Day Thirty Six

Monday 19 July – Gretna Green to Lockerbie.

I escaped unwed from Gretna Green. Today was to be a day of road walking, a means to an end (of which more tomorrow). I was counting on the National Cycle Network to find me some safe and quiet roads, and it did not disappoint.

I needed to travel North, but first I headed West along the Annan Road, formerly the main road to Stranraer but now superseded by the super-highway generating a lot of noise just over the hedge. But soon I turned North on to a very quiet lane, which I had mostly to myself. Single track roads with passing places are often a good bet for walking – motorists tend to be cautious, and grateful if you stand aside for them (of course, you have to be ready to dive into the hedge if necessary!). Across the fields, and across Kirtle Water, I could catch the occasional sight of motorway traffic through the trees. Rather more appealingly, behind me there were glimpses of the Lakeland Fells, across the Solway, caught by occasional shafts of sunlight on this otherwise gloomy day.

So far, there had only been a few spots of rain. After about four miles of lanes, the Cycle Network turned right (East) towards the motorway, and I meekly followed it. Crossing Kirtle Water, I turned North on what used to be the A74, now relegated by the building of the A74(M) to the lowly status of the B Very-long-number. The powers that be have taken the opportunity to accommodate cyclists (and me) by painting white lines delineating reasonably wide lanes either side of the road. Obviously a stripe of paint is no guarantee of safety, but I found that they were left alone by drivers, who tend to stick to the centre line. One car driver, pulling in from a side road, registered the cycle lane (and probably noticed me) and made the car appear to jump sideways into the middle of the road. It was a good trick.

Kirtlebridge is a linear village with nothing to detain a traveller.

I felt that I was now following one of three ribbons on a maypole as the motorway, the main railway line and the old main road crossed and re-crossed one another. All that was missing was the little girls with the sticky-out skirts plaiting and unplaiting the ribbons. Just as well they hadn’t turned up – it was becoming more of a Goretex than a gingham day.

I plodded on through pleasant but unexciting countryside. There is little sense of this transport corridor being constrained by the landscape – no gorges through which everything squeezes or big hills round which road and rail swing. The land was gently rolling.

Ecclefechan’s claim to fame is as the birthplace of Thomas Carlyle, prolific and widely unread historian and essayist, whose admiration for strong leaders went out of fashion when fascism supplied too many of them in the 20th Century. He was born (in 1795) in a modest cottage by a well-tamed stream near the middle of the village. So keen was he to get a good education that he walked the 80 miles to Edinburgh University. He spent a great part of his career a bit South of here, in Chelsea, but his body was brought back home in 1881 to be buried in the parish churchyard. Carlyle’s nephew erected a memorial statue which broods by the roadside a little way out of the village.

Had the weather been better, I might have been tempted to go exploring, “joining the dots” along farm tracks as a break from the road. But burns would have to be forded, and a lot of rain had fallen, so I stuck to the road. As on the day before, the rain started in earnest at midday and continued fitfully for about 45 minutes, but today that was just the warm-up. A little after 2 o’clock hard, driving rain began, and didn’t let up before I reached Lockerbie two hours later (continuing, indeed, far into the evening).

The very nice man at the b&b didn’t turn a hair when I stood dripping on his front doormat. He had just dealt with two soggy cyclists, and he whisked away my wet clothing and generally made me feel welcome.

Lockerbie was probably best known as a station on the railway and a stop-off on the main road until a jumbo jet crashed and put the town on the map in a most unwelcome fashion. This very week Lockerbie’s name was being bandied about by US Senators who were seeking to link BP (already in the dock over the disastrous oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico) with the early release of the only man convicted of planting a bomb on the plane.