This Jura Night Cycling

Here's a poem I wrote about cycling back to my B&B on Jura a couple of summers back. For those who don't know the place, Jura is an island off the west coast of Scotland. Summers on Jura can be midge-riddled, storm-soaked and wind-blasted, but quite magnificent in their own way. There are more deer than people and the hills are as starkly impressive as anywhere in Scotland

                  This Jura Night Cycling

                    from Craighouse to Knockrome fuelled

by the hotel’s slow-poured Murphys you

raise the wild Paps wind with the holy

fury of your pedalling, send it

streaming through the spruce trees, send

the Corran river streaming under its grey-stone

bridge into the black-waved Sound and somewhere

in the drenched hills the hinds running

faster than they have ever run because you’re racing

breakneck down a dark island road as if the whole

glorious shebang of wind river deer even the radiant

wheeling of the cloud-scrubbed stars this one Jura night

is down to you

Ullapool Bike Ride

There's something about Ullapool and the country thereabouts that can't help but prompt a poem - such as this one. Rhue's a few miles north of the town and well worth the ride.


Ullapool Bike Ride
 

All day long a raw eyeball-freezing wind too brute cold

to stand more than twenty minutes at the Rhue lighthouse watching

the gannets wheel and dive before you’re pedalling back up the hill

heavy and hunched into mean blasts of sleety rain and just about ready

to tell the world to go to hell when a weasel pokes its pointy fierce head

through the bars of a cattle grid - wild and ridiculous

as a prize-winning slimmer escaping Alcatraz - so you brake

twist round in the saddle, catch a blear of arse and tail hurtling into the gorse

and, on the other side of Loch Broom, the sheer heathery mass

of Bheinn Ghoblach rising through wind-torn cloud into utter light

so real, so high, so like the only mountain there has ever been

suddenly you want this shitty bastard no-spring-at-all

to stay and stay and stay.

Glen Quaich

I'll get this blog going with a poem I wrote after a ride through Glen Quaich, from Kenmore to the Sma Glen. I say 'ride' but the first mile or so involved a strength-sapping push - the road is pretty damn steep. From then on the going's great, untl you hit the hairpin.

Glen Quaich

Screaming down Glen Quaich

in a blue-gold rush of bracken, rock, sky

until all the eye knows is the glimmering weight

of Meall Dhearg floating above Loch Freuchie

like a vast bird

you hit the suicidally tight hairpin

between the cairn and the bridge

thanking Christ Almighty

the hand remembered when to brake.