Kilbirnie to Fairlie via West Kilbride & Portencross

From Kilbirnie train station head through the town and down the back-road to Dalry entering Dalry from the north, and then taking the bottom orange route westwards towards West Kilbride.

The route to West Kilbride is quiet and good with some real country freshness along the way, and plenty of spots to stop and open that flask of coffee! From WK it's straightforward enough to follow the coastal path around to Portencross and beyond.

A quiet Kilbirnie main street, this late summer Sunday morning, with some old world flavour.

The view across Munnoch Reservoir to Knockewart Hill.

The serene back-road to West Kilbride.

West Kilbride, another quaint little town with some fascinating architecture, old and new.

 

 The coastal path towards Portencross. 

The wonderfully restored Portencross Castle, dating originally from the mid 1300s.

Fishermen on the pier.

And the view across the firth to Arran et al.

From Portencross, the path follows the coastline around to Hunterston Power Station, and then onwards to Fairlie. You can, if you have time, check out Hunterston House and Castle just off the beaten path. But maybe we have taken in too much already today. All that sea air is going to the brain, and I'm dying for a seat on that train back to Glasgow ;)

Route distance: a little less than 20 miles

Time taken: about 4 hours with 3 or 4 stops

The West Coast Route: Irvine to Maybole via Ayr, Dunure Castle, & Electric Brae

The west coast route from Irvine to Ayr and beyond is sublime. So sublime that you may think yourself travelling some French riviera! It's a fairly taxing route with a fair few hills from Ayr to Maybole, though this elevation does afford us some spectacular views across the Firth to the pyramidal silhouette of Ailsa Craig. The good news is that most of this route is part of the sustrans cycle route and so is marked along the way. I've just highlighted the dotted green line on the maps in purple. Historically, Irvine, Troon, Prestwick & Ayr have all something to offer the visitor, and really you could spend a whole day working this route if you make stops along the way. Even without stops however it's a good afternoon's cycle, with the train station at Maybole a welcoming sight to boomerang us back to Glasgow :)

The Troon to Ayr section is well-marked and straightforward with some nice seafront cycling.

From Ayr to Maybole the marked sustrans route skips over the hills but we are going to cling to the coast. A couple of kilometers on from Ayr there is a small detour into Dunure, an ideal place to have a rest and soak up the views. There is a castle here and a lovely harbour and of course wide-sweeping views across the sea.

Just around the corner from Dunure is one of Scotland's most bizarre phenomena - Electric Brae - which is always worth a stop just to test it out. Being on a bicycle as opposed to a car means that we can really put it to the test. Just watch out for the passing tour buses!

Entering Ayr by bicycle - a real eye-opening experience! (Personally, I don't think you've seen a town until you have entered it on foot, by bicycle, or on horseback).

From Ayr's promenade this crumbling castle (Greenan Castle) can be seen clinging to the edge of the fairly steep cliffs called the Heads of Ayr. I took the short path across the field and went in, but be careful if you do, there are some dangerous drops to be had! Moreover, this whole edge is subject to landslip and it'll be interesting to see if the castle is still there in a decade's time.

The idyllic Dunure harbour. The castle is just to the right, out of picture. A beautiful little place 
that I never knew about until my father mentioned it. So, I went there to find out for myself...

Spectacular colours this overcast September day in 2012, with the lofty adumbration of Ailsa Craig hugging the horizon. Epic!

Downhill you say? Try again ;) [The magical and somewhat bizarre Electric Brae, which, if the truth be told, has more to do with the way that hedgerow has been cut than any electrical phenomena].

An explanation of the magic, but sometimes it's better not to know why.... ;)

From Electric Brae, it's not far to Maybole train station, maybe 5kms or so, and most of it is downhill, especially the last part which is very steep and rushes into Maybole's town centre. All told, it's about 27 miles distance, which took me, as slow as I am, about 4-5 hours, with several stops along the way. From Maybole, the train will take you straight back to Glasgow in an hour or so.

Knowing All About It

Wisdom consists in perceiving that opposites, far from being sequestered in their exclusive individuality, ceaselessly modify and communicate with each other. The one never transpires but in response to the other, and all reality is nothing more than this process of reciprocal engendering.

Francois Julien, In Praise of Blandness

Up only exists because of down, not in spite of it. 

On a bicycle, or on foot, this process of reciprocal engendering is something that etches itself into the bones, brain and blood. You breathe those ups, you breathe those downs, because it is you, your blood and your bones, that works them, not sitting passively by, sealed behind screen and speed, as you let some machine do it for you. Moving under your own steam, the shape of the bodymind is thus governed by the shape of the land.

Because of these live-contoured-encounters, and this dynamic inter-influencing of bodymind and world, you soon understand that unity (or, com-unities), and not duality, governs the universe. Organism and environment, together, constitute a single evolutionary process.

A unity of opposites naturally emerges.

'Knowing All About It on the Loch Humphrey Path'     July 2013

Jolomo's Bicycle

The other day whilst coming down from the Kilpatrick hills, I passed through Clydebank and saw that there was an exhibition of the Scottish artist John Lowrie Morrison in the museum. I popped in to have a shuftie, and came across this early one (dated 1975), apparently done on the hoof, of Old MacQueen of Castleton. Granted it's not what you would typically associate with the colour-saturated tableaux of his later croft and seascapes, but this, for me, is one of his finest.

 

Old MacQueen of Castleton - John Lowrie Morrison, 1975

Sacred Cycles

There is something mystical about the bicycle, something mysterious about the way it conjoins with the body to move one forward through the creation of circles and spirals. I often wonder if the bicycle is the secret of the universe, hidden in plain sight, that few have yet noticed, for its capacity to energize, inspire and enopen.

Personally, I am convinced that it is.

'The path that can lead to liberation should be seen less a straight line, pointing forwards or upwards, but more as a spiral pattern of winding and intersecting loops, a string that unravels constantly through space, time and consciousness.'

Aidan Rankin, The Jain Path

Road Closed?

 'Crow Road - Closed?  Aye, right!'

A big red ‘Road Closed’ sign impedes the way. Apparently there’s been a landslide. From time to time, even the land moves at a pace we can recognise. I carry on up the road not so much ignoring the sign as amusing at it. When you walk with your own two feet or use a bicycle, (when you traverse this earth under your own steam and not outsource it to some lugubrious, over-sized machine), you quickly realise there is no such thing as a ‘road closed’ - indeed the concept of closed roads and closed-ness quickly becomes absurd. You find that you are open to everything, that nothing is ‘closed’, not the roads, not the hills, not the skies or the coast, nor the myriad forms that inhabit it all. Everything is emphatically open, and connected.

In this way, cycling is as much metaphorical and metaphysical as it is literal. One creates one's own path without being dictated to by rigid legislations. Car drivers, on the other hand, are so hooked in to the system of outsourcing that they have no idea whether they're coming or going. My father once told me (possibly the only words of wisdom that ever exited his mouth) that buying a car means connecting yourself to a system that constantly bleeds you dry (he was talking financially, via insurance, road tax, MOT, parking, fuel...) but he might as well have been talking psycho-physically. Following my own stints of working in countries like Libya, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia (countries not generally recognized for their road-safety records or bicycles) I understood not just the financial dangers of owning a car but the very real (meta-) physical ones too.

There are no 'dead ends' on a bicycle, no bottoms-of-bags (culs-de-sac) that you find yourself in, that dictate to you where you can and cannot go. There is a freedom to cycling that you could never ever get from a car, not in a million years. In all my years of cycling, (yes, I may have had to throw the bike on my back for crossing a stream or hiking over a hill), I've never had to stop and turn around because of a way that is closed. When you follow the way of the cycle, the cyclical way of bodying forth under your own steam, the word 'closed' never enters the equation. As the old Zen saying goes: the obstacle is the path. There is always a way forward.... (on a bicycle)...

Signature of a Flow-State