I was excited about riding towards Cape Wrath. Is there a more evocative name in Britain? I'd been slightly disappointed to learn that the name refers not to the fury of the seas that pound the cliffs, but from the Norse word hvarf, meaning turning place, the point where Viking warships used to turn east for home or south to the Hebrides. But still, it was a place I'd long looked at on maps of Britain and wondered what such a wild place might be like.
And there I was, two months after setting off from London on my ride around the entire British coastline, cycling alone through its majestic bleakness – that desolate wasteland, only a few living sheep and countless bleached bones, the landscape treeless, pockmarked with little oily burns that sparkled like mirrors. Beyond the land, just infinite sea and sky. The Parbh, as the land is known, was once home to vast numbers of wolves, and it wouldn't have surprised me in the least to have heard a distant howl.
I've travelled to some of the remotest places on earth – the great Arabian deserts, the Alaskan wilderness, Siberia. All those places have an ineluctable sense of their own isolation; it defines them. You travel in those empty places and feel like the first human ever to set foot there, or the first visitor after some terrible catastrophe. Cape Wrath felt like that.
The wind picked up. After about an hour, I climbed a final hill, turned a final bend, and there it was: 3,000 miles east of America and south of nowhere, the famous lighthouse, built in 1828 by Robert Stevenson, grandfather of Robert Louis, sitting atop some of the highest cliffs in Britain, where two seas collided. It was one of the most spectacular places I had ever seen. The light was automated in 1998, operated remotely, like all lighthouses in Britain now, by computer from Edinburgh. So who was the man coming out to greet me, followed by six barking spaniels? I felt a pang of disappointment that I was not alone.
"Hello," the man said. "Don't mind them. They won't bite."
His name was John, and he'd been living at the cape for two years full time, and eight years part time before that, renovating the lighthouse's outbuildings and turning them into a little cafe for the visitors who take the minibus up from the tiny ferry across the Kyle of Durness.
"Go and put your tent up and come by for a wee cuppa tea," he said, softly.
I pushed my bike into a field. The wind was very strong now, blowing in staccato bursts. Alongside one edge of the field was a thick wall standing 15ft high, made from stones each the size of a coffin. In places, the wall had been toppled. And as tempting as it was to tuck into its lee, I measured about 20ft from its base and pitched there.
I met John in the little cafe, the Ozone. "In winter, you can smell the ozone up here," he said. "It comes from the Arctic. Hence the name."
John, 54, told me how he and his wife Katherine had bought the building 10 years ago for £25 on a 25-year lease. They'd been living in Glasgow, where he'd manufactured window blinds, but he'd long had a dream of doing up a building at risk, preferably one that was remote. So when the lighthouse at Cape Wrath came up, it was too good to pass up.
He told me about the storms, about the 140mph winds that can peel the roof back, demolish the walls and send the dogs pitchpoling like tumbleweed.
Did the isolation ever bother him? He looked at me as if I were simple.
"I sit here and watch the fin whales and dolphins. The deer come at night to graze. I breathe what almost feels like pure oxygen. No, I wouldn't go back down the road again for anything."
From below me, in a cove, came the sickening crash of water on rock. "This dread Cape, so fatal to mariners … " Sir Walter Scott wrote in 1814. "There the foam of the sea plays long bowls with a huge collection of large stones, some of them a ton in weight, but which these fearful billows chuck up and down as a child tosses a ball."
I climbed the steep hill behind the lighthouse and looked out on the vastness, 270 degrees of sea. It was like sitting in the gods at the theatre. It was late now, maybe 10pm, in the perpetual twilight of a northern Scottish summer night. The lighthouse light flickered into life, its beam sweeping across the ocean and then the hill, catching me in it for a heartbeat.
The wind was threatening to bowl me over, the sea a maelstrom of whitecaps and churning water. A freighter battled north, its bow disappearing in the swells before popping up again. Ball cotton was flying around, creating a blizzard. A herd of red deer appeared in silhouette on the ridge line. I don't think there had been a moment in my life when I had ever felt more at peace; yet the raw elemental intensity of the place was making me emotional to the point of tears.
Eventually, reluctantly, I staggered back to my tent and climbed inside. It was getting battered and I found myself clutching the ground with my fingers. In the morning, there'd be torn canvas and several of the guy lines would be ripped to shreds. But I just lay there, smiling, not wanting the night to end.
Mike Carter's top five camping spots
Cape Wrath would figure in this list, and so would wild-camping on the southern shore of Loch na Keal, on the Isle of Mull. There was nobody around for miles, and I had a nice single malt for company and bagpipes drifting on the air from goodness knows where.
At the end of a 25-mile dead-end road on Lewis, next to the vast, beautiful expanse of Uig Sands, is a camping field with just a toilet, a standpipe and a £2 honesty box. When I was there, I had the place practically to myself, the grass was long, and through it ghosted hundreds and hundreds of rabbits. Magical.
6 Ardoil, Isle of Lewis (01851 672248). Open March to October
Tucked between the cliffs and the English Channel just outside Folkestone is the small Warren campsite. Its setting gives it a secret feel, and from it you can watch the setting sun turning the cliffs of Cap Gris Nez in France pink then ochre.
The Warren, Folkestone, Kent (01303 255093). Open April to October
The Carreglwyd site at Port Eynon, on the incomparably stunning Gower Peninsula. At sunset, from my pitch above the Bristol Channel, I watched the ships silently passing through, and beyond to the lights of Ilfracombe in Devon twinkling in the gloaming.
Carreglwyd, Port Eynon, Gower, Swansea (01792 390795). Open year-round