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Fat (video) Tuesday – The Quaraing on the Isle of Skye – by Ilya Rudkin

The Quaraing on the Isle of Skye is one of the most renowned geological features in Scotland. It is a landslip on the eastern coast of the Isle of Skye. The whole of the ridge escarpment was formed by a great series of landslips. Apparently the Quiraing is the one part of it still moving which does make you wonder when riding along it.

The name Quiraing comes from Old Norse ‘Kví Rand’, which means “Round Fold”. Within the fold is The Table, an elevated plateau hidden amongst the pillars. It is said that the fold was used to conceal cattle from Viking raiders. You will see these features in the video.

The video was shot on the 8th of June 2016 at 5am in the morning. The weather was exceptional! The motive to start this early was to get the low sun position and avoid the tourists. The path is 7km long loop into the Quirang formation at the end of which you climb out to return along the cliff top. The trail was a mixture of singletrack and hike a bike. In a lot of places the path is very narrow cut into the side at a 45 degree slope which to be honest I found difficult to relax. Cycling was made the more challenging by the fact the some parts of the trail is deeply rutted making the chance of clipping a pedal very likely. This is part of the attraction which makes the Quaraing a must go to destination when on Skye. Much of the time was spent looking at the views and trying to decide which shots to take to get the best presentation while remembering that there limited time before the hordes of tourist would be getting in the shots.

As you have probably have wondered having a fat bike in this video is the only excuse I have for showing you this video here on the Fat-bike.com site. Other mountain bikes would have done. The other videos I made while on Skye would show the fat bike doing its expected bike touring type thing. However my fat bike is my main bike and it is part of, like you, our adventures and I like challenging the bike in the domains of what be expected of more mainstream mountain bikes.

Enjoy the video and if you have any questions please put them in the comments below.

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2 Responses to Fat (video) Tuesday – The Quaraing on the Isle of Skye – by Ilya Rudkin

  1. Wade February 15, 2017 at 11:00 am #

    Good stuff! That trail looks like a flow trail, worthy of spinning it up.

  2. Illya February 16, 2017 at 10:31 am #

    Only did the top section. At the other end there is fork down which is a technical long descent, longer than the section I did, to the coast and the main road. A bucket list ride.

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