Priority Seating

'Sitting is the new smoking' apparently....

Not if you're on a bicycle it ain't....

Prioritize your seating and sitting...

Learn to move under your own steam (with a little help from our rail friends)...

Puncture

No sooner had I taken this photo than I got a puncture some minutes later. Spooky, huh?

Still Plugging Away

The past couple of days, inspired by the changing weather, I headed north into the foothills of the fells, and the kilpatrick braes. Here are a few photos of the landforms, and the weather, and a beautiful little hut...

The Slacks

The Ridge of Boglairoch

 Cochno Hill and Greenside Reservoir

 Duncolm

 Dumgoyne and Dumfoyne

 Dumgoyne, Dumfoyne, and Duntreath Castle...

Dumgoyach, the bosky plug, and some standing stones, just off the West Highland Way.




























A little courtesy coffee hut full of goodies for weary travellers on the WHW... Wonderful :)

Lassooing the Horizon: Thorntonhall to Whitelee Windfarm

Finally, after years thinking about it, I got to Myres Hill within Whitelee Windfarm. I don't know why I had avoided it until now, because it is quite easy to get to, especially if you catapult yourself with the train up to Thorntonhall. In the map opposite, it's the turquoise lassoo coming up from Thorntonhall, and the turquoise line threading back down through the city to Cessnock. (I trained it from Pollokshaws West to Thorntonhall). Once past Eaglesham, the space begins. After Carrot Farm, I saw no-one until Whiteless Visitor Centre some several miles away. It is desolate up here, but this sort of desolation inspires me. Granted, the felled trees make some of this place look like a mass grave (it's mostly Forestry Commission plantation), as does the sinister sound from those turbines, but the space itself is worth it. And on a clear day, the views too.

The veiled horizon just out of Thorntonhall station approaching Eaglesham.

Carry straight through Eaglesham on the way there. On the way back you will emerge (hopefully) from Polnoon Avenue just there on the right after the pelican crossing.

Straight on here. Do not go left or you'll end up in Strathaven!

Take the right fork here towards Carrot Farm. 

Bleak.... but somehow beautiful.

From Myres Hill, looking down on a sliver of the city. From just below Myres Hill there are a few houses which have put signs up saying no through road (through their little plot). This is another example of residents not offering an alternative right of way whilst blocking up an existing one. This is not only illegal, but silly. Ignore the signs of dogs and the like and stroll through their little patch (it's only a couple of hundred metres). If anyone says anything about it being 'private land' remind them of the Scottish Outdoor Access Code, suggest that they read it online or download a copy. They have a responsibility to know the law of the land, and to behave accordingly. I mentioned this to the girl at the Whitelee Visitor Centre and she told me the residents have been spoken to about this. So there's no excuse.  Anyway, chances are you won't see anyone about.

Wind power!

It is a bit of labyrinth so take care not to get lost. The latest OS map has all the access roads and turbines marked and there is another map you can get from the Visitor Centre and which I have included here as a PDF link. The turbine numbers are marked and you can use them to guide you.

Looking north over Loch Goin.

Dunwan Hill from the back...

The road back down from Whitelee Visitor Centre is great! It has a dedicated cycle lane and is all downhill, all the way back down to the city. This is just approaching Eaglesham.

Green Cycling

In Scotland, true golf courses are not created, they are born out of the land.

I often cycle through golf courses whilst out and about. Most of them adhere to the right of way that we Scots have over our lands, and provide paths for walkers and cyclists alike. Naturally, if anyone's about I will observe golf etiquette and dismount, but I've never had any problems with golfers. In fact, they are often a good source of local knowledge, whether it be the weather or the land and its resident flora and fauna.

Around the Glasgow strath there are several golf courses with astonishing aspects of the valley. Indeed, when I was up at Kirkhill the other day admiring the vast vistas, I thought about my botanist friend's scathing remarks about there being too many golf courses in Scotland. Whilst I understand his sentiment, I also see that golf courses have protected the land from further development. To be sure, golf courses are hardly wild spaces but they do harbour a sense of wildness especially when there are no golfers about to distract you. Furthermore, they tend to be outside of the noise of the city and thus accommodate a certain pastoral quality. And because Glasgow is a valley, many of these course are on its slopes, thus offering views of the valley like no other. Then, there is the flora and fauna. And though some greenkeepers chemically spray their greens and fairways, there are some, like Eastwood, Kilmacolm and Pollok who go sparingly with such toxic substances. Correspondingly, foraging for mushrooms on such courses is a joy to behold. Then, there are the trees, huge sessile oaks, Norwegian maple, ancient stands of hazel and hornbeam... What giants there are among us, and yet most of us only see a  little white ball. Then, there are the birds, the insects, the whole biotic community other than the golfers themselves... the list goes on and on, just proving the paradox: that golf courses are least of all about golf.

I have thus concluded that golf courses are a good thing, because let's face it, it's open green space, often wooded parkland.... which breathes not just by itself, but breathes into you. Often when coming back from the hills behind Neilston, I cycle through a green corridor of golf courses to my home in Cessnock (virtually the centre of the city). From Kennishead, I pass through Cowglen Golf Course, Pollok Golf Course and then Haggs Castle Golf Course (the last two within the spacious confines of Pollok Country Park). I feel like a vole or a rat creeping through the undergrowth, avoiding all traffic en route, back to my burrow. It's a marvellous thing when you re-engage your animal drive!

Out of bounds for golfers, but not for intrepid human beings. The wooded slopes of Dalmuir Municipal Golf Course.

Ten minutes from Barrhead train station, and emphatically all uphill, Fereneze Golf Course with its airy views over the strath.

Gourock Golf Club!

The 16th green at Windyhill Golf Club in the Kilpatrick Hills looking south...

 The Road Hole, Dalmuir. (13th)

Cowglen (8th)

Langbank (17th)

 Dalmuir, 2nd.


Pollok


Haggs

Knightswood

Paisley

Kilsyth

Ralston

Eastwood

Bonnyton

Kilmacolm

Lethamhill

Balmore

Dougalston

Routes with Roots: The Joy of Valley-Cycling

Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.

Theodore Roethke

The route system of any life-form is vital to that life-form's vitality: How it goes through its environment, where it goes in that environment, what nutrition and insight it picks up along the way...

Routes, like roots, provide anchorage to the plant by fixing it into the soil, by locating it in space and time. And the soil, if you didn't know this by now, is the soul, the only difference being the small matter of changing an 'i' for a 'u'.

All plants (like cyclists) have a primary root from which lateral roots develop. I recall as a cyclist many years ago having no roots at all, really. I rarely left the confines of the city, the bicycle simply being a means to an end, that end being getting to where I was going without forking out cash I did not have for the bus or train. My primary root back then was a jogging route, but it didn't really fix me in place being as it was very small, too localised, and too confined.

Then, I discovered valley-cycling, and the beauty of cycling out of the city, into the hills, doon the watter, up into the lochs and highlands. And that's when those roots started growing and that anchorage to the land, to the stage now, some ten years later, where I feel truly rooted in the Glasgow strath. To the point now where 'I know my way around'.

Routes here, of course, are all about your locomotive force, your ability to carry yourself across and through the land, without polluting it; in short, to know your territory and your home range. The human is precisely human because of this territorial knowing, because of his rooting in the very contours of the earth itself. The 'soiling' of the self is essential for the human to breathe clearly. As is his locomotive and cardiovascular force. By this, I do not mean tearing the land up with your mountain bike as some people are apt to do, or treating the land like some sort of theme park for you to exploit, but using the bicycle sensitively as a form of expansion which can re-humanize you through its ability to expand your local range. The equation is simple: the more one comes into (semi-) wild places, alone and awake, the more one comes into one's Self, and the more one be-comes Nature ('becoming' simply meaning 'coming to' as an attentive and wakeful arriving).

If you think about it, what is a root (route) if not pure locomotion anchoring the organism within the greater matrix that enables it? The root though it may nourish a particular organism, is always on the move towards the universal.

Locomotion is the basis for cognition too. If you don't move under your own steam, then it follows that you're gong to have problems thinking too. Synapses and dendrites are their own kind of roots.

This is the great scam of the modern automobile that is neither auto nor mobile: it doesn't just dislocate you from place via the destruction of your anchor and the usurping of your vital force by a machine that carries and pollutes you, but it removes you from your own cognitive force, and your ability to think your way through the land, and thus yourself. In other words, machines like this turn the 'hu-man' into 'man' by divesting him of his intimate and dare I say it 'loving' connection with the soil (humus). This is the world we now live in - 'world' from the High Germanic wer + alt, meaning the age of man). Personally, I prefer Godard's definition as voiced by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Pierrot Le Fou: L'age du cul. Yet, it is not world we ought to be inhabiting, but Earth, and by extension, Cosmos. Once again, we are blind-sided by the stupor that is man and his self-polluting inventions.

It is this removal from your routes (and roots) that the technological society (as the decadence of being carried and prammed) is most guilty of. There is no more serious crime than the severing of a plant's roots so that 'nutrition' from an outside source can be delivered to it.

The result of this existential mutilation is the ghost in the machine, the absurd idea that the mental and the physical are not connected, or at least not intimately together. Man has removed his self from his greater body not knowing that to do so is to disembody himself. The ghost - the spectre of man - is the disembodied entity who has allowed his existential feelers to be amputated, his locomotive force to be cut off and replaced with an all-polluting one. The machine is the world - the age of man - that has decided that being prammed across the land is far better than negotiating it yourself, that pollution is better than health, that the particular and the particulate is better than the universal, that the global is better than the local...

Driving itself, or any kind of mechanical transportation that pollutes the environment, is a form of violence. One might argue that science itself has permitted this violence by separating the object from the subject, the perceived from the perceiver. One no longer sees the  land as intrinsically connected to one's existential self but tenuously linked to one's ego self. Driving itself is proof of this. Yet this violence is also perpetrated against the driver via the hijacking of his locomotive force. Man is no longer mobile, he is emphatically seated and belted in when driving. His consciousness is hijacked too. Speed infects his perspective. The violence emerges as a disease. A dis-ease with natural forces, with the simple and frugal, with the local: with getting from A to B under your own steam.... by your self.

We now live in the cake-eating age in the West, where people want to have their cake and eat it. It's a real problem. The cake however is only so big and most of it is gone now. Just a few crumbs left round the edges...

The sooner we all start baking our own cakes the better....Get that steam going...!