Short Circuit 4: Dalmuir to Dalmuir via The Gold Medal

Taking the train to Dalmuir from Partick means you miss out on traipsing through half the built-up suburbs. It also means you are deposited into Nature at the Firth and Forth Canal which you can follow until Kilpatrick about a mile away. Here, you cut up through the wonderful Lusset Glen, under the Erskine Bridge, past the train station and the bowling green, and onto the Loch Humphrey path. This is how you avoid the city even when you live in the middle of it.

Cycle the LHP up to the gateless gate and then veer off into the hanging wood where you can cycle up to Castaneda's waterfall. From here, it gets a little steep and so getting off the bike might be a good idea. Follow the path up, always taking the steepest route upwards (there are several paths veering hither and thither). Once up beyond the braes, you can get a eyeful of the city to the west and the estuary to the east. To the north too you have an ocean of heather and not a human soul about.

Follow the black dotted line. On the way back, at the bottom of LHP take the waymarked path that runs east across the field towards Dalnotter cemetery and Duntocher. It's a lovely quiet route that will take you across behind the cemetery and then across the dual carraigeway into Dalmuir woods and through Dalmuir golf course (Glasgow's Augusta without the palaver) and onto Dalmuir train station. Station to station (via the sun) takes barely a couple of hours and yet...

This is the 'gold medal': the sun, and your enlightenment (you are lighter after all that effort are you not?). Now, you are 'first' and not 'second' as in seconded into an aberrant way of being down there in the de-natured city. Up here amidst the primordial and the primal, you cannot be second as in sectioned from your Self. As the word primal suggest, there is only first place up here. There is only gold. There is no silver or bronze.

Meditation in movement: the battle for awareness continues...

The gold medal, typically, is for those who are 'first'. 'First', typically, is the primal, and the primal is the wild and that which has not suffered the ignominy of (being seconded into) domestication and/or industrialisation. As such, the gold medal is for those who get out of the city (the sectioned, the secular, and the seconded) and into the wild, and into the warrior.