October 2016
“Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour” R L Stevenson, 1881.
RLS can be rather long-winded, whereas the Taoists were more succinct:
“The travel is the reward”.
RLS’ labours were with a French donkey. Ours are with a disused railway line.
It takes a mere six hours to ride along the Dava Way, six hours to learn a lesson, six hours to acquire an epiphany and confirm a guilty verdict.
An old rail bed that rises out from fields of malting barley around Forres, past a museum distillery, through stock-rearing hill farms, over grouse moors, finally to drop down into the Victorian gentility of Grantown-on-Spey. It’s a route and a connection that gives me an inordinate pleasure. I’m already biased, already well disposed towards any ‘rails to trails’ infrastructure; the constant easy grade and the permissive ambiance, the solitude from traffic and the aura of industrial history certainly help, but also the fact that it has taught me an interesting lesson.
Exception to the Victorian rule in G-on-Spey
Without properly realising it, I had assumed that my travelling modus operandi used a similar method-manual for home and overseas travels. A general destination is flagged, a place chosen as much for its availability and proximity to a source of ‘return home’ travel options as for some intrinsic touristic value. Thereafter serendipity is employed and that old Taoist proverb observed. In short; we turn left out the door and see what happens. Something always does.
Only, up until now, it transpires that my Scottish travelling method has been the exact opposite.
I’ve acquired a linear, disjointed geographical knowledge. I know the outline, the flow of the coastline, the wrinkles and creases which have created that distinctive shape, that crag-faced gent with his droopy nose. With ease I can pin-point Inverness wedged in his neck, the crease between one ‘north-east’ and yet another of Great Britain’s multiple ‘norths’. I can isolate North Berwick by the carbuncle on his shoulder, which impinges into the blue of a mapped estuary. I can find Arran awaiting mastication in his maw, between Kintyre’s proboscis and Ayrshire’s jaw. Then locate Inconvenient Shetland which has no connection to the craggy old man, so has been consigned to a box and stacked away up in the top right-hand corner, where it’s closer to its estranged Viking owners than to its presently Brexiting ones.
So when called upon, I can plot my way around my home, or if stumped can generally bluff my way through. It’s an easy exercise: Scotland is a small place. Still, it takes us three weeks to cycle that short distance to Inverness. Small and infinitely convoluted. Yet in my imagination, many of these places are held by threads, connected by just three tethers and a passion. Glasgow, Aberdeen, Lothian and The Hills.
Without realising it, I’ve acquired a linear, disjointed geographical knowledge, one that has little place for serendipity and a lot to do with obsessive list-ticking. Now we appear to be entering an age where it is perfectly acceptable to blame others, never ourselves, heaven forbid, for our own failings; so I have no hesitation in naming and blaming Henry Ford and Sir Hugh Munro as the causes of my demise.
If that Victorian hadn’t been quite so Victorianly List-obsessive with his compilation of hills over 3000 feet, he wouldn’t have given the world a new proper noun and myself a compulsive disorder. The American industrialist with his mass produced motorcar simply facilitated the inevitable.
Ben Somthing is the next new Munro, next desired tick. Load up Mr. Ford’s eponymous black automobile. Drive to designated hill. Ascend. Tick. Descend. Drive home. Serendipitless. Linear exploration. Where Destination is the reward.
However, if I had been carless and reliant on public transport, the descent from Ben Something might have been to an entirely different place, one that would have offered a connection. Grantown-on-Spey in my geo-spatial imagination is a Cairngorms location and so accessed by way of Aviemore. Forres, on the other hand, is Morayshire and so you travel there from Inverness. No correlation existed between the two, until now. The Dava Way has become that connecting epiphany, that perfectly fitting piece of jig-saw puzzle.