Day 41: Strathy to John O’ Groats

There has been no scenery today, only wind. Not the prevailing westerlies evidenced by the shape of the trees, but more of the strong south-easterlies we had yesterday. It was hard enough yesterday afternoon when the number in the wind direction symbol was 16, today it was 29!

For 66 kilometres we wobbled in gusts of wind. (29 mph is Force 6 on the Beaufort scale – a so called strong breeze!) Highlights of the day were entering our final county and buying two pots of tea for 80p each in Tesco’s cafe in Thurso.

But we have done it – we have reached John O’ Groats! And, despite the wind, we are not totally exhausted. And there was time to notice a little bit of scenery – rugged at first; pastoral, with green fields and lots of sheep, near Thurso; heather moorland with pine plantations as we approached the end. We were surprised by the latter – it looked very much like the North York Moors.


We finally reached the end of our journey at 18:45 having completed a journey of 2011.7 km (1250.3 miles) with just enough time to take a few photos before sunset at 18:47. We then carried on to cycle the remaining 1.4 km to our B&B for the night.


John O’ Groats is apparently named after Jan de Groot, who was, again apparently, the first to run a ferry to Orkney. We had hoped to go there but have run out of time and will be heading back south tomorrow. Perhaps we will return to visit Orkney one day but for now we intend to continue the blog for a few days as there may be more bicycle-related exploits in the pipeline.