... in modern civilization everything tends to suffocate the heroic sense of life. Everything is more or less mechanized, spiritually impoverished, and reduced to a prudent and regulated association of beings who are needy and have lost their self-sufficiency. The contact between man's deep and free powers and the powers of things and of nature has been cut off; metropolitan life petrifies everything, syncopates every breath, and contaminates every spiritual 'well'.
Julius Evola, Meditations on the Peaks
The area in question is that region up behind Paisley, Johnstone, and to the west of Neilston.
A rare sighting: a cyclist (homo bicyclus: a red-listed endangered species) on the Mossneuk Road between Foreside and Seargentlaw...
The whole plateaux up here - and the gentle hills (Lochliboside, Fereneze et al.) - have a sort of primal quality to them. Part of this, no doubt, is due to the sheer emptiness of the region, I rarely see anyone up here at all (the occasional van, tractor, the odd rare cyclist; there are nets in place to catch the stragglers who have an idea of escaping the city - the car parks at Foreside, Seargentlaw, and the main car park in the sky off the B775 coming up from Paisley).
Additionally, there is the rolling weather which rolls as much as the hills. It is an exposed place, and all this elemental exposure does something to the cycling body-mind which rolls on through it as it rolls on through you. There is an expansion that occurs because of this, or perhaps it is a dissolution. Either way, you are not yourself. You are much more spacious than that. Add in the cardio that is required to get up here (cardio let's not forget is a primal activity), and you've got yourself a bona fide existential playground for the open-body-minded cyclist.
Additionally, there is the rolling weather which rolls as much as the hills. It is an exposed place, and all this elemental exposure does something to the cycling body-mind which rolls on through it as it rolls on through you. There is an expansion that occurs because of this, or perhaps it is a dissolution. Either way, you are not yourself. You are much more spacious than that. Add in the cardio that is required to get up here (cardio let's not forget is a primal activity), and you've got yourself a bona fide existential playground for the open-body-minded cyclist.
From Seargentlaw looking south....
Neilston Pad drifting in and out of consciousness...
Up here, alone, energized, invigorated, spaced out, timed out, awake, ventilated, refreshed, conjoined... one is emphatically 'in contact with'......
The contact between man's deep and free powers and the powers of things and of nature which had been cut off by the workaday world's restrictive patterns begins to re-assert itself within your mind. This contact - with nothing - is all important. But of course, it's not nothing. There are fields and animals, birds and trees, plants, wildflowers... growth and decay. Movement and breathing.
The Great Flow!
The magical Foreside Road ascending from the Gateside Road...
Nielston in the mist.... from Fereneze Road.
The great essayist, poet, stravaiger, Kenneth White lived down there in Neilston for a bit when he was a young lad. White now lives in Brittany, France, but not before this place marked him as a child.... Check out his The Wanderer & his Charts or his Collected Poems Open World.... Marvellous and insightful stuff, the insight gained from many years of solitary walking and elemental contact.
The primordial lump of Walls Hill Fort that was an Iron Age homestead only adds to the mystical quality of these roads. In fact, this is the quietest road I have cycled, not a human soul to be seen, although plenty of cows, sheep and birds.
The roads of genius, the great walker (and occasional painter-poet) William Blake once wrote, are the roads without improvement.
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