I’ve always been drawn to extremes, to landscapes and cultures that are, by nature, tough. In my own way, I guess I’ve been trying to understand how people forge a life in these wild, weather-beaten locations. This curiosity has brought my wanderings by bike to some of the most far-flung islands in the Northern Hemisphere: Iceland, the Faroes, the Hebrides.

My recent trip to the Isle of Jura in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland, is one that will definitely stay with me forever. Organized by Pannier.cc, we were in the company of Chris McNally, cycling illustrator extraordinaire, his sister Wren and photographer Chris McClean. It was going to be a good trip, fun people, up for adventure, it doesn’t get better.

The island has only one road that stretches 30 miles from south to north from the ferry. There are no prescribed adventures on this island, you need to make up your own. And make up our own, we did.

After riding 10 miles from the ferry to our camp spot in a beautiful location overlooking the sea, we tucked into a warm dinner, enjoyed some of the local whisky then retreated to our tents in howling winds and lashing rain. Not the warmest reception...but we woke to blue skies and a whole day of exploring ahead of us.

The thing about ‘planning’ bike adventures is...plans never really work out how you imagined them to - and that’s just it - the ‘plan’, no matter how well thought out, is a figment of the imagination. The plan usually goes out the window when you roll away from your empty camps pot and all the unpredictable stuff starts to happen. Like bad weather, getting lost, getting lazy...and so on.

We had ‘planned’ to ride as far as a shack on the tip of the island where George Orwell took refuge to write but, we lost so much time buying whisky in the Jura distillery, buying heads of cabbage and food for our camp dinner in the only shop on the island, then chatting with a farmer and his wife who are diversifying with a gin business, that we simply ran out of time. So, stuck at a crossroads, we were forced to choose between George Orwell and a deer stalkers Bothy (recommended by the gin-making farmer who has probably never ridden a bike). We decided to forgo Orwell and head for the bothy which was...according to Komoot, about 10km away.

Apparently ‘trail’ in Scotland covers an extremely varied plethora of interpretations. I’ve experienced what are categorised as ‘gravel’ trails by locals to be singletrack worthy of a full-suspension mountain bike. And on the Isle of Jura, it's no different. This ‘trail’ was a line through the bog, slightly darker than the rest of the bog, created by men in rubber boots holding guns, looking for deer.

What ensued was over an hour of pushing our laden bikes (the cabbage and gnocchi) over and around mounds of bog and sea grass while being feasted on by midges to the point that we couldn’t stop moving. Even.for.one.second. We did have to stop because we needed to discuss the fact that we were only moving at 4kph and at this rate it would take us 2 more hours to get to the bothy even going downhill - never-mind getting back up over the hill and riding the 30 miles the next morning to catch the ferry.

Again...we aborted the plan, returned to the road and had some whisky. The whisky must have made us come to our senses, for it wasn’t until we each had our fair share of the aptly named Jura brew called ‘Journey’ that we settled on the best plan of the day: find a camp spot in a little cove, build a fire and make some cabbage salad and gnocchi. That sounded like a good plan...and it sure was!

Footnotes: Photography : Chris McClean / Text : Fiola Foley @ Komoot