It’s good to be easy riding out west
THE day had started with a bang! Well, more of a slow hiss actually. The valve stem on the front wheel of my Yamaha Drag Star snapped in two as I was trying to pump up the tyre.
It looked like my planned day out with the Caithness Cappuccino Cowboys had been kiboshed.
And then with a dramatic swish into the filling station car park rode my Good Samaritan in the form of Ewan Gentry – although, resplendent in leathers on his all-black Suzuki 850 rat bike, he looked more like a Dark Knight!
Calmly he took control of the situation and a mobile phone call was made to AMS Motorcycles in Wick’s Coach Road. Yes, staff were busy but they could come and recover my deflated bike – and ego.
Meantime Brian Yellop (aka BY) and Michael Ball (aka Tritonthrasher) began to formulate plan B. Moira, at AMS, had confirmed she had a spare 19-inch replacement tube... if BY could collect it, Tritonthraher suggested he would replace the old one at his house in South Road – just a few hundred yards push away.

Thunderbirds are go!
All I had to do was get the bike to Tritonthrasher’s gaff. And life, I was discovering, is full of Good Samaritans as two blokes passing by grabbed the Drag Star’s sissy bar and helped shove me along the way. The bike weighed a ton with a flat tyre. It was the most intensive cardiovascular workout I’ve had for years!
Not many Chinese crested powder puffs can get away with wearing pirate-patterned bandanas. Especially if their name is Chico! But no-one had told the spirited Chico that. Tritonthrasher and his partner Nikki’s wee fellow is an ideal guard dog. Yelps a lot... but he’s more bluff and bluster and just wants to be friends and part of the action, I’m discovering.
BY and Tritonthrasher set to the task at hand; removing the front wheel, separating the brake callipers and removing the tyre to replace the tube. I prefer a less hands-on approach to mechanics having an innate aversion to grease... but what a pair of backstreet heroes those two are!
AN hour later we’re back on schedule and heading to the Craggan Inn, at Talmine, on Sutherland’s north coast for lunch. The roads are dry so we can get our motors runnin’ although the “weather guaranteed” forecast I’d promised was proving less reliable as an ever-dampening mist began to close in like a grey shroud.
We passed the cinderised roadside verge beyond Reay where last weekend two touring Italian motorcyclists were killed in a horrific road accident. It’s a stark warning about the vulnerability of motorcycling.
By the time we pull in at the Craggan we are starving. Fortunately, there was no scabby horse on the menu so we opted for the Cullen skink paella (minimum order two). It was a tad disconcerting to see all the clinical-looking surgical instruments laid out before us. It was going to be one of those de-shell jobs. The meal, well worth the wait, was served à la pan fried complete with fresh prawns, mussels and velvet crabs. Fantastic!
The Craggan Inn has an unusual piece of garden furniture. The SS Ashbury, on passage to the Tyne, foundered during a fearful storm on the night of January 8, 1945, on the nearby
“black rock” in Talmine Bay, close to the Rabbit Islands. All 42 crew members were lost. Twenty-six bodies were recovered from the shoreline. One of the vessel’s guns, recovered by divers, lies in the grounds of the small hotel.
We fuel up at Burr’s petrol station in Tongue. It’s been a very quiet season for tourists we hear. Above the village the ruins of the Clan Mackay ancestral pile, the 1000-year-old Castle Varrich, look out forlornly from its vantage point over the tidal kyle.
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Moments later we pass another baronial home, this time his self-penned “Castle Sandison” – home of the renowned Groat columnist, Bruce Sandison, who scribes amusingly observant pieces about the state of the nation in his column “From Beyond the Split Stane”. There is not one word he writes I disagree with.
OUT west, as we power up the slopes of Hysbackie – Lairg-bound on the single-track A836 – I can make out Lochan Hakel and wonder about all those missing gold coins... But for the Mackays, the entire destiny of Scottish history could have been rewritten.
It was back in 1746 in the weeks before Culloden that a French war sloop, the Hazard, was run aground at Melness. On board was Bonnie Prince Charlie’s munitions and gold bounty that would have bolstered his ailing Jacobite army. Alas, the French sailors fleeing in terror from my dreaded clansmen threw the gold into Lochan Hakel to avoid it falling into the wrong hands. (Wrong hands, indeed!) Some of that gold is still periodically uncovered...
The guaranteed weather I’d promised had materialised and a glorious sun breaks through the mist and haar. (It’s not rain I had earlier told BY and Tritonthrasher, more “vapourised motorcycle velocity”.)
On the dry, empty roads, where we can see for miles, we open up the throttles. Engine revs rise as we imagine ourselves on an Isle of Man TT track. We throw the bikes into the long curves and slam brakes approaching blind corners. Up and down the gears we thrash the machines. It’s good to be out there easy riding with the Caithness Cappuccino Cowboys!
Lairg is positively tropical.
Six hours and 200 miles later – it was a long lunch – we’re trundling up the A9 and rolling into Wick; the welcoming old grey town at the end of the road to nowhere.
Our tummies detect an odd hunger pang. I flick open the visor on my helmet and breathe in the air. Next thing I’m singing that Coldplay song, “Fix You”. I was well sorted!