Charging: E-Biking the Isle of Mull
The Scotsman, Aug 2021
The road from Calgary - a hamlet so comely it inspired Colonel James Macleod to name Canada’s fourth biggest city after it - to the village of Salen, on the north-western edge of the isle of Mull, encompasses perhaps the most improbably rich slice of scenery in the Hebrides. Towering basalt cliffs, glittering aquamarine waters and bone white sands; vertiginous drops, priapic baronial piles and luxuriant, almost wanton jungle greenery. And that’s not even to mention the locals. Stags, seals, sea otters, soaring eagles, suicidal sheep, shaggy horny ginger cows big as barn doors and hurtling battered builders’ vans risking it all on the turn of a blind corner. But from where I’m standing now, things are rather less colourful.
Topping out a shade under two hundred metres, this lonely gravel turnout is a passing and a viewing place, four snaking uphill miles along the B8073 from the wide sweep of Calgary Bay. The air up here is noticeably chillier and the wind snaps and worries at my jacket. Rubble litters the close-cropped scrub and heather. No trees grow. Behind me, hunkered down and near invisible through the haze, the isles of Coll and Tiree lurk on the horizon. To my right, a clouds’ great shadow slithers over the Treshnish archipelago, its scattered skerries like so many uncut emeralds on a silken bedspread. Dead ahead, below and to the south, the olive mounds of Ulva and Gometra are skeined about the temples with a thin white mist, like smoke trickling from the corner of Clint Eastwood’s mouth.
Hunkering into my collar I peer down, ensuring there are no other vehicles labouring up the undulating singletrack. Satisfied I won’t be interrupted, I swing back into the saddle. Pedal once, twice, feeling first the surging push of the motor and then, with exhilarating urgency, the tingling rush of acceleration.
Forget what you think you know about electric bikes. Ignore those Italian waiter you’ve just asked for ketchup reactions from seasoned cyclists and stow your notions of sit up and beg commuting or, heaven forfend, cheating. In seriously hilly country, and few places do serious or hilly with more panache than the isle of Mull, what these machines really represent is freedom and wondrous accessibility. Ideal vehicles for the ninety nine percent of us not blessed with Chris Hoy thighs and a penchant for the gruelling, but who’d as soon not drag two tons of belching metal and engine along for the ride. To e-bike (I’m determined to coin a better name for it) is, from the very first turn of the pedals, to recapture those giggling childhood hours spent rocketing along on two wheels, at liberty to go wherever your fancy (rather than your fitness) may take you.
A sweeping S-bend with good visibility of oncoming traffic approaches. I’ve discovered I can hit even the steepest of these at full tilt which for me, given the collective weight of bulk and bike, is as close to forty miles per hour as makes no difference. Forefingers coiled around the brakes, I stand out of the saddle, start out wide and lean rather than steer. Wind roars in my ears, close and thrilling. Oiled bearings sing with the soft machine gun staccato of a fishing reel unspooling, gravel crunches under the tyres. And I am flying.
From somewhere deep inside, a whoop of joy involuntarily breaks for freedom through the massive grin I am wearing. It may be the first time I have ever done something so indecorous, so…American. The sheep in the verge seem to know it, shaking their heads and glaring, unimpressed, down long black noses.
Approaching Tostarie, the road rises and the motor hums gently with the turning cranks. I can feel my legs working, but it’s more bracing stroll than uphill grind, and at a stately fifteen miles an hour I have time to look about me at last. Jutting cliffs lend scale to the crumbling inlets fringing the headland. Cobalt water melds to Caribbean blue, then clear as cut glass at its edges. Day boats bob at their moorings and, in the distance, the cloud wreathed peak of Ben More, the highest in the Scottish isles, smoulders with deserved insouciance. In fact, I’m so preoccupied that I almost miss the hand-painted sign and have to brake suddenly before the world falls away again like a tailor’s tape unravelling. Rummaging in my panniers, I find some loose change and exchange it for a feathery half dozen eggs.
Vegetation thickens as I continue to descend. Grand trees droop, almost over the road in places, and lush fern blankets quiver in the languid breeze. The air here is much warmer. It envelops then washes past in balmy pockets, a feeling like swimming through sun dappled water.
Beside the grey harled box of Kilninian church I sit, gazing at Loch Tuath frothing at the hems of Gometra. Somewhere down there on the low threadbare outcrop, millionaire landowner and environmentalist Roc Sandford - named for Saint Roc, patron of mad dogs, sea storms and the falsely accused - is striving to save the world’s oceans, alone and unwashed, from the inside of a shed.
The road at Torloisk splits, heading in one direction towards Dervaig. Two cars’ standoff beside a smattering of stone cottages, a Land Rover with a dented stock trailer and a farmer straight from a porridge ad. He sits astride a sun-bleached quad, whistling up a squad of writhing collies. Some already cling to the back, in an old fish box, others sniff around my wheels until, at a word from the farmer, they swarm back to his side. He nods as I zoom off, amidst the sweet grassy perfume of petrol and lanolin and island industry.
Until now I have been profligate with my battery. Top speed is, of course, the most entertaining, but with the long climbs at Acharonich and the return leg still to come, I reluctantly drop a gear, (they’re quite unrideable with no juice). The greater effort warms my back, such that I stop and remove my windcheater at the Henhouse Cafe: clifftop purveyor of scones, sausage rolls and staggering scenery.
At Ballygown, a mile and a face-aching downhill section further, another sign draws me in. BREAD FOR SALE is picked out in painted letters on a hinged, hutch-like box. A fishing boat waits patiently on a trailer in the layby, rods sticking out of the sides like an insect’s legs, but I squeeze past it to discover a cache of sourdough still warm from the oven. Steam rises as I open the lid. My stomach growls.
A little further on, passing a mighty elm that’s probably watched over this road for two hundred years, I hear the thundering base note well before I come upon it. It carries like music above the hills, over the tinkling burble of peat-brown water on smooth rock and the chatter of birds and the hum of wasps and dragonflies. And soon the tumbling, seething long drop of Eas Fors waterfall lays its soporific white noise too, over the hiss of the camp stove and the crack and sizzle of fried bread and eggs in the pan.
