From The Mull To The Cape by Richard Guise

Author:Richard Guise
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Summersdale Publishers Ltd
Published: 2011-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

It was a long time before I discovered why the reader of the shipping forecast thought that ‘occasional rain’ was ‘good’. It turns out that the comment ‘good’, ‘fair’, etc. refers to the visibility and that ‘good’ means more than five nautical miles. That morning’s forecast for Area Malin was ‘Southeast, backing east, 4 or 5, occasionally 6. Showers. Good.’

Here in the sheltered Sound of Sleat there was barely a swell and the clouds lurking beyond Knoydart’s Ladhar Bheinn still looked fair-weather ones to me. In fact this day I got no showers at all. Good.

Disembarkation at Armadale was a noisy, klaxonic aff air, with much hurrahing as one of the Austin Healeys needed the assistance of a Scimitar’s jump lead to disembark at all. I’d had a word with the Scottish driver of the smashed-windscreen Cortina (stone from lorry yesterday) and learned that they’d got another 400 miles to go and that tonight’s target was Applecross – so they’d be taking on a climb that lay on my own route and whose gradients were already causing me some trepidation. Not a place to stall.

It was quite a relief to be in the saddle again on the quiet roads of Skye. The island that many consider the jewel of the Hebrides is effectively a collection of peninsulas tied together in the middle by the Cuillin Hills, which rise to nearly 1,000 metres and adorn many a picture postcard and coffee-table book of British mountains. Armadale sits near the end of the southernmost peninsula of Sleat. Approaching across the Sound, I’d noticed that the hills of Sleat, though relatively low, still hid the Cuillins, unless their peaks were lost in the western haze.

Hugging the eastern shore of Sleat, the A851 had already carried almost all of the ferry traffic north to Skulamus, where it would either turn right to the Skye Bridge and back to the mainland or left to the rest of the island and maybe up to Uig on Skye’s Trotternish peninsula, from where another CalMac ferry route serves the Outer Hebrides. So for a while I had the quiet but incredibly well-maintained road to myself. Virtually the entire fifteen-mile route had recently been widened, redrained, resurfaced and, for one stretch, even resited. It was no surprise to see an EU sign or two. The Highlands and Islands must vie with Ireland to be the most subsidised corner of Europe. If you’re reading this in a traffic jam on a potholed commuter route somewhere in urban Europe, then be reassured that your taxes have not been lost, but are supporting the odd few vehicles that trundle across the Inner Hebrides each day.

Small, intimate wooded areas fringed the road as tiny hamlets came and went. One large and impressive complex of buildings bore a name in Gaelic only – Sabhal Mòr Ostaig (‘Ostaig’s big barn’) – and was, I subsequently discovered, a centre for learning through the medium of Gaelic only.

As good a point as any, then, to take a closer look at the language of the Gaels.

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