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...
Routes that Root: Expanding the Rhizosphere
When you are rooted in the reed-bed of Reality, knowing what to be and to do comes naturally...
Belden Lane
I made a mention the other day that these routes around the strath are actually roots. They root you in the reed-bed of Reality. And, as such, knowing what to be and to do is a piece of cake.
I am a flower. Who grows out of the strath. Who flows and flies, and, occasionally, flowers...
The Reality here is Nature. There is no other reality. The wind, the land, the mind. All together.
Inhaling. Exhaling. Hale.
The other context that people think is reality, the workaday world and the world of entertainment and technology, is really a curtain pulled over your eyes and over Nature. It is, as Kenneth White was apt to say, a 'diminished context', and one that destroys and destructures the natural world. It is a world of conveyance and machines, and pollution. Conversely, the natural world is a sphere of locomotion, flesh, and self-cleansing. It is a world that grows you, and which receives that growth for itself.
The routes that I have plied over the past decade in and around the strath have rooted me like no other in this vast natural sphere. My epiphany of 2007 in a forest in north-eastern Poland (the map is not the territory, I am) has continued to grow inside me and shed all kinds of blossom along the way. I knew that the only way I could uncover myself from beneath all that capitalist 'education' (I was actually educated by the Jesuits!) was by uncovering and undressing the strath, by clearing away the obstructions that prevented my roots from making radical contact with the Earth and with Reality. Not once in my ten year tenure at St. Aloysius as a boy did my teachers ever take me into Nature as part of my education, in spite of the fact that the grounds of my preparatory school in Langside had its own bucolic woods. Not once did my art teacher point out of the classroom window in Hill Street (in Garnethill) towards the great bank of fells to the north, and say... There is your education! No art can touch it!
It was only when I had faith in myself, when I took that leap not to be rich on the outside, upon disabling the ego and realizing my fundamental animality, that I began in earnest to cycle and communicate with the strath as a whole. Consequently, the root zone - a natural parliament of communication - expanded.
We are as plants after all - it is plant-life that gave birth to us - and we would do well to pay them more love. When plants and not people become your teachers you learn more deeply, and more rhizomatically. Your thinking moves. It feels its way through Mind as a root finds its way through soil. Your brain is a fertile field ready to be sown with seminal ideas.If you tend to them and water them well, these ideas will grow into trees, and maybe you yourself will become a hillside, or a stream.
The systems in nature (there are no things) refer us back to the systems that encompass our very selves. They point us back, as Lane writes, to the reed-bed of a common connectedness.
'We've been separated from the source of our identity and have to fall in love with it all over again.'
This is the reason why so many chase after Love. Because they have been removed from it. To be 'in love' is to be in communication with the matricial Earth and your myriad relatives. It is to be 'in Mind'. To flow, to breathe, to stand under...
Identity is not what you put on, nor is it what others graft onto you.
Identity is what you take off. It is what is left behind when there is nothing left.
Except roots that move.
Me & the Red Kite on the Campsie Dene Trail...
Twin Peaks (just north of Blanefield)
The original Twin Peaks that actually inspired Lynch's own program...are here just to the north of Glasgow. They are Dumgoyne and Dumfoyne at the western end of the Campsie Fells. Blanefield, the little village that lies at their feet, is no other than Twin Peaks itself...
All joking aside, this is a great wee route coming up from the train station at Milngavie. I tend to take the road up through Mugdock and down through Strathblane on the way there, and take the Blanefield road and through Mugdock Wood on the way back. But either way is good. Once onto the trail, I cycle along to the oddly-named Cantywheery where I chain the bicycle up and continue on foot. From here, it's about twenty minutes to the foot of Dumgoyne, and probably another hour and a half up and down the side and onto the faint path that runs along the base of Dumfoyne. And which will take us back to the bicycle.
Down the Old Mugdock Road to Strathblane....
The lumpy Conic Hill highlit in the distance...
The twin peaks...
The great sweep of land coming down from the Campsie Fells' highest point Earl's Seat (553m).
Looking at Dumfoyne from Dumgoyne's south face.
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