Beware of tracks
Pulling on cold, soaking wet clothes at 6 am is never going to be fun and it wasn’t this morning. Kate and I have done it before quite a few times when on similar trips. The fact that I was also in a cold and dewy tent added no further joy. Tea. Porridge. Strike camp. Go. It is a routine that I am used to now and it takes me about 90 minutes without rushing. Today, I was cycling round what you might call the ‘hump-back’ of Britain. (If you imagine the UK as someone sitting. Legs as Cornwall and Scotland as the head) This means coastal route so my hopes were high for relatively flat riding. I was soon on the coast again, this time south of Edinburgh and heading for England. If I reach England, that will surely be a big milestone on the ride. The sun was out, roads were quiet and the wind wasn’t unhelpful. When a Greggs hove into view, I made my first stop. I entered the shop to find a woman standing behind the counter waiting for a customer. No one else was there. I greeted her brightly – nothing. I asked for a coffee and decided to see if Greggs sausage rolls were any better than the one offered to me at Lairg. I had the impression that I was putting the woman out, by coming in and asking to buy things and that things would have been far more satisfactory if I hadn’t bothered. She performed all duties with lightening speed and dispatched me. When I re entered the shop three minutes later because I had forgotten to add milk to my coffee, I didn’t even dare look at her for fear of what that might have caused.
I came back out and thought how nice it would be if there was a view of the sea where I was, I wandered round the corner and there was a bench in a little sun trap with a great big window of a hole cut into the wall to reveal the sea. I sat and enjoyed my coffee. The sausage roll was pretty good too.
My route cut off the very top bit of the coastal bulge and took what was probably a disused rail track to Haddington and East Linton before dumping me back at the coast at Dunbar. The track was hard to locate at first as is often the case and a chap walking his dog asked me where I was heading. Once he learned that I was ultimately cycling to Harrogate, he scratched his head and started trying to figure out the best way to Harrogate from there. This often happens. I have now learnt to very quickly interject in such situations and explain that I really do have to follow my Sat Nav pretty faithfully rather than take the road that goes past Derek and Joan’s. Tracks always make me a bit nervous because you never quite know what they will be like. This one was good and I continued to eat up the miles. Arriving at Dunbar, I felt the need to eat up a scone as well. I stopped in the middle of a pleasant high street and, as I am accustomed to now doing, asked the first person who passed, where a good coffee shop was. The bloke I asked looked a bit unapproachable but after glowering for a moment, he said that the best coffee in town was right beside me and insisted on holding a door open which lead down a passage telling me that opening a door at the other end would bring me to a courtyard where I could leave my bike and a door leading into the coffee shop, He was as good as his word. Are the salt police on the prowl more vigilantly these days? This was yet another example of an under-salted scone. I noticed a wry smile from the owner as he caught me adding salt from the salt mill on the table.
Leaving Dunbar, I also left the coast which meant an inevitable increase in hills. There were a lot of ‘em. If you cycle, you may be aware of the sort of road that seems to make a bee-line for the highest piece of land. When it reaches the top, it thinks, Ooh look! There’s a higher bit still over there, let’s go to the top of that. And so on. You find yourself constantly thinking, why couldn’t we go round this hill? I visited countless phone masts, water towers and wind turbine sites. The roads made sure that I was able to admire all these up close…
I reached a junction and saw a great big ‘Welcome to Scotland’ sign on a road to my right. So where was the England sign? Ah yes. There it is. An apologetic bit of brickwork hugging the ground and concealed behind long grass. I had arrived in good old, understated England.
England, on this side of the country means Berwick upon Tweed. A coffee and a sticky bun later, I was heading south in what was a very strong wind. Thankfully it was more helpful than unhelpful. This should have meant I was set fair. But I was nearly stopped in my tracks. And I mean tracks. (See pics) This is part of route 1 of the national cycle network! I couldn’t believe it. They went from very coarse gravel, to deep ruts, to little lines of earth to nothing. This was real mountain bike country. Not heavily laden road bike. Gates, little bridges across extra marshy bits and barriers to deter motorbikes were all on the menu. It felt as remote as Scotland with no signs of life for many miles. At one point, a bloke on an electric bike went past me in the opposite direction. The wind must have been so awful for him that I actually felt sorry for him, despite his power assistance.
I reached Holy Island where the track turned inland. And there was a campsite which I had checked out earlier and claimed to be full. I was so tired that I cycled straight in anyway and decided to put on my most imploring face to see if it got me anywhere. It did. The girl at reception took pity and found an extra pitch. Putting the tent up on the site which was very exposed must have looked like something from a Laurel and Hardy sketch.
It was a posh site, so I ended the day sat in the bar area eating twice cooked chips with a cup of tea. I turned down the offer of truffle oil chips. It didn’t seem right, dressed in smelly licra…
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