Thorntonhall Circular
A lovely wee route starting from the idyllic Thorntonhall Station. Just follow the quiet signposted roads to Eaglesham and the green route on the map below.... In spite of the motorway and the new construction of a housing scheme behind Eaglesham, this is a mightily quiet and pastoral route...
No words required.... just a few pictures...
The old Swan public bar in Polnoon Avenue...
A chance encounter with Lawrie and his dad at the top of Polnoon Avenue... I'm the one without the helmet!
They smell ma pieces...Help ma Boab!
The light up here is spectacular... the air too...
The table-topped Ballageich Hill...
The 15th Green at Eastwood Golf Course. Just walk through the course and over the fence at the end onto the road beside Hazeldean Hill, or if you prefer you can take the road that runs alongside the course down to Newton Mearns...
The Eight Map Man
The map is not the territory. I am.
The Eight Map Man (or Eighpman for short) is a term I came up with the other day when I realized that the terrain I was covering by bicycle, train, and foot, on a weekly basis, required 8 OS Landranger maps to do it justice. I had already identified this terrain some months ago when I did a post called Home Range, and was keen to find out just how large it was, say, compared with the range of an eagle or a large bird of prey. Or, for that matter, another indigenous human being who has not dislocated his self from his own locomotive force or his environment, and who regularly covers vast areas as he stalks and hunts across his territory.
Naturally, my 'hunting' and stalking' is not for deer or bear, but for insight. This is my food before all else. If I cannot see properly, then it stands to reason that my food might not be what I think it is. Our insight as a species has deteriorated in proportion to our being overwhelmed with technologies that propose to see for us.
I am a stalker (in the Tarkovskian sense) after all, someone who realizes the endgame of science, technology and progress, and attempts to circumvent it by doing what comes naturally, namely, locomoting through my territory, in search of 'food' and insight.
There are various definitions of what a home range actually is. Burt (1943:352) outlined the basic concept of an animal’s home range as we now understand it: That area traversed by an individual in its normal activities of food gathering, mating, and caring for young. Occasional sallies outside the area, perhaps exploratory in nature, should not be considered part of the home range.
It has also been proposed that the best concept of a home range is that
part of an animal’s cognitive map of its environment that it chooses
to keep updated.
As a species, it is worrying to see that we have lost touch with our home ranges, because we have lost touch with our auto-mobility (and allowed it to be usurped by machines which we have designed). A car or a conveyance device that subtracts your metabolism and vital force from you cannot confer a home range. Indeed, it destructures your home by carrying you and thus infecting your metabolism. A home can only be homed in on, by using your own steam. Any other way is simply delusion and detraction.
So the Eighpman is where I'm at for the moment. Or if you prefer, the landranger. Sure, I bend the rules a little, by taking trains here and there, within reason. But no cars. Where the bicycle is perhaps one of man's more noble inventions, the motor car is possibly one of man's worst (along with the cathode ray tube, and perhaps even the printing press...). It has divested the human of his soil, and of his contact with the earth. In effect, the motor car has unearthed the human and created man.
The question everyone needs to be asking themselves in this conceited and artificial world of carrying devices and their resulting pollution, is how expansive is your home range. Do you even have a home range? Or are you carried, like a big baby that has never been allowed to grow up, everywhere? Where do your horizons end? And what uninterrupted views have you of the place where you live? Indeed, and perhaps the most important question for someone who has abandoned their own vital force: are you even alive?
Kaim Dam Up'n Over
Here, a beautiful wee route from either Paisley along the 8 mile or so wildflower corridor Sustrans Route to Lochwinnoch or the train. Since the train was overloaded with weans going doon the watter I decided quite wisely upon the former. And lo! what a serene corridor it is, passing quite quickly into the pastoral surrounds of Paisley and past the villages of Kilbarchan, Johnstone, and Howwood. As a botanically-minded cyclist you might get lost here for admiring the beautiful and varied flowers of the valley's many wild plants. Even with several pauses however, an hour or so later, we're conversing with the swans and geese at Castle Semple Loch...
It's a great circuit, the dotted overland route not too bad apart from a squadron of clegs that wanted my blood, and pretty much got it. Down to Kaim Dam is a mere ten minutes from the highest point and you can cycle it if you're foolish enough. At the dam we join a dirt track that takes us back to the road. The place was deserted apart from a half dozen lapwings on the dam pier. Another ten minutes downhill all the way takes us into Lochwinnoch and well-deserved refreshments. It's a lovely little village (too many cars though) with some real cracking hills and glens right behind it. Some real good bike'n hike country. Really works the whole bodymind complex being out here on your own...
And the train back was air conditioned!
The wavelike adumbrations of Windyhill and Minan's Craig, which I saw from the other side last week when I cycled up the Gryffe Valley past Kilmacolm.
Looking down to Kaim Dam and towards the hazy cities of Paisley and Glasgow. Real sense of remoteness up here in spite of being only about a half hour away from the single track road. Absolutely no-one about! Except the pristine spinal column and snout of a sheep long passed, half buried in the peat.
18 Degrees and Cloudy
Most people are aware at some level of how the weather affects them, yet few are apparently aware of the benefits of this affecting, and seem too drawn towards the sun alone. If we considered certain meteorological events, showers, rainfall, gales, snowstorms, there would appear to be, from what I see outdoors, a certain bias towards dry sunny days without too much wind and with little or no rain.
It's curious to be sure. Even the birds will slow down when it rains, try and find a place to shelter, or just wait it out in a hunch. It's no fun being soaked the bone after all.... or is it?
In fact, when you're out cycling, it is quite fun to get soaked, especially given Scotland's temperate climate. It's not so much a soaking as it is a light drizzling, a smirr that coats the skin with a smooth and wet film. Now, when you're cycling, this can actually be quite refreshing; instead of sweating buckets and having to rehydrate, you are naturally cooled and hydrated by the weather. I mean, how cool is that? If, like me, you have lived in countries like Qatar, Libya, and Saudi Arabia, as a poor teacher of English (Scots really), then you will know what hot weather can do to you, what a lack of rainfall and cloud cover can do to the mind. There is nothing so amazing than a vital and varied weather system, and out of all the countries I have lived and worked in (England, Italy, France, Senegal, Turkey, Qatar, Libya, Morocco, Jordan, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kazakhstan) I can say without reservation that Scotland's is the finest and most invigorating.
18 degrees would appear, then, for the cyclist, to be the perfect temperature, and the clouds would then appear to offer the cover from the sun that an energetic animal needs, if not a little rain to wash away the sweat. To be sure, we grow into our climates wherever we are born, but nowadays, since we are so closed off from our environments things are changing. It is important now more than ever to get into the outside and feel the weather. It gets inside you, livens you up. I always say 'double fresh' when I go cycling in the rain, for not only do you have your own hyper-organic energy to refresh you but you have also the rain. There is nothing so awake as the elementally thrashed organism, nothing quite so alive. So, take off that helmet (you don't need it) and your hi-viz clothing (you don't need that either unless you're a moth), and feel...
Electrically and chemically, writes the anthropologist John Bliebtreu in Parable of the Beast, the world passes right through us as we pass through it.
The Rolling Hillscapes of Inverclyde
In the far centre you can see the lumps of Craig Minan (left) Windyhill and another I'm not quite sure of. On the right half of the photo, in the centre you can see Mistylaw and on the far right, Hill of Stake. If you go to the next post, Kaim Dam Up'n Over you can see these bumps closer up and from the other side. Amazing!
A wonderful little road taking us up to the Gryffe Valley, just after Kilmacolm, here, looking down from the Sustrans route.
Corlic Hill.
Looking west across the Gryffe Reservoir to Dunrod Hill in far distance.
Wild Gull Island. Not quite Glacier Lake where they filmed the opening shots of The Shining, but there is an atmosphere...!
The light up here is fantastic and quite ethereal, especially given the great whales of hills, and the desolation. Very remote and stark. Perfect for the shamanic cyclist!
The Old Largs Road
Coming down into Drumfrochar and Greenock. What an entrance!
The finest view from any train station exit in Strathclyde...
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