
Day 63 Land’s End to John O’Groats
Distance: 36km
Cumulative distance: 1665km
That hostel was pretty good last night! Me and Karl were the only guests which wasn’t overly surprising given it was a Monday night and fairly late in October. Karl is a Manchester lad who works as an engineer in Newcastle, but more importabtly he’s a Leeds fan. He’s riding his motorbike around Scotland’s North Coast 500 so we had dinner together and shared a few beers. Great bloke he was.
I received some pretty exciting news this morning too. Lisa sent me a message saying her water had broken! Her baby was already a few days overdue but finally there had been some progress. Due to my lack of knowledge on pregnancy matters I didn’t know if this meant I’d have a little niece or nephew in the next few hours or the next week, but either way I was pretty pumped. Today’s assignment was divided into three smaller segments according to the John O’Groats Trail website – Helmsdale to Berriedale (14.4km), Berriedale to Dunbeath (10.5km) and Dunbeath to Lybster (12.6km). I wasn’t actually going all the way to Lybster, I’d found a place that would have me a couple of miles out of town.
Anyway, the first goal was hitting Berriedale where I was looking forward to checking out the Berriedale Brae. Chink mentioned this the other night, and indicated it’d be pretty hard work walking down to the bottom of it, and then all the way back up the other side. As per normal I brushed it aside and severely underestimated its severity, but I’ll get to that in a moment. I started this morning by extracting myself from Helmsdale via the A9 and decided using the busy road would be the most efficient way to get a good start. There was a grass verge beside this stretch of it so I thought I’d take advantage. The traffic also wasn’t as fierce up here, it seemed to be dropping off the further north I was getting. I went across a couple of rivers and then over the mouth of the Strath of Kildonan which came with brilliant views down the valley and into the heart of Sutherland. After a few more road miles I came to the turnoff for a place called Badbea, a former clifftop village which sprung up soon after the Highland Clearances in the late 1700s, and early 1800s.
The Highland Clearances represent a fascinating but brutal chapter in Scotland’s history. As far as I understand it, this is what happened in a couple of sentences. The upper class wankers realised sheep and their super expensive wool provided a more lucrative use of Scottish land than traditional farming methods. The upper class wankers then evicted the non-upper class folk from their houses and took over the land to fill it up with sheep. There’s a bit more to it than that but that’ll do for now. Fast forward a few hundred years and sheep’s wool in Scotland is worth less than the cost of getting them shorn. Badbea was fascinating, a clump of small stone buildings which are said to have housed up to 12 families during the Clearances. I can’t even begin to imagine how bitterly cold and windy an existence that would have been. Not to mention nutritionally poor. (If this sort of thing interests you, look up the history of the Isle of St Kilda).
I stayed off the A9 after this, crossing farmland the rest of the way to Berriedale. As the town started to come up on me, I realised what Chink was talking about. It was waaaay beneath me, and my only way down was descending a very steep hill in the paddock I was walking across. Geez it’s a good thing my knees had come good by now (well just about, my left knee was flying, my right knee was the one giving me trouble). I was able to get down using the zig-zag method, and then walked through a gate back to the road and took it all the way down to the bridge at the bottom of the brae. There was a tremendously well placed cafe for weary travellers and I loaded up on lunch here while ticking off the first stage of today’s walk.
Leaving town was great fun. I wasn’t required to use the road, rather the JOG Trail took me back across the bridge, then downstream of the river before I crossed it again via a swinging, rickety old number. Then I climbed all the way to the top of the cliffs and I was on my way again. To the north I could see the expansive Caithness headland on which I would reach John O’Groats and out to the west I saw a stack of oil rigs leeching off the North Sea. The stretch to Dunbeath was a challenge, and a bit of an indicator of what was still to come along the rest of the JOG trail. Firstly there were sections of overgrown bracken which stood several feet high. If I wasn’t trampling over the top of it I was stumbling through the stuff, wishing I owned a machete. I passed a log book which I signed, and pressed on past the bracken but onto an even more challenging stretch. The cliffs had been building since Helmsdale and now the sea was far below me much like it had been on the South West Coast Path, although it wasn’t quite as high here and there was more vegetation. Most of the farms along here were fenced almost up to the edge of the cliffs, and the JOG Trail was running between the fences, and the sheer drop to the water below. This created a couple of problems. Firstly, I was walking on a narrow slope a lot of the time meaning my feet were constantly slipping in my shoes. After a short time this became a pretty bruising exercise. The next issue was making sure I retained my potential gravitational energy, and didn’t plummet into the North Sea below. I’m not lying when I say the gap between the fence and the edge of the cliff was about six inches in some sections. After going along like that for awhile I decided to jump the fence and just walk across the farmland where possible. That meant the fairly frequent crossing of barbed-wire fences but it was easier on my feet and allowed me to make quicker time.
Eventually I ended up walking through a gate and found myself almost at the front of Dunbeath Castle. It was a chunky white building, nearly perfectly symmetrical, and I instantly had that feeling of ‘I don’t think I’m meant to be in here’. I needed to go into town and grab some food for dinner since the place I was staying at didn’t offer a night time feed, so I headed up the driveway away from the castle and towards what I assumed would be the front gate. Some bloke came at me on a golf cart with a slightly annoyed bent to his facial expression and I gave him and enthusiastic ‘Gday mate’, and left him grumbling under his breath in my wake. There were some beautiful gardens along this driveway and when I did eventually make it to the gate, I turned around and saw a big sign forbidding me from entering the joint – the usual gibber. I pushed on a bit further and finally came to a tiny little shop which didn’t have the largest selection going around, but it would have to do. The aisles were rather narrow and the particularly pompous store owner took a look at me and said in the Queen’s English “Ahh you’ll find the shop becomes much larger if you take your backpack off”. I bit my tongue and refrained from calling him a twat, instead stepping outside to dump my bag. It was actually a pretty good idea to be fair.
All that was left was about five miles along the A9 in fading light towards my accommodation. I don’t know why it is, but I seem to make the best time when I’m absolutely knackered at the end of the day. Especially when I’m walking along a road which seemed quite a heavenly experience for once, compared with the sloping cliff edge I’d had to navigate earlier in the day. The only thing of note was leaving the A9 behind at Latheron in favour of the A99 which ran the rest of the way to John O’Groats. Not too much further along the way I turned up a ridiculously long driveway and landed at the Forse of Nature which seems like a pretty nice bnb. I had dinner and was so buggered I didn’t hang around in the TV room too long. Just as a fell asleep two names popped into my head out of nowhere, Oscar and Oliver.
