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Looking back at the Mull2Muckle/Fairly Long Ride

Tom’s Fairly Long Ride - the Mull to Muckle: Looking back, looking forward.

It started in July. Well, actually, it started the previous December, during which I first became interested in planning, plotting, mapping and generally dreaming of a long-distance cycle run. One which, preferably hadn’t been done before. Which I could do while in my 56-year-old state of fatness and unfitness without much preparation. Dream on, my wife said.

And then I realised that no-one seemed to have cycled from one extreme of Scotland to the other. Meaning from the Mull of Galloway in the south to the Muckle Flugga lighthouse shore station (Saxa Vord is probably further north, and so is one remote cottage, but I was in the mood for lighthouses) on Unst, Shetland. Lighthouse to Lighthouse. 437 miles, if I opted for the Aberdeen-to-Shetland ferry. Which I did, vowing to complete the Perth-Inverness-Orkney route another day. Or year.

I could only afford a week off work, and for logistical reasons had to knock off the Shetland Mainland and Island of Yell sections in advance. After that it was train and car to Galloway and we were off.

It was called The Fairly Long Ride as the ride was going to publicise the Fair Trade cause and would be supported by - as well as supporting - Scottish Fair Trade Forum. I put together an hour-long musical show to perform en route - Tom’s Fairly Good Show, and preparing this had me wrestling with some of the central issues relating to Fair Trade economics. I will never forget the long conversation in Inverness Station with my friend George from Ghana. He was idealistic and uncompromisingly pragmatic:

“We need structural change. We need local control of commodity prices. But I’m in favour of the Fair Trade movement. It makes things better. It makes things a little less unfair.”

I was  - am - proud of The Fairly Good Show and disappointed that the Edinburgh show had to be cancelled and that so few people came to the Glasgow one. There was even a Fair Trade wine tasting, with wine expert John Lamond!  All the more liquid for those who did come, even though I was related to most of the audience. But the show was performed successfully, with guest Martin Meteyard, at the Belladrum Festival in August, and will soon be available in part to watch and listen to online.

I met with Fair Trade Groups in Girvan, Prestwick - I spoke at a school assembly there - Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen, and the whole thing was filmed, courtesy of Promote Shetland. You can see the finished films, read more and see some pictures at http://mull2muckle.blogspot.com . Edinburgh was particularly inspiring, as there was cake, MSPs and news that a motion congratulating me on the trip had been put before the Scottish Parliament. even though at the time I was only halfway there.

There was considerable media interest, in print, radio and on television, and I think the trip raised Fair Trade awareness considerably. It was clear that the more committed and active the local Fair Trade group, the more effective my visit was in gaining public and media attention. It was also evident that there is great enthusiasm in Scotland for Fair Trade, and that events can this are one way of tapping into that.

I was fat, I was unfit, and some of the journey was very hard. The perplexing detours involved in following National Cycle Route One were often infuriating. I can assure you that there is NO cycle path next to the A90 from the south end of Stonehaven to the north. That stony bit is a drainage ditch, and no place to try and walk, pushing a fully-loaded touring bike. The Forth and Clyde and Union Canal route between Glasgow and Edinburgh is in parts dangerous, crumbling and downright scary.

The weather was on the whole very good, and my final morning, arriving at the Muckle Flugga shore station, was idyllic. My thanks to Scottish Fair Trade Forum for all that they did, all the Fair Trade folk I met along the way, Fairpley Ltd, Precious Productions and Promote Shetland.

For anyone interested, I rode a Surly Long Haul Trucker steel bike with a 20-year old Brooks B17 saddle, and used Avenir and Ortlieb panniers. I didn’t have a single puncture in my Continental Sport Contact Urban Hybrid Tyres, which only needed a tiny amount of air, once. It took me nine days. Afterwards, I weighed exactly the same as I did when I started. But I did eat a lot.

Next year I’m planning to cycle the Perth-Inverness-Orkney leg. I hope other folk will tackle the Mull2Muckle as THE Scottish Fair Trade cycle route. It is a Fairly Long Ride. But it’s worth it!

(This was written for the Scottish Fair Trade forum website)

"How many freelance PRs can one country sustain?'

....so true.

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/content/what-if-we-dinosaurs-are-smartest-people-room

It's the default leap for every former hack, and one that I've taken myself, to an extent, sort of.

Because for me freelance work is all about flexibility. It could mean providing strategic PR advice, writing website copy, editing, subbing, speaking, broadcasting, singing, teaching, fishing, whisky tasting, crisis management, social media ghostwriting, speechwriting, being nice to tourists, selling books and other stuff on Fleabay, and even some paid-for journalism.

But hey, it's better than working.

New Shetland Life Magazine: Islanders wanted!

This has been a difficult magazine to put together for lots of reasons, but I think in the end it's a really good read with some fantastic photographs - and the opportunity for you to take some that will perhaps be just as good!

Andy Holt from Papa Stour contacted me several weeks ago to suggest a piece about the problems being faced by the island - only eight permanent residents now - and his impassioned article makes for salutary reading. Fancy a move? It is one of the most beautiful places in Shetland. Funnily enough, since taking over as editor of Shetland Life I've been looking at something to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the arrival on Papa of the 'first hippies'; Andy was one such. As it turns out, it's a melancholy anniversary.

Meanwhile, The BBC2 show The Great British Bake Off has taken over the Morton family's lives, to an extent, as my son James is one of the competitors, and for the summer's duration our kitchen has been awash with flour and sourdough starters. James shares some of the show's secrets with Shetland Life readers.

We have a unique (these days) photography competition that demands the use of film; another thrilling detective story from Marsali Baxter, regular features like Rosa Steppanova's superb gardening column and Ann Prior's brilliant recipes. And I absolutely love John Brown's hilarious memories of his first motorcycle - a 1940s Velocette.

There's loads more to read and gaze at, and you can either buy the magazine in print form - move fast, though, as it sells out - or download a full pdf version online - you can pay for just one copy and the Pagesuite software is very good indeed. It works very well on an iPad. Get it here:

http://subscriber.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/subscribe.aspx?eid=9b93a5c8-a8fc-4be6-b1c0-7fd92dae25ff

Deep Fried on the Electric Brae

Deep Fried on the Electric Brae

Riding the length and breadth of Scotland

The Magnetic Hill

I can see the slope, the rising road ahead, threading its way upwards along the coastline. There’s a lurch of disappointment in my stomach. It’s been a hard morning, cold and damp and in company. I’m not good at company. I’m not good at people, not cycling with them. They’re inevitably much fitter and faster than I am, and younger, and I’m always taken right back to schooldays, that desperate need to compete, to outpace, to win.

Lactic acid. That's what's burning in my thighs and calves. Over half a century of lazily walking, running, falling over and getting back up again. That's what's wrong with my knees. I can actually hear my knees, if the traffic's quiet, crunching, squeaking and creaking like bits of an old wooden ship asked to cope with a lumpy ocean. 

I'm all at sea. Why am I doing this? I'm out of my depth. These days, I’m not a competitor, never mind a winner. I’m a plodder, a gasper, an agonised get-off-and-pusher.  I’m 56, fat, unfit and fuelled by beer, sugar and fried food. I'm an out-of-breath to the shop for a half bottle of Grouse, four cans of Guinness and a large bag of tortilla chips cyclist. Bryce and his pal Dave, 40-something, serious Sunday fitness riders, are lean and lithe, and although they’re kind and keen to help me along the road, indeed tried to tire themselves out by doing a fast 50 miles prior to meeting me, I can tell that Dave wishes he wasn’t burdened with this heavily-laden, very overweight tourist. It’s the way he races on ahead and waits at farm gates, arms folded, staring at the sky.  His bicycle is an expensive aluminium racer, his lycra-clad body bent around it like a bow.

Bryce is a bagpiper. His lungs are strong, but he’s heard me on the radio and he wants  to chat. "I'm just here for the craic," he says. His cycling clothes are baggier, his bike grey steel. I’m content to let him talk, as my lungs, no longer tobacco-seasoned by still a little emphysemic, are not chanter-fit. I'm not really up to broadcasting the couple of feet from bicycle to bicycle. I'm knackered. I find it difficult to pedal and speak at the same time. I find it difficult to pedal.

“There’s more work than I can cope with" says Bryce, effortlessly. "Every day, or every night. I’m the piper at the Turnberry Hotel, so that’s every day, and there’s weddings, funerals, corporate events. Dinners. I do wee speeches, after dinner things, demonstrate the pipes to tourists. Goes down really well. I have a wee shop up in Maybole, just a wee business, but I’m not there much. I do well with the pipes. There’s too much demand, really.”

Bryce sticks with me, even when I wave him ahead, spluttering with pain outside Culzean Castle. And then, groaning, I crest a wee hill, turn and see that gradually elevating ribbon of grey, wet tar ahead of me. I just want this to end. I want to stop. If these guys weren’t with me, I would stop. Fifteen miles or so I’ve come today, and it’s taken me two hours. What is the bloody point? In a car, I’d be there. No, I wouldn’t have left yet, because I wouldn’t need to be there yet. I mean, I’d leave later because all I have to do is get to Ayr for lunch. Ayr, wha’ nair a toon surpasses, for honest men and bonnie lasses. Burns Central. My dad, my son, my daughter. They’re meeting me there for lunch. To see if I’m still alive. To try and talk me out of this mad caper.

And then the strangest thing happens.

I'm getting ready to expend more muscle-crunching, cramping effort on climbing the slope ahead of me when I notice that I'm freewheeling. Up the incline. I look at Bryce, beside me. He's laughing. 

"Aye, it's something, isn't it?" Suddenly, I know where I am. We are on the Electric Brae. The Magnetic Hill. I am in the grip of a mysterious power. Gravity has no authority in this part of Ayrshire.

I've known this slice of road since childhood, in fact, but never on a bicycle. It was a place parents loved to experiment with cars, when automobiles were fewer and further between, and you could stop one on this stretch of road without risking tail backs, collisions and raging tattooed BMW drivers who've been watching too much Jeremy Clarkson. And wee kids loved it. The sheer weirdness of it. A hill that didn't work. A slope which had anti-gravitational properties. It was the rock, we were told, full of iron. Magnetism. Would it work with…with a Reliant Robin, which was made of plastic, I asked? Who knew? Certainly not my dad in his VW Beetle, his Vauxhall Cresta, his Ford Zephyr. He parked them, facing uphill . He switched off the engines. They crept spine-chillingly forward, sometimes. 

Sometimes they didn't move at all.

On a bike, though, you seemed to fly up the Electric Brae, known locally as Croy Brae. It was like being pushed by God up the A719 between the beautifully named Drumshrang and the negative-sounding Knoweside. My mount, hugely laden with panniers front and rear, and made of quality American steel, surged of its own accord towards heaven, or the Craig Tara holiday park just a bit further on towards Ayr. Against the wind.

It's an illusion, of course. An optical illusion. There are so called 'gravity hills' or 'magnetic slopes' throughout the world, though this is one of the most striking and most famous. General Eisenhower, who was gifted an apartment in nearby Culzean Castle by a grateful Scotland after World War Two, was obsessed with the Electric Brae, and would bring all his guests to see it in action. Hundreds of American soldiers and airmen based at nearby Prestwick flocked here during the war, and tens of thousands of of curious gravity-haters have investigated it since. There used to be metal signs, but souvenir hunters stole them. I wonder if they tested them for magnetism when they got them home? Now there's an immovable granite cairn, bearing this inscription:

The ELECTRIC BRAE", known locally as 'CROY BRAE'.

This runs the quarter mile from the bend overlooking Croy railway viaduct in the west (286 feet Above Ordnance Datum) to the wooded Craigencroy Glen (303 feet A.O.D.) to the east.

Whilst there is this slope of 1 in 86 upwards from the bend to the Glen, the configuration of the land on either side of the road provides an optical illusion making it look as if the slope is going the other way.

Therefore, a stationary car on the road with the brakes off will appear to move slowly uphill.

The term 'Electric' dates from a time when it was incorrectly thought to be a phenomenon caused by electric or magnetic attraction within the Brae.

I'm thrilled, magically transported to a world where cycling uphill does not hurt, where freewheeling everywhere is the rule. I get the same feeling I did when i first let out the clutch on a motorbike, and felt the marvellous, joyous thrill of powered two-wheel balancing. I was defying, painlessly, the power of the landscape, the power of the world to hold me down, hold me back.

Copyright Tom Morton 2012. To be continued...