Keswick to Lochmaben – 63 miles
Sixty three miles. For slow End-to-Enders like us, that’s a long day. We managed to leave the Youth Hostel by 7h45 – a minor miracle – not before Phil gone to take a shower in one of the shared bathrooms and forgotten his key-card. He was discovered waiting by the door to our corridor by a bemused female guest, wearing nothing but a small towel around his loins. Naturally, he transformed the whole situation into another hilarious anecdote. The laughter did us good.
My resistance to Greggs was overridden by a majority vote, and we cycled up to Keswick’s main square where traders were busy setting up their stalls. Frustratingly, Greggs was good, and so astonishingly cheap that I found myself trying to work out the economies of a £2 breakfast baguette. We ate and drank our coffees on the square as Keswick woke up around us.
The route out of Keswick was a freshly laid cycle track that followed the old railway line through woods and over iron bridges with mountains streams bubbling beneath. We passed joggers and dog-walkers, thanking them all as they stepped to one side and secured their dogs. The tinkle of our bell would sometimes take these unsuspecting pedestrian by surprise, and send them scurrying out of our way. Phil added an occasional ‘how are we today?’ to ease our passage. I don’t know how many dog-walkers we’ve crossed on this trip. Thousands probably. The ride out of Keswick was flat, breezy and smooth. There could have been no better way for us to start the day.
At the end of the track the route started to climb into the remote hill country north of the lakes. The landscape is harsher here, the farms and buildings a little shabbier than further south–a working landscape with few walkers and cyclists. I tried to imagine the place in winter, with joy clinging to those bare fields by its fingernails. Only for the hardy.
We chanced on a café run by Quakers in the tiny village of Mosedale at the foot of a steep hill. It’s the hub of a community of Quakers that has existed here since the 1680s, The cafe was in their meeting house, with its jumble of old pews and tables, their wood worn to fine lustre through centuries of reverend use. Up on the wall was a collection of old wooden signs that, so the woman who ran the café told me, used to hang over the door lintels of Quaker houses in the area. The woman was polite and conscientious but reserved.
Next door to the café there was a small outbuilding full of bric-a-brac for sale. Phil bought a toast rack and Tim bought some egg cups and a little bowl for salt. Phil had been talking about toast-racks for a few days already, tea-cosies too, how they were part of the furniture when he was a child and how he missed them. The toast-rack gave rise to endless jokes in the following days, about how we had packed our panniers so carefully to ensure minimal weight but managed to fit a toast rack in too. We imagined all the other things we could perhaps pick up along the way: a set of bagpipes, an anchor, an iron, a catering size box of frozen haggis, a Corby trouser press. It hardly matters whether Phil ever puts a slice of toast into his toast rack, the thing was worth ten times the price just for the laughs it produced.
We drank our coffee and ate our strawberry sponge cakes and rocky road slices near a large hollybush in the garden of the meeting house. Phil told us stories of his adventures with Christmas trees, how one year he’d bought one that was so big it got stuck in his front door. Some phone call distracted him and he left the tree there for his partner Jackie to discover when she came home. When the conversation lulled there was a deep silence, sprinkled with bird song. It was a very peaceful place, very Quakerish.
We glided down off the hills into rolling farmland and picnic’d in cemetery by a stolid old church. The land was busy with harvest-time. Huge tractors roared past us towing unidentifiable machinery. Black plastic hay bales sat mute in the fields. Birds scavenged for seeds. We went plumb through the grounds of a boys prep school and Jools muttered ‘Dotheboys Hall,’ as we passed the imposing old building. The cycle path into Carlisle took us past a huge Nescafé factory (‘mmm…Gold Blend,’ Phil quipped) and then followed the Calder River all the way into the city centre, through landscaped reed beds and wildlife-friendly meadows.
In the south side of Carlisle, with its grids of two-up two-down terraces, we found the route blocked by building work. I quickly reccie’d an alternative route on the map, but in the meantime Jools and Phil had struck up a conversation with youngish man on a bike, who had the thin, taut, physique of a cyclist and a kind face. His name was Gary and he offered to guide us through the city centre. This turned out to be a blessing as it steered us clear of the dual carriageway that splits the city in two like a horrendous gash, the poisoned legacy of 1970s town-planners who understood engineering and logistics better than they understood human beings. Riding on pavements by the dual carriageway I glimpsed the dour streets of old Carlisle. They were hewn from brown stone and were sooty, with a fortress air about them, apt for Carlisle’s ancient purpose as a stronghold, a border town, the terminus of Hadrian’s Wall.
North of the gash, the houses became larger and more genteel, with bay windows and slate roofs. Gary pointed out the way to Gretna Green and, after we had thanked him profusely, said his goodbyes. The road to Gretna seemed interminable. Occasionally it even appeared to lengthen. One sign said ‘Gretna Green 4 miles’, the next ‘Gretna Green 4½ miles.’ We were excited about the approaching Scottish border. It felt like a significant goal on our journey, both physically and psychologically, and we were impatient to get there. So we powered along those interminable roads and tracks, often alongside the M6, with its incessant thunder of engines. How often have I driven along that stretch of motorway, watching the signs whizz by without a second thought – Penrith, Kendal, Carlisle, Gretna Green, Lockerbie. Countless times. But now, rather than skimming the surface of the land, I was pedalling through its undergrowth, absorbing a different perspective.
Our immediate goal was a large road sign beloved of End-to-Enders that’s situated just outside Gretna, up the long curve of a slip road that comes off the motorway. It reads, simply enough, ‘Scotland Welcomes You.’ When we reached the sign there was a large group of Lejoggers, mostly women, who were taking photos under the sign and generally whooping up their joy at having reached this crucial way mark. They all wore specially branded matching kit and were riding road bikes with minimal weight in their attempt to finish the ride in ten days, mostly on A-roads, with a support vehicle. They’d trained for the ride on the hills around Monmouth, their hometown, the hills we rode on our way to Fownhope. They did all their eating, showering, clothes-washing in various branches of Morrisons along the way. When we told them about our leisurely stop-start pace, they were clearly envious.
This has been the pattern of our many encounters with other Lejoggers during our journey. We never met any who were doing the ride more slowly than we were. Most were doing it much faster, with support vehicle and very little in the way of bags or panniers. And most said, wistfully, ‘if I were to do it again, I’d take more time and make sure I saw more.’ The group we met by the sign told us of the multiple road-rage incidents they had experienced on major roads. Shocking to hear perhaps, but no surprise. Nothing is more liable to boil the blood of the person behind the wheel of their car than the imposition of slowness on a road where they could be piling on speed. This is why we always tried to avoid main roads. Bicycles and cars only ever mix unhappily, under duress. They’ll never be friends.
Once they had finished with the sign, we asked them to take pictures of us, and attempted a few more on Tim’s phone with self-timer. This proved tricky, so Tim asked a teenage girl who was watching us from a distance with her friend if she could take a photo. She squirmed and giggled while her friend howled with laughter, but she managed to snap a few shots. Then we cycled into Gretna, and stopped at a petrol station where Phil bought wine gums (or were they fruit pastilles – we had tested so many varieties by then that I’ve lost track), and Jools pumped up his tyres using the station’s air facilities. Gretna is another town that time forgot. The flush young hearts and wedding bells are long gone, and so is Gretna’s reason to be be. That Leominster feeling. We cycled down along its main street, turned off onto sidestreets lined with grey pebble-dash bungalows and found a field next to a large warehouse where we stopped to eat our sandwiches and wine gums. Gretna Green still flashed by me, but more slowly than it had done in the past.
The day ended on long straight roads that climbed gently into undulating farmland, with wide open skies and views of the distant Galloway hills that gave the landscape a prairie feel. This was a new sensation for us, and the feeling of having left England for an entirely new place was reinforced. We practiced our Scottish accents on each other as we rode along. Thank God we were alone.
Lochmaben is a one horse town, east of Lockerbie. Maybe two horses. We cycled past a statue of Robert the Bruce that stood on the main intersection, in front of a town hall as dour and heavy as pumpernickel bread. As we drew up to The Crown Inn, two very excited women emerged from the pub and unloaded their wild energy on us in a cataract of words that were impossible to interrupt. ‘Look at you! How far have you travelled today?! 63 miles!!!! Amazing. Look at those muscles. You’re like the other cyclists already in there (I thought she was talking about Jools, but she wasn’t). Och, let’s take a picture! Look what I’ve got in my hamper! (a bottle of Lemon Gin and other goodies). Are you gonna dance! It’s all kicking off, it is! It is!!!’ Another woman came out and shouted something incomprehensible about a taxi to her mate. The place was exploding with party energy.
We pushed our rides through the garage / store room into the courtyard / garden at the back of the pub and saw a small crowd of ravers – late 20s, 30s, 40s – on the tiny dancefloor or sitting on tables and a DJ under a white gazebo force-feeding bangers through his PA system, which was buckling with distortion under the strain of it all. ‘That’s DJ Stevie C,’ Jools informed us, ‘and he’s on until 4 am!!’ before folding his lips into a cheeky grin. It was 6.30pm on Saturday night in Lochmaben and this was clearly the place to be. Despite our exhaustion, and disconnected mood, we were energised by the monster party vibe that this little town was managing to boil up before our eyes. Stevie C kept everyone primed with a regime of party perennials which had the lasses of Lochmaben dancing on the tables before the end of the night. A four-to-the-floor remix of ‘I’ll Take the High Road and You Take The Low Road’ was especially well received. I sensed the wild desire for abandon in a place with few opportunities to break the tedium barrier. The tools were basic – Tenants extra, vodka, whiskey, tabs, a little space to dance, and the cheesy onslaught of Stevie C. What more do you need?
We strolled self-consciously past the dancefloor to the pub. Masks were strictly enforced inside (Scotland seemed to be taking Covid a lot more seriously than England). Scotland were beating Moldova on the TV over our heads. We ate while the lasses of Lochmaben partied outside, their more reserved men-folk sitting at the tables, propping up the bar or playing pool. They looked granite hard. Even if we’d had a wild notion to do as the Romans do…those Lochmaben boys would have given us pause. Later, while I retired to blog, Jools and Phil went off to try another pub, a short walk away. Their entrance was greeted with a drop in the hubbub levels and they were soon being plied with questions in accents so thick that casual conversation was impossible. But a connection, of sorts, was made and before they left, Phil and Jools were informed that ‘we get a lot of posh c**ts in here, but youse two are ok, know what I mean pal.’
Even though Stevie C called a halt around 11pm, just a few seconds before his PA breathed its last, the sound of mad revelry continued much longer. It may have deprived us of a few motes of sleep, but you had to respect it. Small town Scotland knows how to party, I can confirm.
Andy Morgan
