By the time I reached Rannoch Moor this morning the rain had set in for the day, but just before it started, I was assailed by a noumenon. It was so arresting that I stopped to take its photo for you, but the effect was lost. By noumenon, I mean a manifestation of the divine. Sunlight was crashing through the rainclouds that were spilling over the peaks, lining everything in the valley with a spooky light. A celestial orchestra played a 40-note chord, cymbals crashed and drums rumbled. Still the noumenon persisted, impossibly bright white clouds tumbled off the peaks like slow water. Then it was over and it rained and rained and rained.

There was an easy climb with a following wind (the prevailing wind prevailed today for the first time since the west country) onto Rannoch Moor - wild and bleak, and beautiful even in the cloud and rain. From there, it was a soggy slog across the top before the long, exhilarating fall through narrow Glen Coe, weaving between mountains. Bombing down a mountain pass in the rain on a bicycle is best done while singing a song, so I sang These Are the Days of Our Lives. I belted it out, only pausing each time an impatient lorry passed me, when I felt compelled to shout, 'Whooooooaaaaah!' while it lurched past and I waited to see whether I would survive. A huge lorry fully laden with wooden gables for houses missed me by a whisker.

In the Glen Coe visitor centre, the story of a massacre in the valley is retold. To summarise, and I hope I've got this right, the Highlanders wanted the deposed king James to take the throne again, while the Lowlanders and England wanted the new king William to stay. The Lowlanders sent a party of soldiers, with England's blessing, to Glen Coe to massacre a village - no-one was spared. We English have so much dirty history to take responsibility for, not only in Scotland but pretty much everywhere we've ever laid claim to power. We still fancy ourselves a world power, but with so much imperial wrongdoing to our name, I can't feel proud even of the empire's great achievements. We inherit the deeds of our ancestors, good and bad and all in between. The first time that chemical weapons were ever used in Iraq, for example, was in 1920, by the British to put down a rebellion of several hundred people who opposed the puppet king we had installed there to serve our interests just after the First World War. This seems similar to me to the massacre in Glen Coe.
From there it was a short fall to sea level by Loch Leven and finally a turn in the road to the north-east with the wind behind me. What a difference! I was in Fort William by three o'clock and headed straight for the railway station. The steam train used in the Harry Potter films arrived in a cloud of vapour at four o'clock, stinking of oil, steam and coal smoke. The footplate (I think that's the name for where the driver stands) was all polished brass, mysterious dials and tantalising levers, and its three drivers looked like dirty smudges in the steam. I wanted to be one of them. With or without Harry Potter, it was magic. God, let me come back to Earth as Fred Dibnah! I took the engine's photograph for you (it's black, not red like it is in the films), although it didn't come out too well. I also hatched a plan to come back to Fort William on the sleeper and take the steam journey out to Mallaig, get the ferry to Skye and go walking there.
I'm staying in Glen Nevis youth hostel tonight because it's pouring with rain and I know that the campsite next door can get badly waterlogged overnight. The hostel is right under Ben Nevis, which is pretty much invisible behind rain and cloud. Well, it rains three times as much on the Scottish west coast as the east, so I guess this place seldom sees a sunny day. Tomorrow's forecast, although habitually unreliable on this trip, is for fine weather and a breezy tailwind to take me to Inverness, inshallah, and I'm back on the cycle routes as well, away from these busy A roads.