2018-07-06 Berwick-upon-Tweed to Edinburgh by road bike over the Lammermuirs

The distractions of moving to Berwick-upon-Tweed, setting up house and working on yet another Edwardian house have resulted in a blog famine but no longer. In the past year I have cycled more than ever, largely as a result of joining the Puffin Cycling Group, essentially social but still going rather faster and with more of a concern for appropriate bikes and kit than I had previously pursued. I have tried to keep up with them on a hybrid and a mountain bike but neither is really workable, even in the medium speed group (10-13 mph), which is all I aspire to. 

So, dear reader, I spent £200 on Ebay for a secondhand road bike, for sale through Cash Converters in Dundee. Perhaps a student was raising some cash, having become indebted through involvement in a late night poker school or via the snares of online gambling. This low cost and little used miracle of modern cycling is a B'Twin Triban 3, an entry-level alloy road bike with carbon forks and a basic Shimano drive train. It is a surprisingly good and well-regarded product from Decathlon, the mostly cheap and cheerful French sports chain but they also sponsor the Tour de France, have a research team and offer some reasonably high-end road bikes.  Weighing about 10 kilos, the performance is markedly better than a touring bike or hybrid and I suspect that this is a combination of lightness, gearing that matches the other road bikes in my group, and stronger leg muscles from our Sunday morning outings, as well as other forays.

I attempted to cycle to Edinburgh last year, following a coastal route on my fairly basic 29-inch Felt mountain bike. A combination of a slow puncture from the accursed power flailing of hawthorn hedges along the route together with energy loss through the un-lockable suspension on the front forks, left me knackered by the time I reached Dunbar. I threw in the towel and caught the train to Edinburgh, went to the pub and caught the pre-booked train back to Berwick, as planned.

This year I decided to try the hard way, via Duns and over the Lammermuir hills. The over-dramatic graph below shows the profile. This is the route that I plotted on ViewRanger, generally a very good GPS based app for planning and recording what you do. More detail via the link below.

http://my.viewranger.com/route/details/MTg4MzAzNw==

The route is a little over 60 miles with about 3,400 foot of ascent and most of the time I saw very little traffic. The Scottish Borders are a wonderful place to cycle, with lots of quiet back roads, rolling countryside and only very small towns and villages.

View towards the Lammermuirs

National Cycle Route 1 passes the end of our street and I followed part of it through Paxton and then cross country over the river Blackadder to Duns, a lovely little market town of which we had not even heard before we started to look for houses in this area. It was the home of Jim Clark, the Formula One racing driver who died at only 32. The town has no less than three significant country estates: Duns Castle, built around a former pele tower (this is the land of the border reivers and fortification was obligatory for survival), Manderston, a lavish Edwardian mansion with a silver staircase and Wedderburn Castle, which I only found by accident just before my first spill of the day, when I unwisely attempted to start off uphill into Duns in cleats. A kind young man in a pickup stopped to ask whether the old gentleman had suffered harm. The old gentleman thanked him for his solicitous intervention and answered in the negative, feeling a right tit.

Wedderburn Castle gate

Unfortunately Duns is where the really hard climb begins. Hardens Hill is not particularly steep but it is relentless. I knew what to expect, having struggled up it with the Puffins a couple of weeks previously and managed fairly well for an older guy with fairly crap lungs. Luckily the even more demanding hill that I did with the Puffins was off on a side road before the wonderfully-named Longformacus through which, by turns and across a cattle grid, I ground upwards towards the top of the Lammermuir Hills. There is some heather but it is mostly kept back by sheep and there are various small squares of cultivated land, apparently some type of experiment. There were also young partridges, wandering about rather than flying. The lavish collection of roadkill that I passed mainly consisted of rabbits. This was the countryside that Sir Walter Scott had in mind as his setting for The Bride of Lammermoor. His house at Melrose is not far away. In my view he is vastly overrated and even reading standing up, I found it difficult to stay awake when attempting Waverley.

Once across the uplands, the view is to the hills beyond the Firth of Forth, always magnificent but even more striking from this height. The rather uninspiring photograph below perhaps does not do justice.

And so onward towards Edinburgh through villages such as East and West Saltoun past the Glenkinchie distillery (no, that way madness lies) and onto the long distance cycle path on the former Pencaitland railway. Like much of the rest of the borders, most of the land appears to be in the ownership of large agricultural estates with private 18th Century parks surrounded by stone walls. Presumably wall building was infill work for the agricultural staff on these estates. The effect is a clear message: Private Keep Out. Because warfare between the Scots and the English and the running battles between the reiver families prevented the development of the border lands for so long, the 18th century and early 19th experienced a distinct peace dividend. However, the sparse population and large estates meant that efficient agricultural innovations promoted by Charles Viscount "Turnip" Townsend and others were much more readily adopted here, greatly increasing revenues and values.

Pencaitland is by Dalkeith, smallest of the estates of the Duke of Buccleugh (big in the Borders) but because this rich agricultural land was dense with coal seams, it was also, ahem, the heart of Midlothian's coal mining industry. From here there are marked cycle paths all the way to Edinburgh city centre, much of it on our old friend NCR1 but also often coinciding with The John Muir Way, a coast-to-coast route from Helensburgh on the Firth of Clyde to North Sea fishing port Dunbar. This port was the birthplace of John Muir, founder of the Scottish National Trust. Helensburgh at the other end is close by Loch Lomond, the first Scottish national park, which Muir worked to create.

Everything feels very urban as the route heads towards Musselburgh on the Firth of Forth and then turns towards the city centre, sometimes on roads but also on dedicated cycle paths including former railways, with a long, dark tunnel after it passes below the Salisbury Crags on the south side of Holyrood Park. Once I reached Waverley Station (Scott again), I put the bike in a rack, had a wash and change in the gents toilets with 50 minutes to spare for a much-needed pint of bitter at the Abbotsford (more Scott) in Rose Street, just behind Jenners. Then back past the Scott Memorial, a sort of blackened Victorian space ship and onto a very crowded train to Berwick, the 45-minute journey's rather putting in context my whole day of cycling. The LNER staff couldn't have been nicer and the enthusiastic guard had my bike waiting for me on the platform when I scuttled back to coach B to collect it. A grand day out.