Ride(l) - Galloway

Ok, so this weekend wasn't exactly training, but it did have a direct impact on it, so I'm going to write about it anyway. This might take a while...

It being a bank holiday, my touring bike being in good nick, and with nothing in particular to do, I decided to take advantage of my surroundings and explore some of the parts of Scotland that aren't directly linked to Glasgow or Edinburgh.

With the weather closing in from the north, the obvious direction to head was due south, into Ayrshire, and, ultimately, Galloway.

Saturday morning started fresh and bright, and after a short session of swearing lugging the absurdly heavy frame downstairs, I was ready to go on to nigh on infinity. The bike was well packed, with both panniers bulging (mostly with food) and sandwiching my tent on the rack. Up front, nothing unusual except a couple of bar extensions that I'd had sitting in my cupboard for years. I wasn't expecting to set any time-trial records, but I thought they'd make for a useful additional hand position, and were certainly a good map mount.

Less than ten minutes in, and they had already contributed to one of my life's most terrifying experiences on a bike - very nearly the last. The handling of the bike whilst loaded hadn't gotten any better for time, and the light front end was exceedingly twitchy in the sporadic crosswinds. Heading down to the heliport, I decided to see whether leaning on the exceedingly narrowly-spaced extensions might stabilise things a bit.

Tentatively, I shifted my left hand across and took a white-knuckle grip on the extension. No, this wasn't stabilising things at all. Maybe if I brought across the other hand? Look, I'm just coming to a downhill now, that ought to make it easier. Just shift it across....

OhmygodI'mactuallygoingtodierightnowandIhavenobrakesandnocontrolandmyelbowsaretouchingandthebarsaretwistingandarglebarglearggh!

With a terrified flinch, I withdrew my hand from the extension and brought it back onto the bar, sending the bike half-way across the road as I did so. I had been millimetres from clipping the curb, with no brakes and no real influence over which way the bike was pointing. That settled it, then. These extensions were going to be essentially overweight map-holders for the rest of the trip.

It took an excruciatingly long time to spin my way out of Glasgow, up the preposterously long hill that makes up roughly the entire south side of the city, stopping at every other traffic light and losing sight of the commuters I was tailing. Bursting out into rural Renfrewshire was a sudden, though not unexpected, relief, and by switching to back-roads I instantly found myself lost amongst not-so-gently rolling farmland, well out of sight of the motorway. A trio of road bikers towed me into Stewarton against the headwind, vastly increasing my average speed, but from there I was on my own.

After several attempts, I found my way onto the number 7 cycle route at Irvine, to avoid the worst of the dualled A-road. The stretch of coast between there and Ayr is dominated by a paper factory, the smell of resin and sawdust tackily clogging your nostrils as you weave back and forth by small nature reserves surrounded by heavily managed forestry land. The area isn't entirely charmless, and as I turned off the coast road just south of Ayr to cut across the Carrick hills to Maybole, the view was clear enough to just about make out Arran across the water. Still, I had more interesting places to visit than Ayrshire.

The smell of resin and sawdust

My speed down to Irvine had been so horrifically low that I'd actually stopped bothering to track it, and the short, steep rises and dips of the Carrick hills weren't doing it any favours. Despite the weight over it, my rear wheel seemed to have a worrying lack of traction that made going downhill a far more cautious undertaking than I would have liked (though not slow, by any stretch of the imagination). By the time I got into Maybole, I was in severe need of a caffeine boost to see me to the end of the day, but since the only coffee shop in the village had decided to close already (at 3 in the afternoon), I decided to try my luck at Culzean Castle.

This wasn't the first carriage I'd seen on Saturday

The castle is a Scottish National Trust property, and, as I drew up to the entrance gate, I was confronted by a large billboard with far too many long numbers on it informing me how much gentrified coastal piles of stones and the associated grounds cost to scum like me. Worried more than slightly, I flashed a nervous grin to the gateman and did my best to look like a bedraggled, world-weary traveller (not hard) who really only wanted a coffee.

He took a look at his watch.

"Yeah, alright."

As I whizzed down to the visitor's centre, I realised how rubbish a tourist I was being. I didn't even see the castle as I downed some coffee and cake and got back on the road. I felt like I was taking too long, but I wasn't really going anywhere... so what was too long? Regardless, I felt like I didn't really have time to explore. This was more about finding the shape of the country than its colour.

The bike by the overly-ornate visitors centre at Culzean castle

Back on the road, with some of my energy back, I headed on towards Galloway, thinking that maybe if I crossed that imaginary line it'd mean that I maybe wasn't as horrendously slow as I had thought. I was hardly pushing, but this was still a disappointingly short distance for the first day.

At Girvan, as drizzle moved in, I turned off the coast road and started climbing again. It wasn't that the coast wasn't lovely - it certainly had a sort of agricultural charm - but it didn't exactly feel very Scottish. I was surprised. I had expected the land of Robbie Burns to have a bit more... granite to it.

The long wind to Barrhill swiftly got over its vertical intentions and turned into a (mostly) flat run along the river to Barhill, the valley walls isolating the occasional farmhouse and village from anything more than the odd train running down to Stranryaer.

At Barrhill itself, I climbed steeply out and onto the moors, passing the bizarrely isolated train station that required a bus shuttle to get down into town - Barrhill hardly being a large one at that. Suddenly, I was in a world of space that was uniquely Scottish. You just can't fit this sort of landscape into any other part of the UK.

It just goes on and on

It was getting to that time of day when I wanted to be setting up camp, but there just seemed to be nothing up there to stop me. Open moor went into forestry went into even larger moor, with nothing for miles on each side but the odd crofter's cottage and wind farm, which, to be fair, looked entirely in scale with the landscape. There was just so much nothing that the turbines acted as a nice point of interest, a patch of white rotating trees in between the forestry lands.

I was well into Galloway when I finally spotted a gate through a low stone wall, and headed up the the back end to the field, where there was an almost-flat, almost-dry area. The wind and rain was closing in fast, so I set up quickly, downed some pasta, and fell almost instantly asleep, shivering in my increasingly damp sleeping-bag. The silence beyond the tent was astounding, until the rain started.

First night's camp

My long night, waiting for the rain to cease, was filled with strange dreams about what was going on outside my tent. I must have thought I'd woken up a half dozen times, only to find that someone had, completely logically it seemed, set-up a disco outside. When I finally, fully came-to, the rain had almost given up for the day and the cloud was rising. The wind and my shivering didn't make taking the tent down a particularly easy experience, but I was back on the road by 8, and for a full hour as I made my way down to Stranraer I didn't see a single moving car.

Stranraer being the lovely place that it is, I didn't stay any longer than was necessary to get a cup of coffee and a bacon sandwich at the Morrisons, then headed straight on down to the Mull of Galloway.

The useful thing about cardinal points is, of course, that it takes one through an awful lot of the country to get to them, giving just a little flavour of everything between you and them. This part of Galloway was very much the home of the Caledonian Cheese company, with every farm being dairy and proudly displaying its approved credentials. A long line of small turbines oscillated on the ridge of the Rhinns, powering the milking plant with the strong westerly.

The bike at the mull

The mull itself tapers attractively to the white Stephenson lighthouse, and though I had to frequently pull aside for mobile homes to lumber past me on the singletrack road that leads down to it, I was satisfied with how picturesque it was. The Isle of man was just visible to the south, but Ireland was sadly invisible on the day, so I couldn't do the romantic thing and get to the end of one land mass only to look out to the next. One thing I wasn't satisfied with was finding out it is a whole 5 miles from Drummore to the Mull - an unfortunate sting in the tail that climbs steeply from the coast to get back onto the ridge.

As I turned back, the wind had picked up strongly. Pushing the bike off the peninsular was laboured and slow, but as soon as I got back onto the flat and turned west, I was practically flying.

I took the A75 to Newton Stewart - a fairly unremarkable A road that probably sees much more traffic than I saw on that Sunday - which I noted because it had a brand-new section of dual carriageway. As the signs counted me down to it, I rolled my eyes and shrugged my shoulders, expecting several uncomfortable miles of holding my own against 70mph traffic. To my surprise and delight, this was not the case!

Forn both of the new duallings I road along on my trip, the developer had put an actually pretty decent segregated cycle lane alongside. Getting to and from them still required the nerve to ride a busy single carriageway A-road, and there was enough sharp gravel dragged onto it that I would worry about taking my road bike along there, but it was a pretty good start. Dutch-style segregation along a British road - it really is possible!

At Newton Stewart, I had the chance to turn the map over to the next page... and notice that I was an entire glen further west than I thought I was. Not that I was running slow or anything - I just hadn't noticed there was an entire extra section of hills when I had done my planning-at-a-glance session the previous night. I would have to get a move on, and the next stage was Galloway Forest Park.

For the past hour I had been watching the disturbingly high mountains of the park creep up on me, and now was the time to head straight through it. I could feel premonitions of pain as I slipped onto the start of the Queen's Way, noting the 8 ton weight limit.

Apparently red squirrels like blind corners.

The road rolled on, and the mountains got larger, and I got more and more nervous. When was this going to kick off? With the wind behind me, and a gradient of only 1 or 2 percent, things were nowhere near as difficult as I was expecting. There had to be a sting in the tail.

Galloway forest park - seriously underused

There had to be, but there wasn't. The road just flowed on and on, through epic, beautiful, fantastical, jaw-dropping scenery, and there was no challenge at all. I rolled through with the sort of insane smile on my face that you only expect to see on a serial killer who's just discovered a machine gun. This was just insanely good. The wind, the weather, the fact that I had just downed a can of energy drink - maybe all of these factors played into the hands of the park, but as it was then, that road became one of my favourite of all time.

The best road in southern Scotland?

I won't claim that it was an exciting road, but my goodness was it beautiful. It was just a few over-trimmed forestry sections away from me just saying "forks in my eyes" and leaving it at that.

It's arguable that in terms of land area, you could fit Scotland into England several times over. Well, you can't. Landscapes like this just don't fit. They can't. I can't believe that there's enough space in Britain full stop for vistas like this. I cannot believe that such a road was ever built, and am astounded by my luck to have the opportunity to ride it on such a beautiful day. Riding these roads - it feels like what I was born for.

It's the sheer scale that gets you

The end of the road, when it came, was abrupt, and left me clamouring for more. After a wrong turn at New Galloway, though, I was quickly back onto another A road that, well, just wasn't. It was a bit steeper getting onto this one, but after a short lumpy section, it was back into big glen country. A hundred spots a mile looked perfect to camp in, but I couldn't stop my legs, and didn't want to, either. The rolling green hills, the burn on my right or left, the sensation of gliding through a landscape so lightly inhabited that the time between villages could stretch into reasonable fractions of an hour - why would I stop?

The bike was in its element, and so was I.

As I stopped to check my map at a rare junction, tiredness hit me, and I was forced to contemplate finally stopping for the night. I made it to the far side of the valley, and found a campsite where I could get a shower and leave my stuff if necessary. The original plan was to stumble into town to find a pub, but I was tired enough that it didn't seem worth it, so I decided to leave a perfect day to end with the sun.

The second night was spent in slightly more civilised surroundings

The following morning, I didn't exactly get off to a rapid start. I had picked up a thorn through my front tyre, and repairing this seemed to set the rim slightly off, touching the brake. As I fiddled with this, I noticed how stiff the hub had become. Damn, this was bad.

I hadn't serviced my front wheel since I had picked the bike up, second-hand, thinking that I would replace it soon enough, anyway. Except that the parts were never in stock, and I forgot about the wheel... and now I was in trouble. All of that feedback through the bar that I had thought was just road buzz was, in fact, this hub telling me it was into its last days. I hoped it'd get me home without seizing.

The last day, then, went by with no small amount of trepidation on any downhill, as I worried that a bearing might fracture and skid the wheel, leaving bits of me and the bike all over the road. I took the most direct route back, straight up through Wanlockhead, the highest village in Scotland.

Up, up, and ever more up

What an isolated place to live. Despite only being 1530 ft above sea level, the climb seemed to last forever. With all the weight on the back, I was forced to just set the gearing low and spin for what seemed like hours. I was rewarded with a drab cluster of low houses that looked like they'd be just as at home outside a mining town somewhere in Canada, and I suppose the conditions probably wouldn't have been all that different. Getting chilly already, I decided not to hang around, and shot straight off down the other side of the mountain.

Wanlockhead. It's a really, really high village

To be honest, I wasn't really that bothered about getting home, which was an issue, since I did have to, and my legs seemed content to just keep on spinning along. As I joined the number 74 cycle path, I was overtaken by a couple of guys who seemed happy enough to settle about 200 metres in front of me.

Curse my competitive nature. I finally found a way to use the aero bars - by taking off my light, I could get my elbows wide on the normal grips, and hold onto the extensions from the sides. It was enough to get me past the two leadout men, but it still didn't feel safe enough to do any real descending - not least because going for the brakes might snag my coat on the bars and spin the whole thing. Nevertheless, I was glad that I had finally made use of the things.

The rest of the journey doesn't really seem worth commenting on. Sure enough, I took a few wrong turnings to get between Hamilton and Glasgow, but that was to be expected. I'm sorry to end the post like this, and I'm sorry that my account hasn't been particularly interesting, but, to be frank, I just wanted it down and out of the way. I might come back at some point and edit it to make it more intelligent, entertaining and insightful, but for now, at least it's something.

Good trails!