On the Trajective

The modern itch after knowledge of foreign places is so prevalent that the generality of mankind bestow little thought or time upon the place of their nativity.

Martin Martin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland


Eliminating distance kills. Rene Char

Distance (and duration) is a matter of perspective. In the same time it might take me to cycle from Glasgow to Stirling, another (by a different means of transport) could have travelled to the northern rim of Africa. There is something sinister about air travel however, something not quite right about circumnavigating the globe in the time it would take the average person to walk from Glasgow to Edinburgh. Though it may proceed in bursts, nature does not receive such ‘jumps’ so readily.  Eliminating distance kills. The soul, the Arabs believe, can only travel as fast as the pace of a trotting camel.


When we close ourselves off from the landscape and glassily pass through it (as with a plane or a car), sometimes not even seeing it (nevermind feeling it), something is lost in the process. Distance is killed. It’s not just a case of outsourcing our trajective energy to a polluting and profligate machine, but of crossing the world without the essential in-betweenness.

The loss of the interstitial soon leads to a 'neitherwhere' (neither here nor there), and an existential void (the A to B reduced to the simply AB) in which the mechanical process of relocation denies us our own locomotive force. Since body-mind-world is essentially inseparable, this mechanical denial radically affects our perspective not just of the world but of our own place within it. The ramifications of this depleted worldview, as we are beginning to see, can be horrendous for the body and the mind, and the larger world which embodies them.

In being seduced by speed, convenience and the promise of an easy life, [not knowing the kernel paradox that lies at the core of this promise - that the easy life is a vacuous life: that the less we put into it and the more we outsource this life to technology (that is neither techne nor logos) the less we get out of it], we have effectively allowed our selves to have been stripped of their dignity as hyper-organic entities. Obesity (whether of spirit or of body) is the great symptom, the silent epidemic, of this easy age.

The (short) answer? Start walking, start cycling (the real flying!), start slowing down… and reconnect to the body, to the soul… to the trotting camel. Start moving across the land under your own steam, and leave the car and the plane behind.

The inherent peace and beauty of 'world' reveals itself to those who travel under their own steam....

On Travelling Under Your Own Steam

'The World is us as soon as we learn how to move'. Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Whether cycling or walking, there really is no substitute for moving through a landscape under your own steam. It’s not just about those encounters and cometary intrusions along the way, nor the open-ness of the bodymind to the elements, but, intrinsically, it is the symbiosis of planetary movement: of mind (through wonder fostered by the passing land), of body (through the wander itself), and of planet (through its wandering, its ‘planetting’). It is this continuous harmony of flow that engenders a real sense of religion (from the Latin religio, to bind), and the unity that fastens, religions, every thing together.

In a car, everywhere you go, the whole world is an archipelago, each place an island in a void of travel, discontinuous, dislocated, broken up. The world becomes a noun, vehemently, of places. On a bicycle, or on foot, the paths themselves become verbal interconnectings. They become spokenly open. Places seep into each other as you seep into them. The world becomes a verb, of coming and going, moving and homing.

There can be no greater contrast than that of walking or cycling (on car-free paths) and driving. The bicycle versus the car is perhaps one of the more acute examples of the difference between contemplative (organic) and calculative (mechanistic) thinking, and between an open and a closed system.

Understanding this (and thus feeling it) one can come closer to a reciprocal earthly living that is both compassionate and cultivating in the best possible sense, where one both en-joys the world, and is correspondingly en-joyed by it.

It’s the sort of thing that prompted H.G.Wells to write, well before the full wrath of the motor car had descended upon us, ‘Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia’.

    Central Station, Glasgow.

Wind Wheel Samadhi

A man with a good bicycle don't need no Jesus!

I cycle everywhere. My bicycle is not so much a artificial prosthesis as it is an actual living limb. It is, like a leg, of immense value to me, not just in terms of moving, but in terms of thinking too.

In some ways the bicycle is the great metaphor for the cosmos; in other ways, it is a more subtle metaphor for a gradual awakening. One has to enact a path when one cycles, a path that has, more often than not, not been laid out before you. On top of that, one has to source one's own auto-mobility, and, ineluctably, re-connect to the magic of moving (for its own sake). In returning to this 'magic', one slowly returns to a state of freshness, to a state of awakeness.

Flowing, arc-ing and sweeping round bends, the lightness of moving, of gliding through space, almost flying through air, is the closest approximation I know of to the soaring flight of the seagull or to the spontaneity of a child running. It is the epitome of play. The gravitational pull of the earth is at no point more elegant than when one is conveyed downhill on a bicycle. In moving across the land on a cushion of air, and 'living at one inch above the ground', one attains a sense of freedom and of openness to all things that is self-evident within this selfless state of play. With no screen or speed to shield us, the cyclist necessarily becomes more elemental, more essential, more original.

There is also the small matter of the wind. On a bicycle, even on a windless day, there is wind. The rush of air renders the bicycle an air-craft, and cycling some kind of aero-planing. It’s no accident that the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics long before developing the first airplane. Cycling, if the truth be told, is not just a metaphoric awakening, it is Nirvana itself. It’s not just the wind (vana is related to wind in Hindu), it is the struggle and reward of all that ‘uphilling’, and the reciprocity. The cyclist attains rest in exertion, reaches movement in tranquillity, becomes tuned in by tuning out.

Wind wheel samadhi...

Bell's Bridge to Paisley

The path to Paisley from my flat in Cessnock is timeless. The flat where I live actually lies on the national cycle route which carries on past Paisley down to Greenock on the one side, and up and over to Irvine and Ayr on the other. Mostly on converted dismantled railways (kudos to Sustrans) and quiet traffic free roads, all of these radials shooting out from the city (not just the path to Paisley), are timeless in their embrace of freedom, fresh air, and flow.

From Bell's Bridge take the path past the IMAX cinema up to Govan Road where you can cut through the small and peaceful Festival Park (saying hello to the magpies and wood pigeons as you go!). Head along Brand Street for a few hundred metres before turning left into Harley Street which will take you up to the maind drag of Paisley Road West past the only underground station (Cessnock) that has made an effort with its entrance. We could almost be in Paris!

Cross over the main road into Clifford Street and turn right heading right along to its end where a set of stairs and footbridge will take you across the riverine M8 motorway to the large and spacious Bellahouston Park, which is just down to the right after you cross the footbridge. Head through the park (there are various routes), bearing diagonally south-west towards Bellahouston Drive which will take you down to Cardonald College. Through the quiet residential back-streets of South Cardonald (follow Kinnell and Dundee Drive) and Crookston, now alongside the White Cart Water, the path soon takes us into the infinite liberty of Ross Hall Park and the shade of some wonderfully enormous redwoods. At the confluence of the White Cart and Levern Waters there is a bench (a perch!) where one can rest and listen to the waters celebrate their re-union. From here, the path takes us past the old water tower, needling the sky like a pencil, of Leverndale Hospital, and past the morning fields of Bathgo Hill into the quiet suburb of Hawkhead and Jenny’s Well. Soon, we emerge onto the edge of Paisley at the foot of Hunterhill. If you follow the path along Hunterhill Road past some sturdy villas you will enter Saucel Hill Park (another humble drumlin) where a 42 metre high trig point will anoint you with a view of Paisley (and beyond) that is as timeless as the path you have just travelled. 

The magnificent redwoods of Ross Hall Park.

Leverndale Hospital water tower, field and trees...




























From Saucel Hill: An excellent view of Paisley Abbey and the Town Hall and the Kilpatrick Hills in the background, Duncolm hill clearly visible on the left.

From Saucel Hill: Looking north-westish across some notable Paisley landmarks towards the highlands in the distance.

The Genuinely Ingenious Engine

Sounds like a children's story - The Genuinely Ingenious Engine - and maybe it is, for the story of the bicycle and of cycling is not at all removed from the narrative of the child in each of us.

Part of the genius of the bicycle is precisely this: its capacity to transform us, to create much from little, to coax out of us that kindred spirit which may have been buried beneath too much 'adulthood'. The bicycle's lightness (we are travelling on air after all), combined with that natural ventilation that comes with moving through air, conspires to cancel out gravity - whether physically through our now flying - or psychologically through dispelling any grave concerns and seriousness. The air is all important...

The cyclist is not just some kind of pilot, but fundamentally, an engineer, and, by etymological extension, a genius! One could almost say that the cyclist is the engine itself since he/she is 'the device through which energy is converted to mechanical power and motion'. Moving under one's own steam might seem trivial to some, but when our society is increasingly being undone by the popular and pernicious act of being transported (both physically and mentally), it is both crucial and vital that we pay it due attention. We are all geniuses if only we could learn to move under our own steam, and decry the temptation to be carried by others.

The cyclist creates everything from almost nothing, becoming the most energy-efficient of all... animals and machines and, as such, has a [genuine] ability to challenge the entire value system of a society.... The bicycle may be too cheap, too available, too healthy, too independent and too equitable for its own good. In an age of excess it is minimal and has the subversive potential to make people happy in an economy fuelled by consumer discontent. 

Jim McGurn

The Dumbarton Circular (via St. Peter's Seminary)

This is a T&C (train & cycle) trip, though if you're feeling brave you could forget the train and make it a marathon cycle instead. Take the train (or not) to Dumbarton, and from here head through the town centre by the River Leven crossing the bridge to the other side and head for Levengrove Park by the Clyde Estuary several hundred metres away. Here, you could do worse than sit with a flask of coffee and listen to the estuary for a bit, space out and get lost in those gently rolling hills above Langbank and Port Glasgow on the other side. From Levengrove Park the path veers west hugging the shoreline, taking us up to Ardoch where we can join the main road along to Cardross.

As we go, the names of the residential areas - Kirktonhill, Brucehill and Castlehill - give us a clue to the past. It was here that Robert the Bruce drew up his retirement plans and settled down after a long life of warring. In the preface to his wonderful book Castles of Glasgow and the Clyde Valley (inspired by the more expansive Castles of Scotland by Martin Coventry), Gordon W. Mason (speaking of his weekly trips as an 8 year old along the coast to his Gran’s at Craigendoran) writes of his discovery of Robert the Bruce’s life (and death) in those hills above the Leven. ‘Thereafter my weekends down the Clyde took on new meaning, and from Dalreoch to Craigendoran my gaze, formerly fixed on the beautiful Firth, turned inland.’ I started taking my bike on the train, searching for Bruce’s castle, finding others, but not his.’

This is part of the beauty of cycling - the capacity to go where the car cannot, and the spontaneity of it all, finding things that you weren't necessarily looking for. These trips are not just meditations but explorations...

The shoreline along to Ardoch may involve traipsing through a field or two before you get to a beach, so it may be worth leaving the path and joining the main drag a little earlier than planned, say, just below Castlehill. But if you do you will miss out on all those wild orchids and butterflies. [For more information on this particular area, check out the excellent Wildlife Around Glasgow by Richard Sutcliffe].

At Ardoch, take the main road towards Cardross heading up onto the Carman High Road just before the ruined Cardross Church. We're heading for another ruin, one that wasn’t bombed but abandoned, and which has been wiped clean from all maps, unworthy it would seem of global (or cosmic) positioning. The ruin in question is the Corbusier-like several-storied concrete ziggurat of Saint Peter’s Seminary aka. The Spaceship, built in the early 1960s to accommodate the growing hope amongst the local diocese for more clergy. The seminary is now, after decades of neglect, something of an aesthetic artifact, but no less interesting for it if you can manage to squeeze yourself between the bars of the great unpearly gate that surrounds it.

Re-joining the Carman Muir high road, it's a few kilomtres up and over and down the other side to Renton. Carman Muir high road is a single track filament of a road that lights up brighter and brighter the nearer one gets to its summit. It’s a tough slog, but it’s worth it.  The views from the top are amazing.

At Renton, having survived a ferociously steep slalom downhill (what goes up...), we join the wonderful riverside path that runs from Loch Lomond to Dalreoch and over the Leven to Dumbarton. This path will take us serenely, if we're not already entirely exhausted, onwards into Glasgow, but it may be wise to stop here, have a banana, and get the train back.

Larkhall to Eaglesham

Glasgow`s proximity to hills and lochs is its greatest asset. Its rail links too are second to none. For this trip through the tranquil backlands of Glasgow`s southern rim, it`s a short train ride to Larkhall (a 40 minute journey time from Partick) before hitting the bricks of North Lanarkshire.

To be sure, there are umpteen guides to cycling in and around Glasgow, none more so than Erl B. Wilkie's excellent 25 Routes In and Around Glasgow, but there's nothing quite like making your own route, and finding a way yourself.

This route from Larkhall to Eaglesham (in fact I always continue into Glasgow centre another 5km or so away since it's more or less all downhill) is sublime and passes through some wonderfully tranquil settings, mainly moor and farmland. The back roads are more or less empty, with the odd tractor and fellow cyclist, but there is plenty of life and aliveness. The route passes through the small villages of Glassford, Chapleton, Auldhouse and Polnoon, and affords us a glance at the past as we go.

The Avon water gorge at Millheugh not far from Larkhall - look out for the now defunct Glen Morgan viaduct (the second highest in Britain).

Two beautiful donkeys in a field.

The empty farm-roads behind East Kilbride are a joy to walk/cycle.

When all other cities seem to be growing (accreting matter) exponentially (metropolises morphing into megalopolises), there is a growth to Glasgow that transcends mere matter and which welcomes space. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a large influx of Irish and as the second city of the Empire and the ship-building capital of the world, Glasgow’s  population was ever-increasing, eventually reaching a peak of 1,128,473 in 1939. This established Glasgow as the fourth-largest city in Europe, after London, Paris and Berlin. Business was booming, but so, unfortunately, was the city, quite literally, with the shock and awe of industrialisation. Pollution and population were at an all-time high. Life expectancy (qualitatively and quantatively) at an all-time low. With so many people in so little space it appeared that congestion, if not tackled head-on, would galvanise its own population check.

Post-war Glasgow, however, saw a rapid dispersal in population with boundary changes and comprehensive urban renewal projects relocating people to peripheral new towns like East Kilbride and Cumbernauld. The spacing out of the city had become a necessity following the plagues of the inner-city slums. This, combined with the gradual decline of ship-building, allowed Glasgow to cleanse herself of the impurities that had hitherto benighted her wonderfully airy body. Successive changes and policies meant that Glasgow continued to ‘grow without growing’, to the point where today, in 2012, her population is around the Hippodamic ideal of 600,000, and her airs and waters are qualitatively cleaner.

Auldhouse - if it weren't for the cars you could be forgiven for thinking you had travelled back in time.

Approaching Eaglesham (note the wind turbines on the horizon to the right).

When travelling these high back-roads, (these empty horizons), this inspiring (and inspiriting) quality of spaciousness has a resuscitative property that always awakens and enjoys. It is a beautiful thing to live in a city and yet to be able to escape it so easily.

The only additions to the OS map of 2012, from the OS map of 1962, is, surprisingly, a couple of golf courses (Langlands and Torrance), and the gentle southerly expansion of East Kilbride to absorb the outlying farms of Whitehills and Greenhills. Myriad small farms remain, as do the access roads that lead to them.

The route in red is the one outlined here in the text. There is another route however, just as alluring, the one in purple via Stonehouse and Strathaven, the latter town well worth a visit for its village feel and its wonderful variety of architecture.

The route in purple here is the way back to Bell's Bridge if you decide to continue on from Eaglesham. It's a great run - all downhill, and utilising a rare green finger that cuts more or less all the way into the city centre from the country, relatively unimpeded. After Newton Mearns the way passes through Waulkmill Reservoir and its glen before reaching Priesthill. Just follow the main road straight on, down and up, and down again. At the point on the road opposite Kennishead station you'll need to cut through the golf course towards the trig point. From here, there is a right of way trail through the course down to the clubhouse where you come out onto the main road, straight across it and through (or over) the gate into Pollok Golf Course. Follow the path straight on until it veers off to the right into Pollok Country Park. Pass Pollok House, and just follow the now marked Route 76 to Bell's Bridge.

Croy to Lenzie (via Paradise)

From Glasgow Queen Street to Croy (some 10 miles north-east) takes 12 minutes by train. From Croy train station we follow the hill down to the Forth & Clyde Canal at Auchinstarry quarry (a popular spot for rock climbers), and then up and through Kilsyth. It is here in Kilsyth that we join the great natural elevator into the hills, the Tak Ma Doon road.

In terms of cycling climbs (or downhills) there are few hills in Europe that can rival the beauty and/or difficulty of the Tak Ma Doon road from Kilsyth to the Carron Valley on the top of the Campsie plateau. The road, like the Crow Road (from the Gaelic crodh meaning cattle) was formerly a drove road for four-legged beasts and was never really designed for those with two legs (or two wheels for that matter). Thankfully, cars and cattle are few and far between lending the road a silent aspect that accords it a certain meditative quality as one ascends it. The peace and quiet on this road is all important, as it allows the mind to space out, and to align itself with the vastness of space that confronts it.

About halfway up, I get off the bicycle (or is it the other way around?) and walk the rest of the way with the bike at my side. No sense in forsaking that silence and those views.

'P is for Paradise - At the top of the Tak Ma Doon looking south'

Upon reaching the top of the Tak Ma Doon (some 2.75 miles in length and  500 metres in elevation), and as with all great elevators, the Tak Ma Doon reveals a celestial component to the human soul. The views are amazing - on a clear day, one can see Scotland from end to end (at least from east to west). The views, too, in one's head, having just scaled the face of these fells, are much clearer too! From here, it's all downhill more or less to the Carron Bridge and Carron Reservoir a few kilometres away nestled in the hollow of the hills. At the Carron Bridge Hotel, take the B818 west towards Fintry. It's a beautiful road, quiet and occasionally forested, and always hugging the reservoir's gentle shores.

A gathering of cormorants on the Carron Reservoir.

If you're brave enough you could make a detour into the Carron Valley forest and follow the path to the Meikle Bin, the Campsie Fells highest point. It's not much of a hike since you're already three quarters of the way up. And the views are stupendous...

The view south over the Little Bin and the Carron Reservoir from the summit of the Meikle Bin.

 Approaching Fintry on the B818 with Dungoil Hill front and centre.

From the Crow Road looking north to the Gargunnock Hills.


Just before Fintry, take the B822 which climbs the less steep Crow Road (the Campsie Glen Highway) and then descends to Lennoxtown on the other side. Again, the subdued nature of the hills and the road (mixed in with all those endorphins ) conveys a strange sense of the timeless.

 Approaching Campsie Glen on the Crow Road with Lecket Hill shrouded out in front.


Freewheeling down to Lennoxtown, we join the wonderful Glazert Water path which takes us all the way to Kirkintilloch a few miles away. From here, it's a two mile jaunt through Kirkintilloch and Lenzie to the train station and the train back to Queen Street. All told, excluding the detour, it's about 40km station to station, and, taking it at a leisurely pace, the trip takes around 4-5 hours.

It's an afternoon at the end of the world... la petite boucle...

... the short circuit

Lenzie Train Station (with crow).