Around the southern edge of Barcraigs Reservoir and through the single track back roads of upper Beith.
The Glasgow rail network is a joy to travel outside the rush hours of commuting times. Indeed, even the rush hours aren't so bad. This is not London after all. It is Glasgow, a geographically spacious and liberally populated metropolis, that always seems (outwith the crazed shopping corridors of Buchanan Street and Sauchiehall Street) to have breathing space all around. Part of this space no doubt filters in from the perimeter hills that are always visible from the city no matter where you are. The other part comes inevitably from the 600,000 population, a far cry from London's 5 million plus or Edinburgh's congested tourist hub.
With the most extensive suburban rail network outside London, Glasgow for the bike + train stravaiger is a joy to explore. And, as you've probably guessed by now, I have a rather broad definition of what and where Glasgow actually is. As the American anthropolgist Edward Twitchell Hall was apt to say, the limits of the self extend far beyond the body.
Living as I do in Cessnock just a couple of miles west of the city centre, I have a constellation of train stations to choose from and which will propel Pegasus and I to the furthest reaches of the Glasgow universe. It means that the day-trip is now extended across a wider territory, ostensibly almost as far down as the English border. At the moment however I am rippling out slowly, so it may be a year or two before I take that wonderful train down to Berwick upon Tweed and cycle out to Lindisfarne.
Today, I kick off from Dumbreck Station, another first for me, despite it being the nearest train station to me, a mere few minutes away on the bike over the motorway overpass and by Bellahouston Secondary School. The line is one of the quaintest in all the rail network, and is possibly the only railway line in Glasgow that is also a cycle path (when it arrives at its terminus Paisley Canal, the platform seamlessly joins the Sustrans 75 cycle path).
It's a 13 minute ride from Dumbreck to Paisley Canal and there is a touch of the bucolic (and the historic) along the way as the fields of Bathgo Hill swell up at Ralston, and Leverndale water tower and Crookston Castle pass by.
Exiting from Paisley Canal Station, looking north, you can just see the tops of the Kilpatrick Hills amidst the cupolas and roofs of Paisley. (The route heads the other way, south, up the hill...)
From the station to the 'car park in the sky' on the Glennifer Braes it's no more than a few kilometers in distance, and yet, it is a fair old slog due to some of the hills and the helter skelter nature of the route there. Like the climb up from Barrhead station into the Lochliboside Hills, this is a climb that really gets the blood flowing. By the time we are up on the Glennifer plateau, and with those views behind us, body and mind have fallen by the wayside and we are now fully enlightened beings ;)
Looking over Stanely Reservoir and Paisley towards the Kilpatrick and Campsie hills. (Stanely Castle, well worth a visit, is obscured by a bush at the bottom left of the reservoir).
The roads up on the plateau are sublimely empty and the open wide space palpable.
The view from Cuff Hill looking north over Kirkleegreen, Cuffhill, and Barcraigs reservoirs towards the Kilpatrick Hills. On the far left in the hazy distance is Ben Lomond, and on the far right, not too far away, is Walls Hill Fort which we skirted round the back of in order to get here.
A view of the west front of Lochlands Hill, upon which Saint Inan used to give his outdoor sermons. One of the stones is known as the Logan Stone or Inan's Chair. See if you can discover which one!
Not too far from here, and perhaps carrying on where Inan left off (c.835AD), is the mill farmhouse of Davies o' the Mill where the Scottish apostle of the simple life Dugald Semple lived for some time with his wife Cathie. Semple (related to the Semples of Castle Semple fame) was a very interesting character who sought to live the simple life in tune with nature. He was known as the hermit of Linwood Moss when he spent a year living there in his bell-tent and then a 'wheelhouse' (a horse-drawn wagon) before vast crowds forced him to decamp to Bridge of Weir. The title of his books (extremely hard to find) speak for themselves: The Joy in Living, Life in the Open, A Free Man's Philosophy... Semple was particularly fascinated with food and how we had strayed from a natural, healthy diet to one which clogged our arteries and clouded our brains. He was writing about this in the early 1900s (he lived from 1884-1964) until his death. If he were alive today and privy to some of the absolute nonsense we put in our bodies (and the absolute nonsense being put on our supermarket shelves), not to mention the scale of obesity around the westernized world, he would simply say (and be quite right to do so), 'I told you so...' Too many people 'making a living' and not living itself.
The steeple of Beith. Coming down from the golf course and the quarry.
Beautiful Beith (from Old Irish 'beithe' meaning birch tree).
Through Beith, a beautiful old Scottish toon with 'inns' not pubs, it is another 10 or fifteen minutes to Glengarnock train station and the train back to either Paisley or Glasgow Central.
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