I am staying the night in the cottage where Robert Burns’ mother, Agnes Broun, was born in 1732. It has been somewhat modernised inside and makes a lovely little self-contained unit that I have all to myself. My bike is outside my door, sheltered under a parasol. I have a fridge full of goodies and, […]
Category: 11 Campbeltown to Lindisfarne
Campbelltown, Argyll & Bute to Lindisfarne, Northumberland
I have always thought it would be fun to cycle the length of the River Tweed. It flows roughly west to east for 97 miles, rising in Scotland, then forming the border with England, and finally emptying into the North Sea at Berwick, a fully English river. I have long had in mind a ride […]
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Maps 70, 71 & 72
Today was the kind of day I imagine I will have quite a few more of before this trip is done. I covered something like 96 miles and 3 whole maps and followed a more or less straight line from west to east. I started out in Ardrossan, on the Ayrshire coast, and reached Cardrona, […]
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Map 69 – Arran
Among the 204 OS Landranger maps of Britain, there are a few that contain a single island that fits beautifully into a 40km by 40km square: the Isle of Wight, for example, or Anglesey, or the Isle of Man; all of which are still to come in this adventure. So far we have seen how […]
Last night’s rain in Campbeltown kept me confined to barracks; but I awoke to a dry, if rather cloudy, morning so I made an early start (for me, at any rate – any day when I am cycling before 8am is early). I was able to cross the Kintyre peninsula to the west coast and […]
Three times a week (but not on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday) a Calmac car ferry sails from Ardrossan, the main port for Arran, to Campbeltown, the remote town that sits at the bottom of the long north-south Kintyre peninsula. By boat it is a journey of 40 miles, around the bottom of Arran and beyond, […]