Anneka heads for the hills
The word ‘staycation’ may be a more than normally repellent portmanteau to British ears (we never called a holiday a vacation to begin with) but the summer’s warm weather made the concept appealing.
I hadn’t been back to Scotland on a motorcycle for quite a while. The last time had been the epic 1996 ride up and back to Aberdeen and thence the Shetlands, with Sean Hawker on our BSA M21s – we’d got an award at their show for that one.
But I’d never made it to fabled Applecross, where north of Skye lay the Bealach na Ba, the Pass of the Cattle, claimed to be the greatest road ascent in the UK, climbing from sea level on a single track with passing places with a 1.5 gradient and Swiss-style hairpins to 2054ft before descending to the isolated community on the bay and its famous inn. So that was one goal.
However, my mind was straying even further back. In 1951, when I was eight years old, my mother and her family took my late brother and I on the sleeper train north to Inverness, and then to a hotel at Whitebridge, above the south-east banks of Loch Ness. They’d laid on gillies and a boat, and we’d gone trout-fishing on the little lochs, Tarff, Knockie and Killin, around the
