Exploring the Local: Honeybog - Byres - Bathgo

Take the black outline from Ibrox through Govan, Cardonald, Hillington to our three muses and some well-deserved open space.

Pretty straightforward. Just sign on the dotted line, the black dashes from top right down to bottom right.


It's days like today when you go out for a short cycle, exploring the local (is there any other work?), that you realise how little you know of this vast network of hills that is ordinarily referred to as 'Glasgow'. That's what Glasgow is, aside from its grey-green hollow nomenclature, a vast landscape of lumps and bumps, knocks and knolls, hills and spills. When you see one of these hills naked (the hill not you) you kinda realise how many of Glasgow's hills are invisible insofar as they are built upon or travelled across by car thus effectively flattening it. I always wonder what Glasgow would have looked like 1500 years ago when Serf's bull stopped up at the Molendinar Burn where Glasgow Cathedral is now. I wonder what this hill-strewn landscape must have looked like with the narrow shallow Clyde and the even narrower and shallower Kelvin (et al.) cutting through her. All her hills would have been visible, and in the winter, with that illuminating raking light, the land in which the city of Glasgow now nestles must have been quite something to gaze over.

It still is, to be sure, but you do require a little imagination sometimes to get rid of some of these modern edifices that can block your entry into the infinite. Especially, if you're scaling hills that are inside the city like today and not on its periphery as I am used to doing. Nevertheless, today was a surprise, if only to see the naked Honeybog hill squatting all alone like some great Buddha as I exited the congested little Hillington residential estate. It was like being spat out of a gun barrel into open space. The release was quite something and so for that reason I suggest (as is marked on the map beneath) to take Queensland Drive  and Chirnside Road just after you pass Cardonald train station which will take you through Cardonald and Hillington estates. Pass straight over Sandwood Road at pedestrian crossing and straight into Linburn Road in Penilee. Follow it along past Hillington West train station and in a minute or so you will be ejected into space. It's worth it just for this 'ejection' (and spiritual ejaculation). Then, it's straight into the field and up Honeybog Hill.

The funny looking flats in Chirnside Road at Hillington East. Must be some view from the top floor though.

The ejaculation from Penilee's cosy little residential estate to this, the gentle rise of Honeybog Hill.

Looking over Oldhall to Ralston golf course (note Bathgo Hill in the middle of picture) and further towards the crag and tail of Duncarnock Mount in the centre of horizon.

Looking towards Paisley from Honeybog Hill.

Leverndale Tower.

From Honeybog, it's simple enough to go down and back up Byres Hill to the trig marker. Great views from here over Paisley and beyond and back to Glasgow, and also to the north. In fact, all around! Another hill with attitude (not altitude), which, at 54m, is all you need to space the self out and become all things ;)

Looking north over Arkleston from the cleavage between Honeybog and Byres Hills.

Honeybog Hill: Hardly an Everest, but you only need a few metres elevation to space out...

Byres Hill trig. At 54m you don't need a climbing rope or an oxygen tank to get here.


From Byres Hill, it's down towards Barshaw Park which we will pass through and exit taking a left onto Glasgow Road. Take the next right into Alton Road, second left into Newtyle Road and down a few hundred metres to Marchbank Gardens where you can lift the bike over a small fence into the golf course. Bathgo hill is right in front of you, and a mere 41 metres above. From here, more wonderful views, especially towards Paisley and to the Glennifer Braes to the south.

From the well-manicured Ralston Golf Course (here at its highest point, Bathgo Hill) looking north over the gentle Honeybog Hill (centre) with Carneddans Wood (Kilpatrick Hills) and Dumgoyne Hill (Campsie Fells) as the pillars of Hercules in the centre of the horizon beckoning the way to the highlands.

Looking over Paisley from Bathgo Hill.

The little bridge over the Paisley Canal railway line. This takes us from Ralston Golf Course onto the narrow lane of Scott's Road. Take a left after the bridge and follow the lane to Crookston where you can rejoin the sustrans path into the city.

From here, you need to go downhill towards Leverdale tower and the little bridge that will take you across the railway line to Scott's Road (more a lane) which will take you to Crookston and onto the sustrans path towards Pollok Park and Glasgow. You will see this cottage beside the green and there is a small opening in the hedgerow with a few steps. Go through and this will take you over the bridge and onto Scott's Road (lane). All in all, from my gaff in Cessnock, a with a few stops en route, it was a pretty quick two and a half hours.... And yet.

The Great Emporium: Saturn (just behind Cambuslang)

The eco-existential emporium is open! By this, I mean the universe, I mean 'You'. Is this not what an emporium is, the word deriving from Greek emporion 'trading place, market,' from emporos 'traveller,' from en 'in' + poros 'passage,' related to peirein 'to pass through.' Is not the emporium the place that is passed through by the traveller (travel being natural work, natural migration, natural locomotion)? In this sense, this original sense, the emporium can't be anything other than the cosmos, and 'the place that is passed through and travelled' by a multitude of forms, each one you as you dissolve and reconfigure, decompose and transform. 

For the moment (and momentum) however, let us consider the emporium as the strath, and the strath as a galaxy whose stars are hills....

Today, we travelled to Saturn, just behind Cambuslang, and known to the locals as Kirkhill Golf Course... Saturn's rings were visible all around, rings of hills, that gently hold this planet in place. Is this not what a cyclist is really: an astronaut without having to leave the Earth... an astronaut who homes with his own body? An astronaut who is not floating off into another world (because he has been so disenchanted with this one), but who is grounding himself into the Earth, and who is uncovering the cosmos (and its enchantment) beneath the paved man-world... and who is landing his 'eagle'?

Yes, that is smoke and not a cloud emanating from the other side of the strath (just above the central high-rise in the foreground. I did spot it pretty quickly, but then thought it might be a cloud forming (which I guess it is only a smoke-cloud). I only discovered it was a fire when I was up the Kilpatricks in early May and I saw a forestry contractor who showed me the crown of Cochno Hill all scarred in black and told me there had been a brush fire there about a month previous. It was then that the penny dropped and I realised I had not just seen it but had filmed it too....

The Relentless Rollercoaster

When you inhabit a hill-strewn hollow like Glasgow, filled with hills and surrounded by braes and fells, and you cycle as often as I do, it's hard not to think you are on some kind of self-propelled rollercoaster. I love hills, and I don't think I could live in another flat city (although Warsaw's forests often made up for its flatness). I love hills partly for this rollercoaster aspect but also for the dialogue aspect too: up communicating with down, gravity communicating with levity, and of course the views and all that space. There is a dimension here that flatness just doesn't have, the vertical dimension, the celestial dimension, the paradise dimension... the rollercoaster dimension. And often, I, like the rollercoaster, pause at the top and enjoy that summit, even if it is only 42m in height (like Saucelhill or Bathgo Hill), before plunging back down with gravity and wind as my companions. One might even say that my natural rollercoaster beats all other rollercoasters hands down for the fact that my rollercoaster goes all the way up to 700 odd metres, the highest point in the Glasgow strath at Tinto Hill. The whole city and the strath beyond is one giant topographical rollercoaster, and uniting with Glasgow's huge urban rail network (Bike + Train = Brain) makes it seem even moreso. What's more, this rollercoaster is queueless, open to all, relatively risk-free, and without charge. It invigorates, stimulates, galvanizes, and spaces out the bodymind, and most of all, brings that bodymind back down to earth if not verily in it.

Benchpressing the Braes

Sudden and absolute, and though tempted to make a halt, keep it that way, pure and unencumbered, pure as a breaking wave...

Ken White, Travels in the Drifting Dawn

Cycling along the canal towpath from Dalmuir to Kilpatrick, the familiar sight of the Kilpatrick Braes makes itself known. It's a formidable sight, this massive bank of earth lording it over the river and the riverside towns of Clydebank, Dalmuir, Kilpatrick, Bowling and Dumbarton. I like to think of it as a breaking wave that is in a state of breaking. There is an energy to these braes that a breaking wave also has. Yet, few of us can perceive this breaking wave because we have been too speeded up. But it is there, to feel as well as to see, and it is only one of the many reasons of why I am drawn into these hills. 

At any rate, the bank of earth is the bench, the word bench deriving from the proto-Germanic word "bankiz" referring to a 'man-made earthwork' or a 'bank of earth'. Thus, when I came along the canal this morning I saw this massive bench and I thought to myself: This is your 'benchpress', this is your 'gym', this is where you build that eco-existential muscle that then reinforces all other muscles. This is where you benchpress your Self, where the 'mirrors' in this gym are Nature's nakedness itself. This is where you get fit and healthy, health being intimately connected with 'existential nakedness' as a lack of add-ons and decorations thus allowing the cosmic flow and suction to draw you out without you necessarily having to act. This is where you don't do in other words but be. Bench begins with 'be' after all.

 Levitating... is that not what hill-walking really is?

The Erskine Bridge and Old Kilpatrick below.

 Definitely Mediterranean...!

Looking over OK Bowling Club from the train station.

Mike's Sacred Bike n' Hikes #2: The Up 'n Over

Kilpatrick Train station starting point. From here head to the foot of the Loch Humphrey path about two minutes away by bike. On the map below it's the red line with black dashes up past Craigleith (please excuse the cartographic chaos) and then just the black dashes to the left and down onto the black line back to the train station.

Ditch the bike and vault the fence into the field (the one that soon slopes steeply upwards). Follow through the fields up and up and up (I think there are three fields!). There is a vague path. Just follow that.

Pitstop one: baptism in the babbling brook.

The drystone wall. There's a seat up there on the wall which has perfectly moulded to the shape of my spine.

The view towards the city as we approach the top.

Contemplation Rock (top right).

The view looking west. I usually nip down here towards those gnarly looking trees (in spite of the trail continuing further 'inland'). Once down there, and over the drystone wall you'll see another vague trail which will lead you round to a more visible path which will then take us down to the Loch Humphrey path).

Jump the wall and find the trail that will in about 100m or so join up with another (after you vault another small fence).

Heading down past the 'Hillary Step'.

You can if you peer hard enough see the hillary step up there somewhere. This is the Loch Humphrey path. Just follow down for about 500m or so to where we started.

A short video I made from near the top at end of February.

Glasgow Nobody: Lockdown Cycle

You kinda realize when you cycle through the city during lockdown that so much of your society is non-essential and by extension frivolous. Everything was closed yesterday when I cycled through the city centre, bar a few places like the train station or the chemist. It shows you how your city is comprised: all these people promoting the non-essential wanting to get a piece of you. This is why we have so much advertising these days: because the essential does not need to be advertised (or, because the non-essential does). This is what our cities are nowadays when they're not massively monstrous and wasteful entities: cauldrons for the non-essential. And if you embed yourself in the non-essential for long enough, your spirit (your essence) departs, and you're left with a hollowed out creature that has a wholly false idea of who they are.

 Tuesday afternoon around 2.45pm.... Queen Street.

Does Glasgow still exist if there are no people in it? Buchanan Street.

Here and there, you will see lost souls staring into shop windows, almost clawing at their doors, like the zombies out of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead trying to get into the closed shopping mall. Gordon Street.

Central Station. Transport, whether we like it or not, is part of this whole problem, and as long as man relies on being carried like an eco-existential infant, his problems will continue to multiply. Get back into the local and your own locomotive force and the world will sort itself out.

Mike's Sacred Bike n' Hikes: Loch Humphrey & the Hanging Wood

The green woodpecker with dowsing stick at our first pitstop, St. Patrick's pool, just behind me. This is the beauty of these braes, not just the unpeopled aspect up here when you get off the beaten track, but the old growth trees, the lifeforms that inhabit and feed off them, and the myriad waterfalls and rivulets tumbling down them. I always 'baptize' myself here in this little pool, careful not to disturb the curious little creatures that live here. It is here too where I fill my bottle with the purest water in the whole of Glasgow.

Already, only a hundred and fifty odd metres above 'humanity', and the vastness of space is tangible.

The second pitstop: the waterfall of eventual bliss. Here, we go up, bow beneath the sacred waterfall (some people call it a 'shower'), and scramble up the left hand side to tier two.

The brae buzzard who lives in a treetop on tier one. He always says hello when I come up here.

Pitstop three: the swing of serenity. A ride on the SOS, especially on a dreary winter's morning, saves all our souls.

Pitstop four: into the hanging wood. So called because it hangs off the braes. It's pretty wild up here because of the general steepness of the braes. Indeed, once upon a time a few years ago I wrote of how sacred this wood is, because no-one can get to it with their tonka trucks and power tools, and the following year the first green woodpecker up here moved in. It's one of the few locations in teh greater Glasgow strath where you can hear it. In the three years it has been here, I have only ever seen it once flitting from one treetop to the next. They do, however, the green variety, like to feed on the ground too, so keep those jeepers peeled, as well as those ears, because it's the ears that will see it first.

The hanging wood in all its sublime misshapen grotesquerie.... Beware of symmetry (on grand scales like this), for it is not natural. It is here where you will stand your best chance of hearing/seeing the green woodpecker. Also, look out for treecreepers.

Looking west as we exit the hanging wood and start descending towards the Loch Humphrey path (which you can see eking its way up the braes bottom right).

Looking east towards the city. Coming back down to where we left the bike, at the bottom of this old lime quarry, which I now call the limerock.

About halfway up the Loch Humphrey path lies the gateless gate and the limerock. It is here where I tie up my metal hoss and embark on the hike part. Take a right along the grassy path from here, and we will return coming down from the left.

Looking down the Loch Humphrey path from the gateless gate. It's a five minute freewheel down to Kilpatrick train station from here.

A chemical train passing through Kilpatrick station. Right behind it, we can see, if we peer hard enough, the grey limerock and the hanging wood we have just hiked through.

In terms of views, Erskine Bridge has a few, and it's just above Kilpatrick train station. Normally, only one side is open for pedestrians and cyclists. The best side is the other side, the west side, looking out towards the ocean, and with a fine view of the K-braes which you can also see from its east side (where this pic was taken from) albeit in a slightly blocked state. With most cars absent because of the coronavirus lockdown, the Erskine Bridge is a hill in its own right.

And that's it. Naturally, I have variations on this route that I can use to extend it here and there (go up to tier three and four for instance, adding half an hour or an hour), but all told, the bike and hike is an hour or so, station to station. That quick, but man, does that sacred feeling last all day...!