The old road

Our glen was richer in the iron age than it's ever been since, even at the height of the eighteenth century smuggling boom. And it was in the iron age that the old road was built up by glenhead and over the ridge, under the shadow of the enormous iron age fort on Dungairy. The romans, of course, later built their road round the end of the ridge by Gelston, and the Anglian settlements followed the line of that road. But the old road was still the main route into the glen in the memory of people still living. It's a lot shorter; and when people travelled on their own feet or behind plodding hooves, that's what mattered.

But in the second world war the army developed - and, critically, tarmaced - the cistercians' sheep road road, to take tanks in and out of their new testing range above the cistercians ruinous abbey at Dundrennan. And motor traffic followed the tarmaced road, because it was faster. Four miles to the east, a motor road cuts through a gap in the ridge, through the doach between Potterland Hill and Douganhill; six miles to the west a tarmaced singletrack links across the low end of the ridge.

So the old road has sunk back into the landscape. It's still a good road, well engineered, avoiding swamps and hollows, built, for the most part, of well graded, well compacted stone. And because it's no longer even of agricultural significance, the huge heavy modern tractors which rip great holes in other unmetalled roads locally have never hurt it. It's a road used now by the shepherds on their quadbikes, by the horse folk out exercising, and by walkers in the summer.

But a cross bike, now. This is a road for a cross bike.

On Friday, working from home, I took an hour out over lunch and rode north up the old road, swinging west the other side of the ridge to come back by Marks and the long blast down from Hazelfield. Yesterday...

I got hubs and rims for Christmas. Record hubs, and DT Swiss rims. They're meant to be my audax wheels. They still don't have their own cassette, and I wasn't going to use them until the salt was off the roads. But it was a glorious day yesterday, bright and, in the sunshine, warm... I swapped the 13/26 cassette off my commuting wheels, and put a spair set of cross tyres on them. I went for a ride with a friend who has been a great cyclist but who is now very ill, and has just been told he'll never ride competitively again. It was a good run; we had a good ride, and a good blether. And at the end of it I left him at his house in Castle Douglas, which is north of the ridge. It didn't take much thinking about how to get home, out over the little lumpy road to Rhonehouse, and from their to Shielahill, and then onto the old road, climbing up past Nether Linkens and out onto the high, quiet hill.

And there, a car. I pulled over to the side of the track to allow it to pass, but it stopped.

"Can I get to Dumfries this way?"

I boggled a little. "Well," I said, "ye could dae. Whaur have ye come frae?"

"Kirkcudbright." I boggled some more. What error of map reading had directed him off the modern, well signed highways onto this little forgotten thread of a road that now links nowhere with nowhere in particular? I shrugged, and gave him careful directions through the rats' nest of little roads north of the ridge, right by Shielahill, straight on through Gelston, right at Hardhills Smiddy by Buittle Kirk, left at Craignair. And then we parted, and I rode on over the ridge.

It's twenty years since I rode on wheels I built; twenty years since my custom built Carlton was stolen from Lancaster. They're not as pretty, or as light, or, probably, as strong as a pair of Mavics I could have bought for the same money, but... I built them. I more than built them, I chose all the parts, I trued them with care. They aren't the radical build I first conceived, radial on the front, half radial on the rear; instead, they're boring two-cross. But I made them; and bucketing off the ridge into the narrow, shaded top end of the glen on a two thousand year old road, they felt good. After all, if they stand up to this treatment, a summer's audax cannot hurt them.

Bizarrely, while the road on the north side had been in sunlight and it had been actually warm, here on the south side rolling down towards the sea there was white frost right across the road, and the puddles were milky with ice. To ride it at speed was not sensible. But... The thing is, from the ridge down to the village is four and a half kilometres, and if you let the bike run you scarcely have to turn a pedal. So I let the bike run. In the shadow of the glen, in the cool of the afternoon, in the blasting wind of my speed, in my thin lycra shorts, it was freezing. But it was a blast, watching the familiar landscape roll by crispcut in the still cold air.

And then up by the school, left down main street, brake to a halt in the square, indoors for hot coffee and a warm shower.

Life doesn't get much better.