Lanark to Stirling – 50 miles
The rain finally caught up with us on that autumn morning in Lanarkshire. Our unused waterproofs were pulled out from the bottom of our panniers, and we pedalled gingerly through the drizzle into the centre of Lanark. The place has pedigree: King David 1st of Scotland granted it a royal charter in 1140 and for centuries it served as the main market town for the region. But on that rainy morning, before we had a chance to warm up, it looked glum and moribund and we slipped through it without regret.
Turning left at the end of the main street, we were instantly komooted down a long steep path, our fingers frozen into claws with the effort of gripping our handlebars as we walked our bikes down over the wet and slippery stones. At the bottom, the path rejoined a tarmac’d road that crossed a bridge and ascended a steep hill before crossing the main railway line to Glasgow. The view north was forbidding. The grey Lanarkshire hills rolled joylessly to the horizon, echoing the grey of the sky. Huge barns the size of small football pitches sat stolidly in the dips and rises, looking more like decrepit factories than the bucolic farms of my urban imagination. Cows eyed us nonchalantly as we passed.
On the outskirts of Carluke we stopped and took shelter under a tree on a green surrounded by an estate of semis, all pebble-dashed a uniform light grey. Many of the houses had satellite dishes sprouting under their eaves. We joked, insensitively, about housing prices and the advantages of owning a holiday home in the area. Cars swished by on the main road, but no one was out walking. The centre of Edinburgh was less than thirty miles away, but it might have been in another solar system. What was it like to live here? We didn’t stay long enough to find out.
Cycling past sodden fields, through veils of light drizzle, we came to the village of Bonkle where we stopped to answer nature’s call, not that nature was particularly inviting at that moment. The name of the place was a gift of sorts and yielded a few cheap laughs (‘A waz in Bonkle followed by a bonk in Wazzle’). From there the road climbed and entered some woods where we passed a fine example of the fly-tipping that’s a salient feature of that corner of rural Lanarkshire. Piles of sodden rubbish spilled out of the undergrowth at regular intervals. We couldn’t help being mildly shocked at this desecration. They could at least give the place a chance to be beautiful. But perhaps that’s just bubble talk. After all, we knew nothing about the area; all we were doing was passing through, unattached, unconcerned.
In the uplands beyond Bonkle we came across a homestead that might have been lifted straight out of True Detective, except that this wasn’t Louisiana and we weren’t Marty and Rust. But you know the kind of place: a secretive hideout in the woods where badness lurks and occasionally emerges to terrorise decent law-abiding folk; a place of 90% proof alcohol, tattoos and strange vats in which something unspeakable simmers gently. This particular iteration was a ragged jumble of caravans and outhouses, patched together with corrugated iron, tarps, breeze-blocks and hand-me-down windows and doors. As we pedalled past at high speed, I managed to count at least five large husky-type dogs that were chained, and three collies that weren’t. This canine army unleashed a broadside of barks as we approached…not the just the usual neurotic ‘who the hell are you’ type of bark, but more of a snarling, forceful ‘I’d like to rip you into pieces’ kind of bark. One of the huskies, whose chain was longer than the others, came out into the middle of the road and lunged at us as we swerved around it. We stopped about half a mile later, ruffled and breathless, and turned to each other with moon faces. What the hell was that?
Jules had arranged to meet his old school friend Dave Gornall, also affectionately known as ‘Nogger’, at a turning just below the Kirk of Shotts, which is known far and wide as ‘The M8 Church’ because it can be clearly seen from the nearby motorway. It was named after a giant called Bertram de Shotts who used to terrorise travellers on the old Glasgow to Edinburgh road. He’s evidently been reincarnated in chained huskie dogs and fly-tips, and the only effective weapon against him is a stalwart sense of humour.
Waiting in the drizzle for Nogger to show up, it felt as if we were characters in a Cold War John Le Carré novel waiting for our mole. The rain was growing more persistent and we were dying for our statutory coffee and cake break. When he arrived, Nogger informed us that we were in “the arse-end of nowhere” and could kiss all dreams of artisan café-bakeries goodbye, at least until we had passed Falkirk. But our hopes were raised when he added that our route took us down a motorway underpass where we could take shelter and brew up our own coffee, using the Lyons coffee bags that Jules had bought some days ago for precisely this kind of emergency. With that we thanked our informant who promised to come and meet us that night in Stirling, and cycled up the steep and busy B7066.
Nogger seemed like kind and personable bloke but he turned out to be a fairly useless when it came to local knowledge of underpasses. Instead of that promised shelter, we found ourselves cycling over the thundering M8. On the other side we saw a house standing less than 100 yards from the motorway, surrounded by slag heaps and pylons. I’ve travelled far and wide to places at either end of the beauty scale, from icing sugar picturesque to turd-bog ugly, but I can truthfully say that that house by the M8 was one of the saddest habitations I’ve ever seen. Carluke and Bonkle were des res in comparison. We took pictures and continued on our way, eyes scouring the gloom for a tree large enough to provide some shelter. Our prayers were soon answered…well…half-answered…by a little copse that stood by a river, close to some large boulders that were surrounded by the detritus of yet another fly-tip. Someone, for reasons unknown, had dismembered what looked like some kind of old motor and arranged its pieces neatly on top of one of the boulders. There’s no accounting what you might do for kicks in Lanarkshire. Or were we already in West Lothian?
Nogger had assured us that life would start to improve after Falkirk and he was almost right. The upturn actually came a few miles before, in the village of Slamannan, where we stumbled across an eatery called The Big Melt. No matter that the handsome old house across the village square had all its windows boarded up, or that the old clock tower in the middle of the square had stopped telling the time long ago, or that the kid who was eating a burger and slurping a coke at the the Big Melt’s only outside table was a feral customer who liked climbing up the clock tower. His mother was was one of the two women running The Big Melt and when she came out and asked him to “get down from there this bloody instant…Ah wohnt tell ye again!”, he screamed some unidentifiable phrases back at her. Never mind any of that. Big Melt was our oasis in the desert and we slurped its atrocious coffee with a feeling of deep gratitude. When I googled Slamannan, I found out that the village is named after the old pagan sea-god Manau or Mannan, as are other nearby towns like Clackmannan, home of the phallic Mannan stone. But the sea and its God seemed far away, and so did Slamannan’s days of fortune.
The Scotland of tourist brochures and guide-books reasserted itself on the Union Canal towpath, which took us to the southern edge of Falkirk and surrounded us with the familiar sight of joggers and dog-walkers. We linked up with John Muir Way, a cycle path that crosses Scotland from east to west coast along the line of the old Roman Antonine Wall. Apart from its endless gates, it was a pleasant path to ride. We took bets on how many gates we would have to open and close before we reached the Falkirk wheel. I think Tim came closest, but the game degenerated into a wrangle about what constituted a gate and what was merely a barrier, so I couldn’t be sure.
The Falkirk Wheel is a truly strange thing, a marvel of engineering that must have cost a gazillion pounds and whose sole purpose, as far as I can tell, is to hoist barges from the Forth and Clyde canal up onto the Union canal (and vice versa), thereby knotting together two of Scotland’s premier waterways. It’s the largest, nay, the only rotating boat lift of its kind in the world, and it looks very impressive. A row of enormous hooped gantries carrying the Union Canal extends from the side of a hill and ends in two massive rotating arms, shaped like bass clefs, that pivot at a snail’s pace and deposit barges in the Forth and Clyde below. You have to admire the ambition of this startling project, which has no doubt gifted Falkirk a place of pride in the annals of engineering and an A1 visitor attraction. But all that just to lift barges from one canal to another? Really? I was under the impression that the economic heyday of canals and barges was in the 1840s. Was there really a pressing need to devote so much money and ingenuity to such an outmoded transport dilemma? Come to think of it, those massive pivot arms do look a little like elephant trunks, but steely grey rather than white.
We made full use of the visitor centre café, and witnessed one rotation of those massive arms, before continuing north into the plains of Central Scotland, along minor roads and tracks which had the blessing of being flat and relatively traffic-free. Along the way we saw signs for Airdrie, Cumbernauld and Stenhousemuir, which reminded us of the damp winter evenings of our childhood, eating jam and toast and listening to the Scottish football results being read out with that beautiful lilting voice on the TV: St Mirren – 1, Hamilton Academicals – nil. Partick Thistle – 4, Arbroath – 2. Dumferline Athletic vs Queen of The South, match postponed and so on and so forth. How soothing that memory is. We racked our brains and vied with each other to come up with more team names: Kilmarnock, St Johnstone, Motherwell, Airdieonians, Stirling Albion, Montrose. Each new name was greeted with a joyful ‘ahhhh’ of recognition.
As we headed out across the plain, we could see Stirling Castle sitting on its rocky pedestal in the distance, set against the majestic (and, in cycling terms, daunting) backdrop of the Highlands, with the Wallace Monument sitting high on Abbey Craig hill to the east. The evening sun was warm, the cycle track smooth and easy, and I was glad to be approaching the nexus of so much Scottish history. Wallace had given the English a bloody nose near here, at the battle of Stirling Bridge. Little matter that he was hung drawn and quartered at the command of Edward 1st some year later; Robert the Bruce stepped in to finish the job at Bannockburn, which is now a suburb of Stirling. Fourteen years later, in 1328, the Pope recognised the independence of Scotland and Robert the Bruce’s heirs reigned over Scotland for the next four centuries. That’s some weighty history that still bears down relentlessly on the Scottish psyche.
We had no trouble liking Stirling, even though we got lost and had to ask several passersby for directions to the youth hostel. It’s small, ancient, manageable, with a young and groovalicious student population and great views. Tim put it on his list of places to visit again without any hesitation, and when we heard that the local university has a special focus on sports subjects, we began, with comic exaggeration, to hatch all kinds of blue-sky plans for his future. We eventually found the youth hostel up a steep road that leads to the castle (the inevitable sting in the tail). I haven’t been able to find out what purpose the hostel – a very grand Scottish Palladian building with colonnaded entrance – served in its former lives, but it now offers rooms with basic but adequate ensuite toilet and shower, key-card access, and twin beds. In terms of what we needed, it was perfection, and far removed from the dreary youth hostels I remember frequenting in my twenties, with their rules and chores and dorms. The place was so empty that we were each given separate rooms–an unheralded treat. The day had started low and ended high.
We found a large old pub called The Portcullis near the castle and repaired there for our arrival pint, followed by dinner. Nogger joined us as promised, shortly followed by another of Jools’s old school friends who was working as an estate agent in Perth. The conversation ranged far and wide but turned regularly to the subject of Scottish independence. Our English friends, now resident in Scotland, were both dead against it and could barely muster a kind word for SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon. If the ghosts of Robert the Bruce and William Wallace were in the vicinity they refused to be stirred, not even by all the pints of Tennents and Broughton that landed on our table. We went to bed puzzled and exhausted.
Andy Morgan
