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.