Paisley Canal Circular via Neilston Pad

In terms of the valley aspect and 'brae meditations' you can't get much better than the C road up behind Paisley towards Glennifer Braes. With its several small ascents from Paisley Canal train station up to the plateau it is what I call a real 'opener-upper' (that which is opened up being the body, the brain, the veins and arteries, and of course the valley).

Just at the turnoff towards Glennifer Braes. The views are expansive!

The road heading towards Neilston, and its inimitable 'pad' (centre right).

Looking south-west from Neilston Pad across Ayrshire towards the silhouette outline of Arran.

Once you get off the main road from Paisley into the braes there are no more cars, only tractors, horses and cyclists. The initial ascent can be a bit hairy especially if you do it at the weekend when youngsters have nothing better to do than race their souped up cars into the hills along the B775, but once off this road, things become very peaceful very quickly.

A real opener-upper from Paisley Canal to Roberston Park.

Take a left at Mossneuk Farm towards Greenfieldmuir and onwards to Neilston cutting through a small housing estate to Craig of Neilston farm. About a hundred or so yards past the farmhouse is a fence where you can chain your bike and take the short but steep hike up to the summit of Neilston Pad.

Once up on the sugar-loaf summit of the 'pad', head across to the eastern rim where there are small copses of old growth trees. Here, there is all manner of life, and it was here that I saw my first ever cuckoo (the hearing of it is in the video above). The views all around are incredible.

From there, there are a number of ways back. I just headed down to the train station at Neilston and caught a train to Patterton (one stop and what an 'inter-view'!!) where it is all downhill down the beautifully wide B769 through Thornliebank and Mansewood to Pollok Country Park. Alternatively, you could head back to Neilston and down to Barrhead and along the B774 back to Paisley Canal thus completing the 'loop'. Or, you could get the train from Neilston (every half hour) back to Glasgow Central.

The choice is yours.

The Entorhinal Cortex & Knowing Where We Are

Science-technology-and-industry has enabled us to be precise (apparently) in describing objects that are extremmely small and near or extremely large and far away. It has failed utterly to provide us with even adequate descriptions of the places and communities we live in - probably because it cannot do so. There are scientists, one must suppose, who know all about atoms or molecules or genes, or galaxies or planets or stars, but who do not know where they are geographically, historically, or ecologically. Our schools are turning out millions of graduates who do not know, in this sense, where they are.

Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle

My brain feels solid after a day wayfaring on the wheels; finding my way, checking the maps I bring with me, checking landmarks, hill-lines, even listening to the landscape, whether it be roads with cars on them or rivers and streams, or the absence of both.

It may be a little exhausted, this little brain, but it is solid nonetheless, as if you had just done a major workout at the gym, except here the muscle is in your brain, more specifically, in a little area responsible for navigation called the entorhinal cortex.

This cortex is related to memory, in particular spatial memory. In 2005 it was discovered that the EC contains a neural map of the spatial environment in rats. And if you've ever kept a rat, you'll know how explorative they are. In short, it is thought that the EC in humans works in a similar way to other animals. I have always maintained to those who simply dismiss rats as 'rodents' or 'vermin' that they are great navigators, like humans used to be, seafarers, wayfarers, trekkers, et al.

Now however, progress and technology has forced most of us (the dimwitted who accept without questioning) to outsource these natural talents for navigation, our vision, our hearing, our finding our way by ourselves or by using tools that enhance our search and not annihilate it entirely.

The EC, like any 'muscle', requires exercise in order not to atrophy. Yet, faced with gadgets and gizmos which do the work for us, atrophy it has to the point where we no longer know where we are... spiritually, physically, existentially, metaphysically....

And if you don't know where you are, well, problems are never far away. Problems like ecological devastation, economic destitution, and human desolation (loneliness, alienation, confusion, self-loathing... etc.). Indeed, it has been suggested that the onset of Alzheimer's disease and various neurological disorders are a direct result of our lack of presencing and not knowing where we are. Effectively, dementia is a state of mindlessness (de-mented, removed from Mind), resulting from our kowtowing to an economic system that is neither economic nor eco-minded; it is a result of our outsourcing our own locomotive forces to machines, and outsourcing our own mental energies to technologies that do it for us... Kowtowing to convention it would appear is fraught with danger. Of course, the converse is also true: that the harder people try in building cognitive maps of space, the stronger their underlying memory circuits become. As Nicholas Carr writes in The Glass Cage: Where Automation is Taking Us, this practice can actually 'grow gray matter in the hippocampus - a p[henomenon documented in London cab drivers - in a way that's analogous to the building of muscle mass through physical exertion.

Veronique Bohbot, a research psychiatrist and memory expert at the University of Montreal warns us that today's over-technologized society is the road to entorhinal and hippocampal ruin, and thus the road to our ruin:

Society is geared in many ways toward shrinking the hippocampus. In the next twenty years,  think we're going to see dementia occurring earlier and earlier.

Carr himself states based on the information gathered by various experts in the field that:

It may well be that the brain's navigational sense - its ancient, intricate way of plotting and recording movement through space - is the evolutionary font of all memory.

One could thus conclude that, in terms of knowing where we are, and re-membering the self in all its intricate complexity, Memory (with a big M) is thus a matter of locomoting-navigating, thinking and moving, under our own steam, and not allowing anyone else to do it for us.