Day 122: And What Shall I Do in Elysium?

Tags

Creetown, Gatehouse of Fleet, National Cycle Network, Newton Stewart, rusko woods, Scotland

A Cycle on the Celtic Fringe … Part 29

The convenience store across the road gets its first delivery at 4.30 am. It only wakes me up a little bit. It’s the 4.50 delivery that wakes me up fully. I wonder at the sleepy town putting up with the shouting and the banging of doors and the groaning of tailgates and the rattle of shuttering.

I try to sleep on but a third and a fourth van driver, who I imagine have heavy milages and tight schedules, arrive. The shop doesn’t look busy enough to accept so many deliveries.

I make tea and set about the long letters to family back home that are really pages and pages of notes. I have a vague intention of turning these notes into a fully written travelogue but I’ve had these intentions before. Hope defeats expectations. There is something glorious about re-living the previous day in words. Re-living it again eighteen months later, as I actually do write it all out, is almost as good. This is life worth living, re-lived, examined and enjoyed threefold. I write for two hours, have another power shower and arrive in the dining room at the same time as two elderly couples from England. We are greeted with brisk friendliness by our hostess. She tells us to sit where we want, to help ourselves to cereal and juice and asks after how well we slept.

Our English couples seem to be in uniform. Both men are in blue and both women in pink. They have matching scowls and copy each other in having very little to say. A sixth diner joins us. He’s scrubbed and dressed as a salesman and has the easy patter to confirm this.

There is an inevitability about my main order. “So, a full Scottish. Would that be with black pudding or haggis?” I choose haggis and I choose right. It will be my second of two Scottish breakfasts. I can get good black pudding in England and will, no doubt, be getting more in Ireland. And haggis goes so well with a cooked breakfast.

This breakfast is particularly fine. The tattie scone is really good and they know how to do mushrooms which, to me is a sign of a decent cook. There is also as much tea and toast as I can manage and I can manage plenty.

It’s my fourth fried breakfast out of the six days of the journey. There isn’t a worse start to the day you can give yourself. When I was younger it was fuel, but in my fifties it takes a while to even start digesting it all. For fifteen miles each morning I’m doing little other that carrying an extra half stone around with me. Once I’m over those fifteen miles it gets easier.

I take one last walk around the town. The woman in the post office is either solicitous, concerned that I don’t pay may than I should, or is a finer deliverer of blue-chip filth than even Humphrey Lyttleton. “No, you will not be after needing the big letter stamp. See, it slides through my slot perfectly.” There is a hint of a knowing look as she asks if there’ll be anything else I’ll be wanting.

I’m pedalling lazily through the village by quarter to ten, following a middle aged fellow who has ridden into town for a newspaper. He’s taking his time and makes the perfect pacemaker.

We pass the The Ship Inn where one of the most enjoyable of twentieth century detective novels was written and out into the countryside. The route  is one taken in the novel. I’m neither heading for mystery or murder but beginning a four mile ascent through rich green shady woodland. I see a dozen nuthatches and can hear woodpeckers. Each quarter mile brings  a fresh layer of vegetation as plants thrive at their favourite altitude. The car that goes past me is driven courteously and the driver waves. Broadleaf gives way to conifer and as I continue to climb that moment when the trees give way to open space and a landscape from another world is revealed; a lovelier world.

Up here there are drifts of heather, banks of bilberry, upland sheep and miles and miles of moorland, with rocky outcrops, and much higher hills beyond. To strike out northwards across this would be to enter a British wilderness. We may be a small island with nearly seventy million people but there are still places where you can walk and see not a soul, where you can get so lost that you will need those more expert than yourself to lead you to safety; where you can walk for more than a day without seeing a single road.

Once again I’m torn. I’m within half a day of the ferry ports now and as keen as I have always been to return to the island of Ireland, but this is the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen. I want to stay and draw it; to scratch down verses; to sit and soak it in and remember.

The compromise is a brew of tea to celebrate making a good climb without getting out of the saddle. I’d filled the waste bin in the hotel with a dozen items that no longer seemed so essential to be carting around. I discover that I have swapped them for the room key. It’s becoming a habit.

Refreshed to the tip of my soul I begin the long descent. The feeling of privilege is huge. These are the first days of the school holidays and I’ve got beauty, from horizon to horizon, all to myself. If this was the Peak District or the English lakes I’d be able to see at least a dozen people in lurid hiking gear. Here I share the world with a pair of buzzards and sheep who are content to be herded a hundred yards before bleating their true feelings at you.

Nothing lasts forever and Creetown is heralded by a young mother screeching at her three year old daughter.  Creetown itself is a seaport with working quarries. The granite that went to build Liverpool docks came from here. They’re big docks; must be some quarries. The town has a working class charm. The simple streets have an industrial flavour despite the geographic position.

Beyond Creetown the cycle network have excelled themselves. A whole route has been constructed to keep you off the main road. You can see the thundering ribbon in the valley below from time to time but the path way keeps you safe. It, being a cycle route, comes with cyclists. I hail them down to ask if they are going to be passing through Gatehouse. The third couple are and are happy to pass the room key back to the hotel. They are friendly and pleasant and are cycling Wigtownshire, Kirkcudbright and the Mull of Galloway. They’re on an organised holiday where their hotels are booked for them and their luggage carried from stop to stop. If they hadn’t been dressed from top to toe in  logo emblazoned lycra I might have been even more impressed. What is it about the twenty first century that brings people into the great beauty of the British outdoors in order to save you getting bored at the endless loveliness of it all? It wasn’t always like this. Now then Wordsworth, when you’ve finished showing Coleridge the quiet way up Greenhead Ghyll to look at an abandoned sheep fold why not have a look at some unfit middle class people who have squeezed themselves into puce and magenta spandex with Burger King splashed across the front?

For six days Newton Stewart has been a destination. The name and it’s western position has added to its allure. I can’t help but feel a tinge of disappointment as I enter the outskirts. I cycle up and down the main street and feel I may already have seen all there is to see. A shop advertises lattes and cappuccinos. I call in and ask for an Americano with milk. “Sorry,” says the young woman, “Would ye maine saying that again.”

The proprietor takes over. “It’s fine. I’ll deal with it.” He adds, sotto voce, but not so sotto voce that I can’t hear. “”It’s a white coffee!” I like the town much more after that.

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!

Day 114: Crossing the Border

Tags

Asda, Carlisle, Dens Park, England, Gretna, Lake District, National Cycle Network, Scotland, Solway Firth, The Old Blacksmith's Shop

A Cycle on the Celtic Fringe …. Part 23

There is a splendid bridge over the Eden as you head north out of Carlisle city centre. It will be the last time I see this river and I’ll miss it. I met it on the highest Pennine fells when it trickled from bog to marsh, and have watched it grow through childhood of falls and tumbles to young adulthood in the meadows amidst cattle and dairies. It’s a fully mature river that flows beneath the Eden Bridge. It still has a few meandering miles to go before it joins the Esk and together they form the tip of the Solway Firth. It isn’t a river I’ve heard a great deal about but it is a river to cherish; a river that is almost the perfect model of an English stream.

Once over the bridge my troubles begin. I’ve got previous with the National Cycle Network. Like every other millennium project, this seems to have been designed with greater fervour than thought. It seems either to take you altogether out of your way, or it adds miles onto the simplest journey without adding much to the aesthetic experience. Another habit it has is to take you step by step into the middle of nowhere and then abandon you. And this is what it does before I’ve even left Carlisle.

A lady outside the castle had carefully explained the route to me and it distinctly said Asda, and it clearly said, service road. I amble along some Victorian streets of three storey houses from Carlisle’s days as a major textile town, and then out into country lanes where charms of goldfinch cheer me on my way. My spirits chirrup and chatter with the birds, the meadow flowers are in full bloom on the verges and hedgerows and I suddenly find myself on a series of newly laid out roads without signposts and some without macadam. My twenty five year old map is useless; these roads didn’t exist twenty five weeks ago. I have no compass, no sense of direction; the sun seems to have moved into the north. I lose a little enthusiasm on finding that my first choice leads to a dead end and my second becomes a slip road for a big trunk route. On my third attempt, I come across a group of road builders being advised by a sturdy fellow who turns out to be something of a hero.

I expect to be shouted at for riding on his unmade road. Instead he takes in my plight, points me in the right direction with written instructions (which include the words Asda and service road), and instructs one of his men to drive slowly in front of me, motorcade style, to ensure I get safely out of town. I’m sure a riever or two have had similar escorts in their time on their way into Scotland. I’m proud and thankful, and happily acknowledge the van driver’s salute as he speeds back to his work.

From then on getting to Scotland is a piece of shortbread.

My main interest in Asda is whether or not to buy a £12 tent. The problem is that their £13 sleeping bags have sold out and a night in a tent without, even in summer, in Scotland, is something that may prove a little chilly. I’m also packed to the gunnels. It’s a dilemma though. There isn’t another big town on my route until Dumfries and I suspect that the Queen of the South isn’t as big as I imagine. In the end I save my money, buy a few apples and seek out the service road.

It’s brilliant. A perfectly made road, newly laid and flat and smooth, in the shadow of whatever the M6 is called this far north, with hardly a car on it and a good summer breeze blowing me along like a sail. I wasn’t expecting either such a good road or such power in my legs. For four days I’ve laboured on this bicycle and now I’m flying towards the Scottish border like a man on the run. To my right the thundering wagons and lorries force their way out of England. To my left the vast estuarial plain of the Solway.

I divert west to the pretty village of Rockcliffe and then it’s north again, enjoying the sun, the wind, the fitness and the aptness and the just being thereness of it all. More cattle, more haymaking and a final glimpse of the Eden, though I was unaware of it at the time.

The maps I used were years out of date and I left them behind in the next hotel, google maps suggest that I must have gone into Gretna and Scotland on the M6. I know I didn’t. I passed a large saltaire, and a famous blacksmith’s shop without stopping. I’ve been there before; it’s Scotland of the Arran sweater and shortbread tin variety and that’s for the English. OK, so I am English, but this pedaller started school in Thurso and saw his first professional football on the terraces at Dens Park, Dundee. I’ve also taken a hundred hours to warm up my legs and I’m not stopping for an anvil and a place to marry an underage bride without her father’s permission.

My plan is to get nicely into the auld country and then look for one of those ubiquitous cheap motels; Ibis, Holiday Inn, Premier; and have a proper room for the night. I’m afraid of the A75 but, in finding my route to Annan, I find that what was the main road is now a quiet B road and I can avoid the Stranraer bound beasts for ten happy miles. The south westerly that blew me over the border has abated. It’s early evening and the sun is still high and bright over the fields of barley and wheat. Scotland looks a good deal like the nicer parts of England. I can even see the peaks of the Lake District. I’ve been keeping a healthy distance from them all day and now I can see them from a completely new angle. They’re every bit as impressive from a distance as from up close.

But I’m leaving behind the land of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Ruskin. I’m in Scotland, the land of Robert Burns, and to see her is to love her.