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.