Take train to Barrhead station (red dot with blue circle), cycle up Gateside Road for a few hundred metres, before veering right up the very steep Hillside Road (look out for the massive monkey puzzle trees). Up to golf course, and green dotted line is the way back down through the course to clubhouse, station. An hour is all you need, before hopping back onto the train a new (wo)man.
It's not too often that you find the strath covered in snow. Last time I remember this amount of snow was 2009-10 winter but even then it wasn't that much. I have to go back to my Glasgow childhood (or when I lived in Poland between 2006-9) for this much snow. At any rate, it's a magical thing, snow. The sound of it underfoot (assuming you're not equipped with snow-shoes), the feel of it on the face and the skin, the look of snow, it's purity, its sea-like flatness deftly concealing the lumpy topography beneath, and its sheer whiteness making it almost impossible to look at it straight on for any length of time. maybe it's this last 'quality' that confers a god-like characteristic upon snow. Or the fact that the word itself contains the word 'now'.
The flask of hot lava java... never leave home without it!
The sun trying its best to break through....
Cycling-ploughing down the 15th...
And just as there is no feeling quite like walking through snow, so too is there no feeling quite like cycling through it. I had my first snow-cycle in Warsaw, particularly the Russian Cemetery in Mokotow near where I lived, and I recall being overwhelmed at the joy of it. To be sure, there is the oscillation of getting off and on when the snow becomes too deep, or at the sight of a slight incline, but there is a definite play quality to snow-cycling that trumps ordinary cycling. It's the snow itself, I think, it renders an unpure world pure again. It covers over the cracks of civilization with a veil of forgiveness, and makes the world virgin again. It's as if the waters of the world have decided to warn man of the impending flood that will come if he continues to crowd the earth with his machinery and his own kind. It's the emptiness that the snow-world brings that calms me, the armageddon-like quietness and depopulation. It is also as Thoreau writes in A Winter Walk as if all creatures out here are in the original frame of the universe. It is this quietly cosmic quality that renders a short cycle through Now (or even snow) a journey of unforgettable proportions. The sort of journey that re-members and re-calls you (into the eternal here and now) and not the other way around.
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