BEN CHONZIE
The track is a pale thread drawn across the hill's flank, a line of crushed stone and grit that sings under the tyres. To climb Ben Chonzie by bike is to feel the mountain in the legs, in the lungs. It is a slow conversation with gradient, a negotiation with gravity. The bike becomes a simple machine of translation: muscle into motion, will into altitude. On this summer’s afternoon, the air is thick with the scent of warm peat and the drone of the occasional bee, a sound that seems to be the very hum of the heat itself. The land here is old, a rumpled blanket of gneiss and schist, softened by millennia, and the track is a modern imposition, a way made easy, but the effort remains real, honest.
Higher, the world opens out. The broad, whale-backed ridge of Chonzie begins to reveal its character – not of sharp drama, but of vast, rolling space. And then, the fence. Or rather, the ghost of a fence. A line of thin, rusty metal posts marches towards the summit cairn, streaked with the orange of decay. But there are no wires strung between them. They are a boundary with no barrier, a line without a limit. They do not contain or exclude. Instead, they suggest. They trace a path, offer a direction, etch a human idea onto the land without enforcing it. To walk or ride among them is to be in a strange, liminal space. They are a fence of possibility, their missing wires speaking more loudly than any taut strand of steel ever could. They are the memory of an enclosure, or perhaps the dream of one.
From this spectral boundary, the gaze is drawn north-west, across leagues of air. There is Schiehallion, the fairy hill, its conical form almost too perfect, a geometric proof rising from the moor. It is a mountain of myth, a place of gravitational experiment, and from here it seems to float, detached from the earth. Further west, the Ben Lawers range lies like a sleeping giant, a complex knot of summits, its northern corries still holding stubborn patches of old, hard snow, gleaming like quartz in the sun. The view is a lesson in scale, a reminder of a world built to a different order of magnitude, in which a human on a bicycle is a fleeting, upright speck.
Then, the eye falls, pulled down into the deep. Far below, Loch Turret is a blade of silver, sunk deep into the glen. It is a different world down there, a place of water and steep-sided shadow, while up here, on the roof of the massif, all is light and wind and open sky. The loch is the mountain’s dark mirror, a repository for its water, its history. To see it from the summit is to understand the connectedness of high place and low, of sky and water, of the long, slow work of ice that carved the one and filled the other. The descent, when it comes, is a release, a rush of speed and rattling stone, but the image that remains is of that silent, unwired fence, standing sentinel over the great, sleeping land.