Tak Ma Doon Ma Man: Ode to a Ritual Road

The Tak Ma Doon road is one of the great by-ways of the world. It's not just for its quietness and the effort required to engage it, but for those sledgehammer views all the way up. It is a 'ritual road' for me and many others, ritual in the sense that to walk it or cycle it (engage it under your own steam) is a devotional experience. Prayer, the American poet Wendell Berry says somewhere, is work done in gratitude. This is one of the world's many paths of gratitude: as one ascends it, one becomes less and less, shedding the manufactured ego as one goes, until finally at the summit (a mere 320 metres or so), one is nothing. It is at these moments, fed and nourished by momentum (the mental fed by the elemental), when one realizes the significance of truth, beauty and the good. It's a significance that cannot be put into words, but has to be felt for oneself.

Having lived and worked in many cities around the world, there are not many that can boast ritual roads so near to the city, and yet with that searing remoteness and accompanying serenity that is so vital to one's spacing out. Glasgow, after all, as its name suggests, is a valley, or as I like to refer to it, a galaxy. These roads, then, with their metaphysical attributes, are something of existential wormholes into a whole other quadrant of being. Outer space, and alien life, is only off-world and distant for those who have been battered about the head too much by conventional wisdoms. Many children dream of becoming astronauts, not knowing that the real astronaut is the traveller who works these roads and lands.

Laird's Hill.

You can just spot the 'tombstone' high-rises of the city in the grey distance.

A couple of old-timers nearing the top. The shorts they're wearing tells me it's all go and head down from start to finish: no way to inhale the views or breathe in the setting, or simply just sit at the side of the road, flask in hand and talk to the birds. One of the great imperatives of our times, writes E.F. Schumacher in Small is Beautiful, is to distinguish between ends in themselves and means to ends. In other words, the ritual road is an end in itself, not simply a means to boost one's cardio.

At the top, just past the car park, looking south, some snow and ice (February 21st, 2015).

At the top, looking north towards the Ochil Hills of Stirlingshire. From here to Stirling is another 10 miles or so through the most idyllic (and mostly downhill) landscapes (see 'The Backroad to Bannockburn' elsewhere on this blog for the route guide).