Another reminder that Scotland boasts world-class trails and world-beating views
After Torridon was voted the UK’s best route in our Britain’s Best Wild Rides guide, we felt compelled to seek out our own adventure on Scotland’s wild west coast
RIGHT FROM THE OFF WE’RE THROWN INTO A MELEE OF JUMBLED SCREE
Torridon’s secret got out a while ago. I’d never been there or even known where to place it along the jagged coastline of western Scotland, but it was a name I knew well. Torridon – synonymous with hard, natural riding, and repeated, mantra-like, as a place you need to experience as a mountain biker. If Whistler, BC, is the ultimate bike park experience, then Torridon could be the UK’s jewel in the crown. But there’s no chairlift here, no Crankworx, no nightclubs, no two-dollar pizza, just a youth hostel and a single terrace of houses. Why hundreds of Munro-baggers, mountain bikers and sightseers descend on this remote hamlet every year is all around you – rugged peaks of 750-million-year-old sandstone rising 1,000m straight out of the sea. But the real magic of it, and the reason Torridon still holds its appeal, is that once you head up into those mountains you feel like the secret’s still safe and you’re the only one who knows about it – the vast landscape swallows everyone else up. With just wilderness and sea, you sense you’ve embarked on a proper adventure. Just you and about 10 billion midges. There’s definitely no shortage of them, let’s make that absolutely clear.
A jolly with a bite
Slowly turning the pedals to inch my way uphill towards a distant col, I’m lost in these thoughts, but I’m not completely alone. Here to show me the best way through this expansive maze of crags and contours are Tom and Steph from MTB Guiding. They’ve invited me along to sample one of their biannual trips to this part of the Highlands, and their promise of “the best trail we’ve ever ridden” was all the encouragement I needed to set up an out-of-office email and log off for four days. Equally easily persuaded were Tom and Steph’s mates Dave and Craig. They assure me they’ve come to “help out”, which sounds like an excuse for a jolly if ever I’ve heard one, but seeing as I’m fully guilty of that too, who am I to judge?
The five of us, plus our photographer Andy, are currently midway up the first climb of day two. Yesterday was a ‘warm-up’, riding the foothills from Applecross to Kenmore, and today we’re on the ‘real men’s stuff’, you could say – except you can’t when it’s Steph who’s out front setting the pace. The hills are tough here. Don’t look at your GPS because you’ll get disheartened by how little ground you’ve covered. Here 5km is hard-won, crawling over steep, rocky ground with no time to settle into a steady cadence before you’re grazing pedals off rocks and twisting yourself into strange, derailleur-saving contortions. On and on we grind, through swirling eddies of mist and drizzle until finally we reach a gap in the hills, the gradient relents and we’re faced with the whole sweep of the glen laid out before us. As if on cue, the cloud lifts to reveal a snaking ribbon of singletrack stretching into the distance – 6km of downhill, all the way down to sea level – and a knowing grin from Tom tells me that we’re in for a ride.
Shifting stones
I don’t think the concept of ‘easing you in’ was given much thought when deerstalkers forged these trails a century ago. Right from the off, we’re thrown into a melee of jumbled scree and it takes aggression, commitment and a loose grip on the bar to stay afloat on this shifting stone river. Eyeballs rattling in our skulls and lactic acid building in our forearms, we’re relieved when the rocks become boulders and our wheels find something solid to bite on. These slabs are where the real fun starts, on a strata of flowing waves laid down by rivers dating back to the age of the dinosaurs, which just happen to form the perfect terrain for modern full-suspension bikes. There are tons of possibilities for carving or gapping through these undulations and the group of us train down, reacting on the fly, feeling the flow and relishing the endless grip. Eventually firing out onto the tarmac at Achnashellach, we all agree that Tom was right – that was a trail to remember.
Wild swimming
Unfortunately, what comes down must go up, and we have the mass of the Bealach na Lice separating us from Torridon. It’s now mid-afternoon and the sun has burned through the clouds to the level that sends redheads running for cover and prompts Glaswegians to go ‘taps
aff’. We follow suit in Loch Coire, stripping off our riding gear and diving into the surprisingly warm water. Feeling the cocktail of sweat, dirt and midge repellent getting rinsed away is incredibly refreshing, but less pleasant is the chafing as we climb the final hundred metres up to the top of the pass.
If the trail we rode this morning was the best in the world, then this next descent could be a contender for number two. More than 10 minutes of bone-shaking rocks later, we drop over the final crest, just as the sun dips below the sea’s horizon. We marvel that there really is no finer place than Scotland when the weather’s good, but almost immediately after we stop riding, the midges descend. Filling the still, humid air, they harry us through the final rocky corners to the hostel.
Another epic day
After a big session on the pedals yesterday, Steph assures us that today will be a little easier. Our legs are somewhat stiff but we’ve ‘recovered’ well, refuelling last night in a tiny little restaurant off the beaten track in the fishing port of Diabaig. Stuffed to bursting with haggis and seafood, thanks to the hospitality of Dutch/Scottish husband-andwife duo Aart and Amanda, we can’t use poor nutrition as an excuse for struggling up today’s climbs. But, as seems to be a theme round here, it’s never a gentle spin to the top. At one point, we join up with a newly-built hydro road that slashes an ugly gash across the landscape. It might spoil the sense of solitude somewhat, but it does allow our legs some welcome respite. When we’re not weaving our wheels through the rocks, we’re snatching glances upward, towards the craggy top of Ben Damph – the Munro that we’re skirting around – so there’s plenty to distract us from the burning in our thighs.
Finally, after many folds and false summits, we reach a loch marking the start of the descent. It’s saddles down for more slab-surfing and needle-threading through gullies, until we skid to a stop in front of a deep ravine. Today, it’s easy enough to pick our way over the boulders, but Steph tells us that in harsher conditions she’s arrived here with clients and had to wade across, holding bikes aloft, at risk of being swept over the waterfall downstream. On the far bank we rejoin the trail, which skirts along the edge of a wooded gully. Between the webs of tree roots are pockets of soft loam and we push our wheels into the grippy dirt, doing our best to keep eyes and wheels from wandering too close to the precipitous edge.
Itchy and scratchy
It turns out that in the Highlands, as well as having the usual weather forecasts, they’ve got midge forecasts. Today is predicted as sunny/overcast, with a 30 per cent chance of rain and a 4/5 midge level. August, as it transpires, is
IT’S SADDLES DOWN FOR MORE SLAB-SURFING AND NEEDLETHREADING, UNTIL WE SKID TO A STOP IN FRONT OF A DEEP RAVINE
prime midge season up here and it makes us tackle the sharp-edged drainage gullies with extra care – knowing that having to stop to repair a puncture would be a doubly unpleasant experience.
Poor Craig seems to be the unlucky one on this trip though. He’s not only broken his dropper post and is having to pedal up every technical climb with his knees around his ears, but is suffering from, how should we put this, an acute case of saddle-soreness. Two days later, as we prepare to ride between Elgol and Sligachan on the Isle of Skye, he’s standing shiftily in the layby, hands down shorts, administering liberal quantities of chamois cream.
When we get stuck into the day proper, I understand why he’s not letting any mechanical mishap or discomfort in the nether-regions stop him from getting on and riding. The trail, while much flatter than what we’ve ridden on the previous days, feels like a proper out-in-the-wilds XC mission. The terrain is much easier and more free-flowing, and I discover that the more you put into it, the better it gets. That means punching up steep inclines, hitting the pedals at the right moments to avoid the rocks, and pumping, hopping and gapping to keep pace. The looming time pressure helps too – I’ve got a flight to catch out of Glasgow later today, with a four-hour drive to get there and 15km of technical trail before that. The anticipated bustle of an international airport feels so alien compared to the wild solitude of Skye, and when we ride past a remote farm, I imagine how isolated life must be up here. There’s a Land Rover outside, but I can’t see any roads to drive it on. You’ve got to come by boat or bike to get to this place, and that feels like something special.
Torridon, unfortunately, can’t boast the luxury of existing in car-free isolation. Which is why I’ve come to view the midges as a necessary evil. The secret about this place may have got out, but those minuscule, irritating little f**kers are, in their sheer quantity and relentless determination, deterring the masses and keeping the sense of adventure alive. When I’m back home, I’m not going to mourn the lack of them. But as they nibble away at me, it’s some consolation to know they’re helping to keep Torridon wild.
THE MORE you put in, the better it gets – punching up inclines, hitting the pedals to avoid rocks, and pumping, hopping and gapping to keep pace