Day 28 - The Last Bus to the Terminus

Inverness to John O'Groats

I confess I am not entirely at ease with travelling on a Sunday. 

Some years ago, I divided my time between Surrey and Tyneside and made regular week-end journeys between the two. I also spent three years away at university, again travelling to and from home - and my girlfriend in Birmingham - by train and usually at week-ends. Remembering those journeys, especially the return trips on the Sundays, immediately conjures up images of lengthy delays due to engineering works, tiresome re-routes along slow and little-used tracks via obscure former mining villages, and interminable unannounced halts in the middle of nowhere. It's a prejudice I carry to this day.

As a result, I tend to the opinion that Sundays should be reserved for simple, blameless activities like going to church or stamp collecting, and travel should be avoided at all costs. This is not always possible, however – witness today's long journey northwards to John O'Groats. Besides, bus travel and religion (though strangely not stamp collecting) have proved to be a remarkably volatile arena thanks to a series of unlikely yet controversial bus adverts.

It's not that unusual for religious organisations to use bus adverts to discreetly promote their views. However, when one writer spotted an excerpt from the New Testament stating "When the son of man comes, will he find faith on the earth?" (Luke 18:8) not once but twice on her walk to the office, it set her thinking, as it was probably meant to do. When she discovered that the advert was directing her to a website warning of everlasting torment in a lake of sulphurous fire for those who didn't believe in God, she felt shocked and disappointed. Exactly when, she pondered, was it deemed acceptable to spread fear from the side of a bus? And why don't a few people get together and distribute some reassurance instead?

After making a few enquiries, she idly speculated – within the pages of a national newspaper, admittedly – that if 4,680 atheists got together and contributed £5 each then they could have their own atheist bus advert on the side of one of London's bendy buses urging people not to worry. It seemed an innocent enough idea yet few could have anticipated what would happen next.

Almost at once a campaign group sprung up. Within weeks this group had raised something like £140,000 with the result that adverts began to appear on the sides of 200 London buses, as well as 600 buses elsewhere in the UK, reassuring the public that "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life". 

The Christian church, bless it, seemed to take it all in its stride. When pressed, a spokesman for the Methodist Church even described it as a "good thing if it gets people to engage with the deepest questions of life" and suggested it showed there was a "continued interest in God". Others weren't quite so impressed, though.

Ron Heather, a bus driver from Southampton, arrived at work one day to discover that he'd been rostered to drive a bus with 'There is probably no God...' plastered on its side. A devout Christian, he flatly refused to take it out. 

"I have a lot of passengers who are over 90 or are seriously ill,” he later explained to reporters. “And to tell them there is no God seems a bit insensitive when God is probably all they have left in the world." 

To their credit, his employers First Bus said they'd do everything they could to avoid such a thing happening in the future, but the fuss was far from over. The Christian Party, the Trinitarian Bible Society and the Russian Orthodox Church responded with their own series of pro-God adverts on hundreds more buses, one of which proclaimed "There definitely is a God. So join the Christian Party and enjoy your life."

To make things worse, the Advertising Standards Authority now became embroiled, receiving more than a 100 complaints about the atheist bus campaign being offensive to Christians, and that the "no God" claim could never be substantiated. The ASA eventually ruled that the campaign did not break its advertising code and concluded that the ads were an 'expression of the advertiser's opinion and that the claims in it were not capable of objective substantiation'. 

By this time, however, the campaign had gone global, with the London scheme being credited with inspiring similar atheist bus campaigns in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany and Italy, where posters in Genoa proclaimed "The bad news is that God does not exist. The good news is that we don't need him." 

Some ads are pretty clever...

And it's not just Christianity that has been credited with creating more heat than light.

In New York in 2010, the city's public transport authority allowed an advert to appear on its buses opposing the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero, the site of the former World Trade Centre. The advert apparently showed an image of the mosque and an image of a plane heading towards the burning World Trade Centre with the question "Why There?" The reason it permitted such an advert to be displayed on its buses was because the American Freedom Defense Initiative had already sued New York's Metropolitan Transport Authority for trying to block the advertisements and thereby curtail freedom of speech.

Of course, bus advertising can get people's hackles up even when its nothing to do with politics or religion. According to passenger's representative group Bus Users UK, see-thru ads plastered over bus windows annoy the hell out of most passengers who have to endure their vision being obscured by millions of irritating dots. 

...others less so.

And in 2010, one bus operator running services to the Royal Worcester Hospital came under particularly heavy criticism for devising a marketing campaign which used a sexually-provocative woman dressed as a nurse alongside the words 'Ooh, Matron'. Not surprisingly it upset quite a few people, not least the Royal Worcester's own nursing staff who felt the image demeaned and devalued nurses by portraying them in a fatuous, stereotypically sexual way. They may have had a point.

In fact, it's tough finding any winners in all of this, especially when one marketing expert reckoned that most advertising is a complete waste of money anyway. He cited research showing that just 4% of advertising was remembered positively by the public, and 7% was remembered negatively, while a whopping 89% was either not noticed or not remembered at all. In a nutshell, he reckoned nearly 90% of all advertising was a complete waste of money, though I doubt whether the UK's advertising industry would want to advertise that particular view.

I say farewell to a grey, drizzly Inverness at 10.15 and clamber aboard the X99 City Link service for Wick, from where I'll make my final short hop to John O'Groats. I find a seat near the front where I can settle back to enjoy the road north out of Inverness over the elegant suspension bridge which lifts the A9 across the narrow Beauly Firth. 

Already I can see that today is going to be different. The landscape here is very different to yesterday's, flatter, more agricultural with wide fields of cereals flanked by dark stands of pine. This area is known as the Black Isle though it is not an island at all but rather a blunt, rounded peninsula. The people who live and work here seem to grow much of the food for which Scotland is rightly famous – oats for porridge, barley for whisky, potatoes, lamb, and prime Scottish beef.

It doesn't take long to cross the Black Isle and we soon arrive at another bridge, this time across the Cromarty Firth which is unexpectedly dotted with large, muscular oil platforms under repair. We round a corner and the landscape suddenly changes once more, the wide open fields replaced now by rounded hills, their sides thickly sown with silver birch and wizened oaks, bright flowering gorse and purple heather. 

The Black Isle

We pause at the village of Evanton to drop off a walker who carefully checks with the driver on the times of the bus back to Inverness. That's important when there are only two buses a day. We are now slightly ahead of schedule so having advised the walker our driver deftly pulls out a paperback and begins reading. What books do bus drivers read, I wonder... 'On The Road' by Jack Kerouac, perhaps?

A few stops further on and a chef in his full whites, long apron and towering chef's hat climbs aboard. He cuts a dashing if slightly surreal figure which a few minutes later he accentuates by getting off apparently in the middle of nowhere. Its not at all obvious where he can be going - there's not a house in sight - but nobody else aboard seems to think it's in any way out of the ordinary.

The abundance of cereals and the purity of the water in this part of Scotland means that this has always been prime whisky country and our coach passes several along the road north – world-famous Glenmorangie at Tain, the more obscure but equally delicious Clynelish at Brora, and Invergordon where the evaporating fumes from the rows of bonded warehouses have blackened the roofs of nearby houses with the curious and distinctive black mould that feeds on what distillers call 'The Angel's Share'.

Loch Fleet

The road is gradually becoming narrower and steeper. We are now perched high on the top of huge unseen cliffs, though I don't recall a climb to get here. It reminds me of the exhilarating and slightly precarious bus ride I took a few weeks ago up to The Needles on the Isle of Wight, though that seems like months and months ago now.

Another turn in the road and it looks like we are back in the narrow lanes between Newquay and Padstow in Cornwall, green and windblown, another turn and we could easily be in the Peak District, or on the tops of the Pennines. It feels like my whole journey is somehow all coming together in this one penultimate bus ride to Wick. Unless I’m becoming soppy and emotional, of course. Hmm. Yeah, that's probably it.

After three long hours, the X99 finally drops me at Wick's tiny bus terminus around the back of a supermarket next to a car park, maintaining the weary tradition of bleak, uninviting bus stations of the kind I have encountered all along my route. From here, I am to make my final bus journey of the trip. It has taken me 79 buses of all shapes and sizes, four coaches, a couple of trams, five ferries, half a dozen London Underground trains, a hovercraft and a funicular cliff railway to get me here. All I need now is to catch that one last bus to John O'Groats and my journey is complete.

Except I can't. It's a Sunday. There aren't any buses to John O'Groats on a Sunday.

So. My epic and largely trouble-free journey apparently has one last sting in its tail. I've finally come face-to-face with one of the most serious handicaps facing rural communities today – the absence of public transport. 

Yes it's maddening, but for the people who actually have to live and work around here it's far more serious. Many of them have to cope with this on a daily basis and try to find ways of visiting the doctor, or the post office, or getting to work in the mornings, or seeing friends and relatives, or indeed any kind of socialising without a convenient bus service. 

It’s the young who are particularly badly hit. Not only can the cost of public transport severely limit their choice of school or college, poor services also discourage participation in after-school and other social activities. Let's face it, any one of us would struggle to maintain a social life if we didn't own a car and we live somewhere where the last bus home leaves at 7pm.

There's deep appreciation for public transport when it works, though. One local community project here in East Caithness developed a scheme to provide an evening bus service to and from the town where there hadn't previously been one, and persuaded a local coach operator to take part. And it was popular. Young people were able to take part in activities at Wick Youth Club for the first time, others carried out voluntary activities or took on part-time jobs. The service was also used by people making hospital visits and for shopping trips. Everyone loved it - apart from the operator, that is, who decided it just wasn't commercially viable and scrapped it.

Ultimately, then, the problem is one of money. In thinly populated areas such as this it’s very difficult for transport operators to provide a service that can generate a reasonable financial return. Local councils have traditionally provided subsidies for important but not-quite-commercial services, but cuts in central government funding for local councils since 2010 have meant that their means to do so has become more and more limited. This has encouraged some local communities to try to solve their own transport problems themselves.

The road to John O'Groats

To be honest, I'd realised some time ago that I’d have no bus to John O'Groats. It was an aggravating setback at the time because I found myself having to totally unpick my journey back to Tyneside just to ensure that I would arrive in Wick on a day when there actually was a bus service. That also meant un-booking and re-booking hotels and guest houses all along the route, and much else besides. It was maddening, so I began an urgent search for alternatives.

For a while it seemed I’d be resigned to travelling by taxi on the final leg of my journey even though that would have been deeply unpalatable. After getting this far purely by public transport, it seemed an admission of defeat to have to resort to taking a private hire car now. Of course, the taxi does have its own place in the story of British public transport - after all, it was the monopoly enjoyed by London's hackney carriages, the precursors of today's taxi's and private hire cars, which prompted the invention of Shillibeer's horse-drawn Omnibus. It still felt like the wrong thing to do, though.

After frustratedly head-butting the furniture for a while, I returned to my computer and relied to find out what other people do when they find themselves in the same position. Eventually my researches brought me to a splendid organisation called Caithness Rural Transport. 

Far from being a major transport operator, this is one of a large number of small, community-based groups in Britain who take over where the bus operators stop. Set up in 1999, it provides a pre-bookable dial-a-ride service for people with a good reason to travel but no means to do so, and it runs a small fleet of wheel-chair accessible people carriers with a handful of paid drivers and a group of willing volunteers. Passengers include the elderly, people with disabilities and mothers with children, and in fact anyone who has to be somewhere but just can't get there by public transport. That, I was reassured by scheme co-ordinator Coreen Campbell, even applied to hapless End-to-Enders like me. 

My rescuers - Coreen and Alan

So as I climb down from the City Link bus I am relieved to see a people carrier parked nearby with 'Caithness Rural Transport' emblazoned on its side, and I'm especially delighted when I realise that Coreen has turned up herself to welcome me on the final leg of my trip, despite it being her day off. That's amazing. She's also brought along a reporter from the local paper to interview me as we travel, so with driver Alan at the wheel and a reporter at my side, all four of us chat amiably as we speed out of Wick on the road to John O'Groats. 

Caithness is like no other county I have visited. There are scarcely any trees and the horizon is a distant grey line on a landscape worn smooth by the ever-present wind. It's barren yet oddly exhilarating and I'm in high spirits as we bowl gently into John O'Groats, pausing briefly for a few celebratory photos by the roadside at the entrance to the village.

I soon find myself doing all the usual things I expect other people do when they complete their End-to-End's – go and have their photo taken by the John O'Groats fingerpost, buy a couple of postcards, chat to the steady trickle of other End-to-Enders, stare reflectively out to sea. It's a funny thing, but you immediately recognise the End–to-Enders among the other visitors milling around. Those just starting their journey south have a look of anticipation tinged with apprehension about them, while those who have just completed their trip looked slightly dazed and have a tendency to smile a lot.

“Just finished?” I call over to a cyclist fiddling with his bike at the roadside. He beams.

“Yes. Just finished.”

We smile at one another and share the moment. No words are necessary. We'd both in our own way taken part in a huge endeavour just to get here, even if there was nothing much here to get to apart from a small harbour, a few gift shops, the occasional bus parked alongside a croft (drivers get to take their buses home with them around here) and a whole lot of sea.

Duncansby Head

I wander around in the drizzle and find myself chatting good-naturedly to all manner of travellers – walkers, cyclists, a group of men on Harley-Davison motorcycles. We talk about my trip, their trip, isn't the weather miserable and who cares anyway. 

Eventually I wander out across the cliffs towards Duncansby Head, the promontory about a mile away to the north east and the furthest tip of the British mainland. From here, high above the cliffs, I look back over my left shoulder to the low-lying northern coast of Scotland disappearing into the mist towards Thurso, and over my right to the cliffs that mark the North Sea coast of Scotland running back the way I came from Inverness and beyond. It's quite a moment.

I drift happily back to my hotel and treat myself to a good meal, a couple of bottles of beer from the Skye Brewery and a glass of one of my favourite malt whiskies. Tomorrow I have one last bus journey to make, to Thurso railway station and my nine-hour train journey home. There'll be plenty of time to reflect on this slightly mad adventure of mine, but not tonight. Reflection is definitely for tomorrow. I'm told this hotel has no less than 130 different malt whiskies on sale in the bar. And so far, I've only sampled one....

NEXT: The Epilogue – I look back on my 28-day journey, consider the future of bus travel, and find myself strangely uplifted by the knowledge that I am definitely not the first to have travelled this road... 

www.facebook.com/abusthroughbritain

Map courtesy of those awfully nice people at Google