Riding with a record breaker
Slipping the shackles of civilisation and disappearing into the Scottish wilderness is taking longer than expected.
We hadn’t anticipated the predatory pay and display machines in Callander’s riverside car park not accepting cards nor giving change. Neither did we plan on getting stuck behind a timber lorry on the high street, holding our breath in a cloud of exhaust fumes while waiting for the lights to change.
Finally they do, and we are bidden to splutter off past a quaint row of boutique cafes and shop windows dressed in tartan and shortbread, then make a left down a residential street of parked cars and neatly trimmed lawns. At the end is a metal gate, on the other side a tarmacked, shared use footpath bordered by hedges and the fences of suburban back gardens. We close the gate behind us and ride on, the sounds from the busy A84 gradually muffled by the deepening foliage, only then to encounter a second, this time locked, gate that requires us to wrestle our bikes over it. Suburbia is determined to keep us in its immaculately manicured grip for as long as possible.
Eventually the back gardens are replaced by fields, the hum of traffic by birdsong, the smooth tarmac by loose gravel. We break out onto a grassy knoll giving views of the Ochil Hills in the distance.
The path turns
