Day 247: When You Can’t Get Any Wetter Rain Feels Nice

Tags

Arran sweaters, Carlisle, Dumfries, Dumfries & Galloway, Gretna Green, M C Escher, Old Blacksmith's Shop Gretna Green, shortbread

A Journey into Scotland … Part 14

Rain pattered onto the tent throughout the night. All tents are designed to amplify the sound of rain but this is a good tent. A small, properly made, one man mountain tent. Inside the sleeping bag, inside the tent feels snug and warm and dry. I have no intention of setting off into the wet and mirk of the morning. Today was going to be the day when I learnt a very important lesson about cycling. Like most important lessons it was a simple one and one that might seem banal to the inexperienced. It has stood me in good stead in many circumstances since and it is this: once you are wet, you cannot get any wetter and most rain then becomes friend rather than foe. Obviously it doesn’t stand up to cold rain. Being cold is tolerable. Being cold and wet isn’t.

By nine o’clock it was obvious that it wasn’t going to stop. The tent came down and I delighted in packing an entire camp site into the bags on a bicycle. There is something tremendously satisfying about carrying everything you need for the journey with you. My efforts and my efforts alone are going to see me round Scotland. I’ll camp about half the nights and use youth hostels for the rest. I didn’t mind the youth hostels at all. Met all kinds of fellow adventurers and wanderers but found something even more special on the nights I put up the little tent and fired up the primus stove.

Returning twenty five years later I hoped to find the place where I had camped. I couldn’t even find the road. Not even on a map. I know I was there. I have the memories and I know that by ten o’clock I had cycled the few miles needed to take me into Scotland. I’d heard stories about the old blacksmith’s shop at Gretna Green for years and hoped to be able to find  it. It wasn’t difficult. It is on the main road. It is just about the first building you come to. There was a Scotsman in full kilted regalia blaring out a tune on the bagpipes.

My first taste of Scotland was of a tourist kind. The shop was there to cash in on an image of the country that has been exploited for a long time. Piles of Arran sweaters and tins of shortbread. Robin Hall and Jimmy McGregor songs playing away in the background. This was all Scotland decked out for the English. I was to spend the next fortnight in the country. I never again came across this sort of “White Heather Club” Scottishness until I once again came close to England.

It did feel good to have crossed the border and it felt good to have tracked down my first intended sight. I was pedalling again before long. The rain slowly soaking everything I wore and deflating my spirits. It was a genuine test of resolution. There was a main railway line at Carlisle. If I was going to abandon I’d be better off doing it now. There wasn’t another station until I got to the Ayrshire coast. The rain washed away my spirits, it washed out the views (I had taken off my glasses, after conceding defeat  to raindrops and condensation, and my eyesight isn’t the best without them). It even washed the lubricant from my gears and gave the back wheel a rather annoying squeak.

And so passed the early villages of Scotland. And then, quite suddenly, while passing through Annan I realised that I was now soaked through to the skin. I couldn’t get any wetter. It was like being in the shower. The falling rain suddenly became something that could no longer harm me. The drops felt sweet and my spirits lifted. I think I may even have opened my mouth and tried to catch raindrops on my tongue. I can clearly remember starting to sing as I crossed the countryside between Annan and Dumfries and by the time I arrived in that city the rain had stopped and a watery sunshine was trying to break through.

I rested long enough to eat a Mars bar by the river and to get encouragement from a fellow walking his dog.

“Thurso. Now that’s a good long way. Couldn’t you have persuaded your parents to have moved you up to Kilmarnock? Would have saved you the best part of a thousand miles on this trip of yours.”

I patted his dog and we marvelled at this new fleece material. My trousers were soaking but the fleecy jacket had completely dried out while pedalling.

He took my picture down by the River Nith. I arrange it so you can just see the floodlights of Queen of the South football ground in the background. I have a quaint desire to locate some of the wonderfully poetic names from the Scottish football league. Putting real places to go with the poetic results recited every Saturday on the radio by James Alexander Gordon. I manage to detour  my route enough to take in Cowdenbeath and St Johnstone, Inverness Clacknacudden and Brora Rangers. Football has always meant a great deal to me. I don’t want to visit the big cities on this tour but the odd venture towards Forfar and Stenhousmuir can only be a good thing.

I had no sense in those days. I’d ridden most of the day on main roads and found myself on the A75 coming out of the town. I’ve ridden little bits of this road recently and it is one heck of a monstrous, murderous stretch of highway with the full force of the Northern Ireland lorry fleet thundering by. I have very few memories other than of turning the pedals and making my way. I cannot remember the lorries or the cars. I can remember the squeak from the back wheel which was annoying me so much that I pulled into a little garage near Crocketford and asked if I could use the oil can. I was embarrassed asking but the man didn’t mind at all. Thought it was quite natural.

And so, with the clouds lifting and the weather brightening I finally got off the busy road and found a route that I can remember. This was why I had come here. There was no landscape like this one in the whole of England. The fields were bigger, the tree lines more marked and even the buildings suited a different clime. Remote, single storey whitewashed cottages. It was called an A road on the map but it didn’t feel like one. Cars were few and far between. The road continued upwards for a long time. It wasn’t high country but the road seemed to have been engineered by MC Escher. I never seemed to be getting any higher but I never stopped climbing.

Farms, the occasional cluster of houses, the odd church or chapel. I couldn’t help but feel a sense of rejoicing. I was only on my third day of the expedition and already I was somewhere that felt like a different world and I knew that I had made the right decision to make the journey by bicycle. I was still a drinking man and a smoker back then. I sampled a fair number of Scottish pints on my way around the country, smoked a good few packets of cigarettes and ate an awful lot of the type of food that has given Scotland something of a reputation for unhealthy diet. At the same time I was puffing out my cheeks, sucking in the Caledonian air and feeling fitter and more free than I had experienced for some long time.

I was pedalling through the hills of Dumfries and Galloway and the journey was beginning to feel very special indeed.

Note: I’d very much welcome thoughts on using black and white photographs for this post. I’ve done nearly 250 posts now and this is the first time I’ve used monochrome. It is merely an experiment to see how it works. It felt time to try something a little different.

Day 119: Queen of the South

Tags

Dumfries, Kirkpatrick's Cycles, Lochmaben, National Cycle Network, River Nith, Scotland

A Cycle on the Celtic Fringe … Part 26

Breakfast is in the bar of The Crown. It is overseen by an old man who seems to be well versed in over-seeing. And decidedly un-versed in helping. Like many small hotels there is a set way of doing things and an assumption that everyone will know what the set way is without being told. Some people like routines. I am suspicious of them. I have no objection on principle but feel a sadness when the routine is seen as the right way of doing things because it is the way we do things. It stifles creativity and stands in the way of actual thinking, exploring and advancing. It’s limiting effects are as keenly felt in national governments and schools as in small hotels.

There are tables laid out for one, for two and for four. No-one is allowed to eat before 8.30. This isn’t simply a matter of routine; this is to allow the attractive young mother who does absolutely all the work, to provide her husband with his breakfast, get her children to the child-minder’s and man the hotel kitchens. She is one busy woman. She is also pleasant and calm, friendly and accomplished.

I am directed to the table for one. Two road-builders nurse hangovers. One sees the cure in eating, the other in abstinence. The German family have their breakfasts ordered by the father who, in broken English, recites a list of what they would like excluded from their full-Scottish. Through simple mis-understanding, this is exactly what they are served. They eat slowly but without complaint.

I get an extra sausage and my first taste of haggis. I like haggis but wouldn’t put it forward as a national dish. It works well with bacon and eggs though.

My legs have stiffened up over-night and the mile-and-a-half-long-hill out of Lochmaben stretches the fibres nicely. I use it as a warm-up; just find a low gear and go up very slowly. It’s a grey and drizzly day, only a little after nine and I’ve got the whole day ahead of me. I’m on the main Dumfries to Lockerbie road. I’m only four or five miles from that town. The quiet, peaceful towns and villages I have discovered in this area make me contemplate the events of December 1988 when a little Scottish town became the centre of world news and the site of the worst terrorist attack on Great Britain. I say a silent prayer for the victims as I ride through the falling rain.

The upper Eden Valley is a glorious red sandstone. Dumfries is more of a mudstone. It is distinctive, but it is not handsome. It is a town I like though. My size of a town. Big enough to have all you could wish and small enough to have it where you want it to be. I have an issue with the signposting. I’m quite a good navigator, yet nearly miss the entire town centre. A young man puts me right and directs me down a road with a proper cycle shop on it. Kirkpatrick’s is an old fashioned shop run by a man who knows about bicycles. He stocks things a true cyclist needs and not just the fancy designer stuff to make the air-head look good. There is a wonderful old bike in the window and the philosophy of the shop is to give the customer what they actually need; be this parts, a new bike or first class information. The slogan is “At Kirkpatrick Cycles we don’t sell bikes, we simply tell the facts to let you make an informed decision”

I rate the shop highly, buy two tubes and ask the best way to Stranraer. He questions whether I wouldn’t be better off heading up towards Troon and Ardrossan and getting a ferry from there. He says I’ll enjoy the route through the south west highlands. His wife stands away in the background and observes in a tone that brooks little disagreement that “There’s not much to see in Stranraer. Troon’s nicer”.

Marks and Spencer provide me with a packet of their very nice drinking chocolate. They come in individual portions wrapped in silver cigar shaped tubes. Waterstones provides me with a modern map which includes cycle routes. The staff are helpfulness personified. I hand over the muddy brown bank note I was given in change at the bike shop and get a smeary blue one in return.

Outside it is a friendly version of any small town in Britain. Groups of young people impress each other while annoying everyone else. Young mothers with tattoos and cigarettes, old people getting in the way, especially the one with the bicycle, and groups of eastern Europeans looking a little lost. The town centre is nicely laid out and could even be called attractive. After an hour though I feel I might have done all that I need to do and wander westwards. The River Nith is wide and splendid and under-used as a feature of the town. I cross a fine bridge and follow cycle network signs that take me through a park, over another bridge and onto a disused railway. It all points in the direction of Castle Douglas. I had seriously considered following routes up into Ayrshire but this route was so very pleasant that I found myself choosing the Loch Ryan ports almost by distraction. I wanted the rail line to go on and on. Of course it didn’t but it soon became glorious country lanes. This part of Scotland is truly wondrous, and heading in a fast straight line to the ferry isn’t the way to see it. The day remains grey and wet but it’s  lovely. It is the day when I finally fall in love with the National cycle network 7.

There is only so much you can write about the pleasures of cycling. You pedal, you pedal some more. Sometimes you get short of breath, sometimes you recover while free-wheeling down hills. You see a lot of fine countryside, you experience whatever weather is around directly onto you skin and you think a lot of thoughts. Some people cycle to exercise their bodies. I certainly do this. Having done severe damage to knee and ankle joints I need a non-pounding form of exercise. Cycling and swimming work for me. But I find the exercise it offers to the spirit and the brain is what keeps me turning the pedals. I simply think better and more clearly when I am riding a bicycle. The experience is enhanced considerably if I’m riding through lanes as beautiful as these.

Day 117: Avoiding the A75

Tags

Annan, Dumfries, Eastriggs, Kirtle Water, National Cycle Network

A Cycle on the Celtic Fringe … Part 24

The road I’m following is also a national cycle route. With hindsight, I may have been better keeping to this all the way to Dumfries, but, if I had, I would have missed what I saw and I’m not really one to wonder too much about the road not chosen; certainly not with regret.

I’m not sure if the breeze has dropped away to nothing or if my legs are in the best shape of the year. Four days sunshine has done no harm in bronzing them, and there is just a hint of muscle emerging as I shed the first layer of chubbiness. There’s plenty of wobble left in the upper body, but the legs are setting a pretty good example. The road is quiet and good. At first it runs parallel to the A75 but after crossing the delightfully named Kirtle Water the road takes you out into the countryside.

It’s mixed farming all the way with a farmhouse on top of every rise from Gretna to Eastriggs. The flatlands are most welcome and the perfect sunny afternoon makes me want to go as far as I can. There comes  a point in any endurance activity when the keeping going is the simple and perfect pleasure of it. You’ve passed six degrees of tiredness and suddenly you are not only not tired, but you don’t think you’ll feel tired ever again. The pituitary gland produces endorphins and these  give you a feeling of exhilaration and they  hide pain. They make long distance cycling quite an experience. We also produce endorphins while eating spicy food and engaging in sexual activity. I make do with the cycling ones for now.

Eastriggs is a pleasant mixture of bungalows, whitewashed cottages, more substantial stone built houses and the grey municipal semis that caught on in Scotland rather more than south of the border in the 1950s and 60s. It’s almost deserted. I suppose everyone has been called in for their tea.

The road remains quiet between here and Annan but you’re never out of sight of residential housing here. The fields stretch out towards the distant (and out of sight) Firth. The succession of whitewashed barns and farm buildings gives the area a completely different feel from rural Cumbria. I haven’t spoken to a soul since crossing the border; I’ve passed little other than ash and sycamore trees and fields and farms; and yet, it is unmistakably Scotland. And I am undeniably happy.

Annan was another place where I’d thought of making a stop. There was no way I could have planned getting this far when I left Dufton. It’s approaching evening. I’ve left my writing pad in a Carlisle post office and I need a fork to eat my second M & S salad. The first shop I stop at sells both. It also sells me a can of cola to wash down the lunch I didn’t finish in Carlisle. I take an immediate liking to the town. I sit down on a bench to eat my tea but all the shine of the place wears off before I’ve completed my coleslaw.

On the adjacent bench is a young family. Mum and dad can’t be more than 24 (which is about the number of teeth they have between them). They have 5 children under 7 and a single covered torso between them; happily, the mother’s. In refutation of popular myths about the Scottish, there isn’t an ounce of fat on any of the six males. There is very little muscle either. The adult male has a selection of badly drawn and self-applied tattoos. In choosing a tattoo, the art is to choose one that depicts your personality. These are all awful and depict his personality perfectly. Both parents are smoking endless rollies which have a semi-legal smell.

The children are playing rough and tumble games of a sort that are indeed rough. The ability to accept humiliation and to take pain without complaint is not a skill I aspire to myself, but two of the littler fellows are going to become extreme hard cases if they continue to take the punishment their elder siblings are dishing out. The youngest complains to his mother.

“He hit me.” he whimpers, in a manner that still expects some sympathy and even protection.

“Well hit him back.” is all he gets.

“But he told me to f*** off!”

“Well you tell that tw*t to f**k off from me!”

And the elders went back to moaning about the f***ers who had stopped their dole and where the next lot of money was coming from.

I’ve no doubt that there is a family here in need of some urgent attention and help. I wouldn’t rate my own chances in life if I had the upbringing being displayed. I could do nothing. When I’d so much as glanced across I’d been met with looks of menace and hatred. It didn’t show Annan in a favourable light. The two older chaps supporting each other out of the hotel bar across the road did little for my desire to make myself a local tourist statistic. In fact, there was either a fine local celebration or Annan has a strikingly high proportion of serious drunks. This was before six o’clock on a weekday evening and there were at least seven people beyond the acceptable bounds of sobriety.

I find a quiet road out of town and am contemplating where I might spend the night when I find myself on the A75. The rest of my journey to Stranraer/Cairnryan is one long attempt to avoid this road. It is a thundering brute of a road. All the traffic bound to and from Ulster would make this a busy enough road on its own but this is a major route inside Scotland as well. It beats like a thundering pulsing artery from the border to the sea. If you can avoid it you’ll cycle some of the best cycling and sightseeing roads in Great Britain. If you can’t avoid it, and I am forced to pedal it at this point, you’ll improve your map reading and route planning skills before you venture into Dumfries and Galloway again.

With ever larger trucks clattering by the last thing I want is a puncture. I’d only cycled one stretch of main road since leaving home and I punctured then. The odds of puncturing on my second stretch must be huge. The flinty roadstones that have been flung into the tiny ribbon of road, to the left of the kerb line, reduce the odds. I hit one. My body and soul deflate with the tyre. There is literally no where to fix the tube. The verge is one thicket of gorse. I prop the bicycle up in it, release the wheel, climb over a fence into some woodland and fix it there. I don’t care where the next road is going… I’m going to take it!