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A Journey to the Birthplace of the Bicycle
Late, as in the Late Arthur Dent
I don't know why it happens this way. I had everything organised the night before. I got out of bed in plenty of time. But somehow it was ten minutes after the time I had intended that I finally left the house; and, stopping to pick up my friend Marcus, somehow we took fifteen minutes instead of the five I had budgeted. So we were getting tight on time as I drove into the car-park of the Ayr Rugby Club at Alloway, right in the middle of the Rabbie Burns theme park. And somehow oor Rabbie was sort of a thread tying the whole journey together, but I get ahead of myself. We drove into the car park and found it full of cyclists - at least fifty, possibly many more. I got the bikes out of the car and assembled as quickly as I could, and ran to sign in. And as I came back out the last of the peloton was disappearing down the lane, and only Jon Senior had waited for us. Grabbing the last few things out of the car, we left, last on the road as usual, and immediately I was struggling. I think Jon and Marcus both (very sensibly) wanted to catch up with the rest of the group, and were trying to make a good pace. And, while I wanted to as well, I wasn't cutting it. The landscape through which we were travelling was green and well wooded, with rolling hills - but we were on average steadily climbing, and each wooshing descent had to be clawed back up the next hillside. At Crosshill we came up on our first straggler, a man on a nice Trek wearing a plastic rain jacket over an Ayrshire CTC jersey. For some time we rode on as two pairs, Jon and Marcus a little ahead, myself and the chap on the Trek a little behind. It wasn't desperately warm, but the steady climbing into a headwind made me feel overdressed, so at the top of one green brae I stopped to stuff my jersey into the back pocket of my shirt. Marcus and Jon both waited for me, so we lost our straggler and were again last on the road. But not for very long. Soon we came to the first serious climbs, up to Straiton, and now cyclists were strung in lines across the hillsides ahead of us, gradually climbing into a lowering sky. And gradually we started to catch, and even pass, some of them. As we climbed, the weather got colder and more dreich. A thin rain was now leaking out of the tattered clouds ahead. Here comes the rain, again Up on the top of the moor the road started to level out and become more rolling, and although the headwind remained strong we were going better. Marcus suggested stopping to put rain jackets on, and I thought 'what is he talking about, it's only spitting'. But we stopped, and after a slight internal debate I decided to put my rain jacket on too. Just as well. The dirty, cheating, lying forecasters had promised sunshine and no showers in Ayrshire, sunshine and some showers in Dumfrieshire. I should have known. I'd packed my mudguards in the car, but, trusting to that weather forecast, hadn't fitted them. I very nearly left my rain jacket in the car, because it takes up a lot of space in my bag. Very nearly. But I hadn't, and now I put it on. And before we'd had time to get the zips up the water hit us, hurling out of the grey wind, dense and heavy. We got back on the road, pushing into a wall of wind and rain. Within minutes my shoes were soaked. My shorts were saturated. My hair was plastered to my skull, and the view through my sunglasses was virtually uninterpretable, so I had to push them up on my head. We rode on in a mist of spray, and that set the tone for the next forty miles. It was gey weet. But now the road had peaked at 266 metres and was descending towards the headwaters of the Doon, and if there's one aspect of cycling I'm good at it's descending. It was still windy. It was still wet. It was still wild. But it was definitely fun, and we ripped down the hill towards Dalmellington. Ye banks and braes The Bard - aye, verily, oor Rabbie himsel - wrote at great length of the bonnie Doon. We may remember him now as a love poet, but in truth when he was not writing political polemic he was primarily a poet of landscape - and more than occasionally a polemicist of landscape. Few landscapes have been as praised in poesy as these banks and braes. What would he have said if he could see it noe - what could he have said of a valley once so fair whose principal tourist attraction is an old pithead overlooking bings and slagheaps, amongst the scars of the still-active opencast pits? Rabbie, those banks and braes of yours, this is how we praise them. But praise them or not, we rode down to the valley floor on flowing roads, now well up with the tail end of the pack. In Dalmellington several other cyclists, including the one bent trike, were still at the control when we arrived, and there were at least another two clusters on the road behind us. Marcus was already looking cold and unhappy, and I was concerned about him. We got our brevet cards stamped and read our navigation, and, because I was in a hurry, I formed a completely wrong idea of what we were doing next. I have no excuse - I was practically on home territory and ought to know these roads. So I took a wrong turning, and we had climbed steeply for about half a mile before Jon very gently pointed this out to me. By the time we got back onto the A713 no other cyclists were in sight. Over the border The long climb up to the Galloway border runs up a glen which is in places more of a ravine, with steep scree laden slopes climbing into the mist, and the river and the road twisting around each other in the constrained space of the bottom. And it's a climb: a long steady slog up to 283 metres at the watershed. Jon and Marcus were again climbing faster than I was, and went ahead together. I climbed at my own rate, but as the road levelled at the top quickly caught up with them. And now the views opened out, with a marvellously clear view over Loch Doon, even though the high hills were lost in grey murk. I'd hoped - we'd all hoped, I think - that things would be easier once we were south of the watershed. The rain was not so hard, but the wind in our teeth was every bit as strong, and although we descended 100 metres over the five or six miles into Carsphairn, most of that distance was earned. Now it was Marcus who was behind and struggling. His back was hurting, and he clearly wasn't enjoying himself. And really, I had every sympathy. We were all droukit. It was cold. We were completely out of touch with even the slowest of the other riders. And the wind and the persistent rain were gruelling. So at Carsphairn Marcus phoned home, and decided to bail. Jon and I headed on, eighteen miles across the south slope of the hills towards Moniaive. And then there were two And the truth is this was a most enjoyable section. It should not have been. Jon would stop periodically to wring about a gallon of water out of each of his gloves. My front deraileur was giving problems - the cable clamp bolt appeared to have slipped a bit. There was little let up in the rain - it was getting gradually lighter, but no less persistent. The wind, however, had ceased to be such a nuisance, partly because we were now more or less broadside to it. And the gradients were not at all bad. That's surprising, because looking a the map I see that it was on this section we reached our highest point, at 309 metres crossing out of the Glenkens into Nithsdale. But the long descent into Moniaive was just fun - a rush - and our average speed was beginning to creep slowly back up. Then in Moniaive we rounded a corner and found the control - a cafe with its yard crowded with wet, filthy, expensive bikes. And a sign saying BACON ROLLS. There were plenty of other things on the sign, but those two words stood out. Bacon rolls. I could have thought of nothing more pleasant - more vital - to the well being of a soaked cyclist. And so we parked up the bikes and went in, to find the cafe crowded with equally soaked cyclists with the same idea. Bacon rolls (and coffee). Heaven. I Lift Up Mine Eyes And after heaven, hell. Or Tynron Brae, whichever is the more unpleasant. In a sense this must be seen as divine retribution. Only two days before, I had been saying on uk.rec.cycling that any normal person could climb almost any road hill in Britain on a bike with a fairly modest range of gears - one with a lowest gear of 37.1 inches. My lowest gear is slightly higher, at 39.2 inches... And Tynron Brae is a wicked little hill. The house at the bottom was warning enough. You know houses, you drew houses at primary school. Houses have a door in the middle, and a window on either side. The house at the bottom of Tynron Brae was just like that. Door in the middle, one window on either side of it. The only minor eccentricity being that the window on the right of the door was on the ground floor, and the window on the left of the door... Uh huh. That steep. And that was before you got onto the climb proper. And what added insult to injury were nice little council erected signs marking it as a cycle route! Well, I ground up it, very slowly. Ahead of me several other cyclists were grinding up it, each at their own pace. My pace was 2 miles per hour. Not 2.1, not 2.2, two. Arthur Clune posted, in response to my claim that you could climb any hill on a bike with modest gearing, that my calculations meant a cadence of 24, and that any cadence 'below 40 gets very painful and [you] can't do it for long...' He's right. My cadence was ten, and that is not at all pleasant. I wanted to get off. I really wanted to get off. The only thing which stopped me getting off and walking... ...was the fear that if I stopped pedalling long enough to unclip I should undoubtedly topple over. Up ahead I could see a steep, grassy bank at the side of the road and I began to promise myself that if I could only get up that far I'd allow myself to come to a stop alongside it and gently topple onto it... the idea was just so pleasant. I heaved the cranks over, one great effort after another, and stared at that grassy bank. But when I got to the grassy bank the top was in sight, and somehow I struggled on. The full 128 metres of the climb were over about 1.25 kilometres horizontally, but 80 metres of that climb are packed into just half a kilometre. It's an evil little hill. At the top I passed a man on a lovely Cannondale in Team Saeco colours, but I didn't have enough breath left to do more than gasp 'nice bike'. What goes up, of course, must come down, and if there's one bit of cycling I'd claim to be good at it's descending. But the east side of Tynron Brae is just insane, if possible worse than the west, twisting down vertiginously through a wood. It was pure mountain bike descending, arse out of the saddle and hung out over the back wheel, clinging onto the brake levers, easing the bike gently round tight turns on a dreadful, broken surface. What makes this worse, of course, was that I knew perfectly well that if we'd taken a short cut by the A 702 round the bottom of the hill not only would we have cut a few hundred yards off our distance, we would not have climbed more than five metres in the process. Sadists, these audax organisers. And so to Tynron, and then Penpont, and then powering down through the flat carse lands where the Shinnel Water flows into the Nith. Where it all began The smithy came up before I expected it. I'd been here before, of course, and had some memory of trees. I saw the little white building on the right of the road, and another about three hundred yards further on, and thought I recognised the second as our goal. But as we flashed past the first I recognised the plaques on the wall and shouted Woah! The birthplace of the bicycle is a strange sight. You'd expect... I'm not sure what you'd expect. In the United States I'm sure it would be a glitzy museum. In England, a carefully tended National Trust property, with tidy, over-restored forge tools, and pea-gravel outside. In Scotland it's a half-dilapidated, not very well maintained, firmly closed wee building at the side of the road, untended, unremarkable except for two old stone plaques and one newer painted plaque, already peeling. No exhibit, no gift shop, no theme park, no museum. A little, abandoned, deserted, locked building at the side of a side road. This? For an invention that changed the world? For a machine which gave people mobility? It's madness - that, or Scotland. There, and back again We were now halfway, not only at our turning point but also halfway in terms of distance. We crossed the Shinnel Water and turned back on a 'National Byway' following the west bank of the Nith, now in a bunch of about seven cyclists. The rain had stopped, and the cloud base was getting higher. Slowly, we started to dry out. On the flat Jon and I were going a little faster than the rest of the group, but navigation stops tended to keep the group together. My route sheet, in my mapcase on top of my bar bag, was still clearly legible, but I couldn't read it without digging my reading glasses out of the bag. Jon doesn't need reading glasses, but his route-sheet, despite its plastic bag, was now an oddly shaped wodge of papier mache. So at each junction we would stop, Jon would read my route sheet, and the rest of the pack would catch us up and follow our lead. But past Drumlanrig the road started to climb again, and gaps opened up. For a long while I was climbing alongside a man on a nice Airborne Carpe Diem, but at the top he started to pull away, joining a little group who had managed better on the climb. Jon had waited for me, so we, together with two guys on Thorns, formed a group for a while. Then, as the route started to descend again, they waved us past, and Jon and I were again by ourselves. Looking at the map the next section is actually quite long, but it isn't long in my memory. We were climbing, but only very slightly; what wind there was in the mainly wooded valley bottom was favourable; the weather was increasingly pleasant; and Jon is damned good company on a long cycle. I'd stripped off my rain jacket again now, and was just enjoying the ride. All good things come to an end at last, and as we came again over the spine of the Southern Uplands into Ayrshire the little quiet side-roads came to an end and we had to join the main A76. Which was less than wonderful. It's a fast main trunk road with quite a lot of traffic; as it crosses the border into Ayrshire it's running across the grain of some really quite hilly land so although it is overall descending there's a lot of climbing to do. And there was some spectacularly awful driving, particularly when an articulated tanker started to overtake Jon on a bend, met a car coming the other way, and pulled in sharply with Jon on his inside. When at last we reached New Cumnock it came as some relief. Among thy green braes New Cumnock again is in lands which Burns praised, and at New Cumnock you can still see why; it is still a rich and verdant landscape, despite the ravages of mineral extraction. The architecture of the town, courtesy National Coal Board 1950-1970, adds a piquant contrast. Or something. At the control when we arrived the group that got ahead of us at Drumlanrig were all there, as was the bent trike, but they left while we were getting our cards stamped and eating ham rolls, so again we hit the road alone. We had now completed more than three quarters of our journey and were following quiet minor roads around the north-west flank of the Kyle hills; the country was green and pleasant, and no more than gently rolling. We were both of us still going well, and I think, enjoying ourselves. Some blue was beginning to appear in the sky. The wind, which I had privately bet would drop as soon as we turned back west had, if anything, strengthened and was definitely helping us. We ate the last of my malt loaf and cycled on. Around us now were opencast sites, and the road twice crossed railway tracks. The ground was dropping west towards the sea. On one glorious swooping turn I missed a junction, and having overshot it by a mile the struggle back to it into the teeth of the wind showed us how much assistance we were getting. And then for no apparent good reason we were routed back down onto the A70, which was about as much fun as the A76. You are in a maze of twisty little lanes The truth is we were now both tired. Jon's bike was tired too, making a distinctive 'oil me now' sound. We'd reached ninety miles, and we kept making optimistic assessments of how far we had left to run. And so the last few miles of routing were... a little frustrating. I mean, I'm grateful to the organisers for keeping us as much as possible off the main roads. I appreciate the difficulty of routing tired audaxers at the end of the day through a conurbation. But navigating a route around the town across the grain of the land and the roads on little twisty lanes almost completely without signposts was not easy. And, I suddenly realised, I was on the edge of a sugar crash. I was getting to the point where I just didn't have energy to turn the pedals, when we were so close to the end - when we could see the sea, and actual sunlight glinting on it. I ate a couple of cereal bars and drank the last of my energy drink, and quickly felt better. Crossing the A713 just east of the hospital where I recovered after breaking my back, we passed the magic hundred miles. And then very quickly it was all over. We descended to the A77, crossed it, turned into Alloway, and quickly found the lane down by the old Brig o Doon, where Tam o Shanter's mare lost its tail. His hat was a hundred and two feet wide We signed in and had our brevet cards stamped at 6.44, after nine and three quarter hours on the road, eight hours and twenty minutes actually cycling, for an official distance of 102 miles, and a travelled distance of at most a couple of miles more. A century. The furthest I've ridden in one day in more than thirty years, and the second furthest I've ever ridden. Average speed 12.4 mph, against the 13 I had originally targeted. At the end I didn't feel especially tired, although I'm not sure how many miles I had left. I could have done some more; after a meal I could probably have done quite a bit more. Two hundred Km does not now look impossible. What's amazing is how close we must have been to other cyclists most of the day, considering how rarely we saw any. While we never saw the fast boys after the start, about twenty people were still packing up when we got to the finish. We were the last in apart from the two Thorns we'd left just north of Drumlanrig, and they walked in while we were still doing our end-of-ride paperwork. Happiness is a filthy bicycle I rode (or course) the Dolan. And while I bought the Dolan frame as an impulse purchase driven more by aesthetics than practicality, I've built it up and equipped it primarily as an audax bike. This was it's first real audax: how did it perform? Well, brilliantly. Apart from minor trouble with the front deraileur, no mechanical problems. Despite my ongoing uncertainty about the ultra-light SLR saddle (and other people's mockery of the 20mm tyres), no comfort problems, apart from slight stiffness in my lower back. Leaving the mudguards off proved, as the day turned out, to be a mistake - but not a critical one. Leaving the taillight on was a good decision - I had it on in flashing mode all the way from Straiton to Moniaive, and more than one person said it improved visibility. We didn't encounter any hill I couldn't manage with the double chainring, although Tynron Brae was definitely the limit and people with triples clearly benefitted there; in retrospect, it would have been worth fitting a 13-29 cassette for this occasion. The Dolan is sitting now, unbelievably filthy, in the dining room, still awaiting the clean I meant to give it today. But it has proved itself. It's not only a ridiculously beautiful bike; it's also one I can ride in comfort for any distance. And that's really all there is to say, apart from thanks to David Lawrie for organising, and to Marcus and particularly Jon for being such good companions on the ride. -- (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/ Morning had broken, and there was nothing left for us to do but pick up the pieces. |
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Simon Brooke came up with the following;:
snipped a well written and absorbing, interesting ride report. And that's really all there is to say, apart from thanks to David Lawrie for organising, and to Marcus and particularly Jon for being such good companions on the ride. Friends are what i cycle for a lot of the time. I've made more friends through cycling than I have in any other hobby. Must be a touch of masochism in all of us. -- Paul ... (8(|) Homer Rules ..... Doh !!! |
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Simon Brooke wrote:
Late, as in the Late Arthur Dent... Another brilliant report Simon. Despite the weather, the ride was enjoyable overall. Pass my best on to Marcus, hopefully next time you drag him out the sun will be shining. Jon |
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Simon Brooke wrote:
Late, as in the Late Arthur Dent I don't know why it happens this way. ... Great report, Simon. You can write when the mood is upon you. Well done for getting round. -- Dave... |
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