Wind! A cyclist’s worst nightmare, whichever direction it’s coming from.
If it’s blowing in from behind you, it bowls you merrily along without you even being aware of its presence, giving you a misleading impression of your cycling prowess. But you’ve got no closer to being Lance Armstrong – it’s the stiff breeze doing all the work. In that sense, wind is treacherous in a way that snow and ice can never be. At least you know where you are with ice – usually on the floor or wrapped around a tree.
Cycling with the wind in your face is, on the other hand, a miserable experience. Every effort to pick up speed seems in vain as the wind pushes you back to a crawl. It’s like cycling uphill, but the only payoff comes if you turn around and go back the way you came.
The day began in wind-free fashion in a morning during which I redefined “taking it easy”. After a leisurely breakfast and many cups of tea, I headed all of two miles down the road to Newtonmore, where I stopped off at its free Highland Folk Museum. What was intended as a flying visit (it would be rude not to visit a free attraction!) soon turned into an entire morning spent poking around recreations of 1930s farms, 18th-century Highland crofting communities and a couple of great “flat-packed” churches and schools, supplied as corrugated iron sheets for assembly in situ. Truly the Ikea of the early 20th century.
Not long after leaving Newtonmore, full of more tea and a cake, I had my first encounter with my old enemy, the wind. It was blowing from directly the direction I was travelling. When I was researching the trip, I’d read that Scotland’s prevailing wind is southwesterly, making a journey from north to south the better option if you want to avoid it in your face. I decided that the other advantages of a north-to-south route outweighed the danger of being hindered by wind – I was regretting it today!
A late lunch in Dalwhinnie, only about 15 miles from Kingussie, showed just what an effect the wind (and, admittedly, my lazy morning) had made. There I met two blokes who were travelling from Pitlochry to Kingussie, the opposite of my journey. They were nearly home and dry and I had over 30 miles to go!
The wind had come on the day I would be crossing the most exposed and isolated point on the trip, the Drumochter Pass. With a summit of 1516 feet, climbing it would not be much fun on the best of days, but climbing it with a wind of 15mph+ in my face (according to the BBC weather web site) was slow work. Luckily, the scenery is spectacular, even if it runs close to the A9 most of the way (and immediately alongside – separated by a crash barrier – at times). Eventually I made it to the top, heralded first by a sign on the nearby railway line – the highest point on the rail network! – and then a similar sign for travellers on the A9.
As soon as I got over the summit, the wind abated. Don’t ask me why – you’d think the hill would have protected me from a headwind as I was climbing it, but it seems the opposite is true. The rest of the journey into Pitlochry was comparatively plain sailing – helped by the long, enjoyable run down from the views of Drumochter and some very quiet, decent roads.
Many of the roads used by this part of National Cycle Route 7 are old sections of the A9, either abandoned entirely as they were superseded by the faster, safer route of the new A9 built a short distance away, or simply reclassified as traffic moved over to the new road. These reclassified roads are great – wide and well-surfaced, as they would have been in their A9 glory days, but now almost entirely devoid of traffic. But it’s the sections that have been entirely abandoned, save for their new life as a cycle track, that are most special. They’re narrower now, as the undergrowth has been allowed to creep in on both sides, but the surface is still good and the white line leads you down the centre. Even the metal holders for the cats eyes are still in place. The only trouble comes when the white line continues straight into a newly sprouted mound of earth deposited by one of the new A9’s massive embankments…
I’m writing this while sat next to the river at Pitlochry, still broad daylight at 9:45pm. It would be very relaxing, if it wasn’t for the fact that Pitlochry Drum-n-Bass Fest 2010 seems to be taking place on the opposite bank! Oh well – you can’t have it all.
