Edinburgh to Peebles - Europe to the United Kingom - CycleBlaze

July 19, 2025

Edinburgh to Peebles

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We are embarking on the last section of our Scottish adventure. This week we take a few days to ride through the Borders until we reach Hadrian’s wall, and then we will be in England and Wales for six weeks, assuming all goes as planned. 

In the last few days we have been working through some options for the last six or seven weeks of our trip and we have come up with a surprising (at least to Jill) plan. Dave suggested that we do a cruise. This is not something I would ever come up myself but I do have to say I am a little weary of the unrelenting travel logistics, and a cruise theoretically addresses that issue. All you have to do is get on the boat and they look after you. Had it been necessary to start from scratch  (I know nothing about cruising) I would not have been up for the planning, but we had a great head start. Close friends of ours, Mark and Elizabeth, had been raving about a new cruise line they really liked.  Explora had some suitable options in the European area with ports of call going to places I didn't think we could get to (realistically) on a bike. The most difficult part was figuring out when we wanted to, or even if we could, get back to Munich, drop our bikes off and then get to the appropriate port of departure in time. In the end we figured out a cruise Sept 29 to Oct 6 would fit the bill. Seven days was all I thought I could handle! As you can tell - I feel a little ambivalent about this. 

Our new plan: In early September we'll catch a ferry from Harwich in England which would take us to the Hook of Holland and from there ride for a couple of weeks through Holland and Belgium. After that we'll hop on a couple of trains, get back to Munich and park our bikes. We'd then fly to Rome whence the cruise leaves and then disembark in Barcelona, spending a few days in there. (Like Edinburgh, I've been to Barcelona several times while Dave has yet to go there. I've been somewhat ambiguous about going back. And like Edinburgh, there are hoards of tourists, a situation which never excites me. On the other hand, I'd love to share and show off this beautiful city with Dave.)

This gave us an extra week so we decided to fly to Portugal, rent a car and see some of the country. Neither of us has been to Portugal and getting our bikes there seems too much, so this was a great chance for us to visit it.

 Mark and Elizabeth put us in touch with their cruise travel agent and she did an amazing job working through the issues to get us booked. Apparently, there are many little tricks and issues to booking a cruise, of which I was clueles. Anyway, its all booked and now I am madly working on all the resulting travel issues this has created: trains, ferries, flights. Did I say something about being free from travel logistics?!

The upshot of all this is that we are on our bikes for another two months, and are pretty excited to explore England and Wales. 

Today we planned to get on the road by 11 am. We had a timed entry ticket to visit the Rosslyn Chapel which is 14 km south of Edinburgh. Just as we were loading our bikes, we met a couple from outside Toronto, Debbie and Jim, and wound up having a long chat with them. They were over here because their daughter was graduating with her PhD from Lancaster University. They reported they were not travelers so it was a big deal for them to do the trip (and they were somewhat astonished by what we were doing). They have a 170 acre farm  back in Ontario, and as a second career Debbie became a minister. They also have an 11 year-old retriever and grandchildren, so there is a lot keeping them in Canada. Nevertheless, we extolled the wonders of travel!

Debbie and Jim from Ontario, newbie-ish travelers, but willing!
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We rode out of Edinburgh about 11:30 having really enjoyed our hotel.

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Given that our midpoint stop today was Rosslyn Chapel, it was handy that there is a new cycle route between Edinburgh and Rosslyn Chapel. The ride was well-marked and fun the whole way; a mix of bike trails, small roads, busier roads with marked cycle trails, and we rode through suburbs of Edinburgh, parks, and a few small villages before we arrived in Roslin (the village).

On the way to Roslin and Rosslyn Chapel.
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The Chapel, constructed originally in 1456, by William St. Clair, achieved renewed fame when Dan Brown used it in his bestselling novel  “The DaVinci Code”  and then it was used as a location for the film adaption starring Tom Hanks. Just as with the locations used to film Outlander, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones, this put Rosslyn Chapel on the modern tourist map. Crazy. 

Not being a film junkie I only came across it when I was trying to figure out a cycle route from Edinburgh to England; a Scottish cycle touring company had published a ride through the Borders, and mentioned Rosslyn Chapel as a sight to see. I incorporated some of the suggestions from this tour into our route, including the Chapel. 

As I mentioned yesterday, Scottish history is finally starting to gel for us after a month. We learned at the Chapel that the original ancestor of the Earl who built Rosslyn Chapel, was William “the Seemly” St. Clair. William the Seemly was famous for having escorted Margaret from Hungary over to Scotland to marry Malcom in 1070.  This was the same King Malcolm and Queen Margaret we learned about at the Dunferline Museum and Library a few days prior. Turns out the royal couple is buried at Dunferline Abbey. Seemly’s descendant, built the Chapel in 1456, and it was a collegiate chapel, designed for education. As such the ornate stone carvings in the interior tell all sorts of stories. We got a talk in the Chapel as part of our ticket entry and the guide told as a few of these - not all were religious or biblical, but most were. 

Rosslyn Chapel
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The interior of the Chapel is intimate, stunning and original and unfortunately photography is not allowed - Dave took this one shot from outside looking in. 

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The interior is filled with light, ornate columns of stonework, and gorgeous stained glass windows (the latter from the Victorian era when the Chapel was restored). 

After 1560 the Chapel fell into disuse because of the Protestant Reformation and Henry VIII’s “rough wooing” of the Catholic Church in England and Scotland. (I think that means he called it a seduction but it was really a rape). The Chapel was sacked, and the altars destroyed. The Chapel was used by Oliver Cromwell to stable his horses when his troops passed through in 1650 to attack Rosslyn Castle. The Chapel took on an evocative mysterious air in its abandoned state, with ivy and plants growing inside the building and up the interior walls, becoming a subject for poets and writers. 

In 1842 Queen Victoria visited and suggested the Chapel should be restored, thus began a long process of restoration, continuing to this day. It was rededicated by the church in 1862 and services held there for the first time in over 250 years. 

Afterwards we rode into the village and split a mature cheddar and tomato ciabatta at Dolly’s tearoom. (Mature cheddar is definitely the cheese of choice in Scotland). Dolly’s Tearoom is named after Roslin’s second claim to fame: home to the Roslin institute that cloned Dolly the Sheep in 1996, a scientific breakthrough that led to increased abilities for stem cell research.  The cells used to clone Dolly came from a mammary gland, so the scientists named her after Dolly Parton!

Dolly
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The ride after lunch wasn’t as bucolic. For about 12 km the ride was on the busy A707, lots of traffic and no shoulder. We pulled over when we could to let traffic by.  About 7 km from our destination we got on a bike trail and had a quieter ride into Peebles, which turned out to be a hopping town on a Friday night.

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The Tontine (Dave: Not Tatooine) Hotel, reputedly built by French prisoners in 1808, is an old classic Scottish hotel, a staple of our riding here. As Dave reports, the description by any front desk clerk in Scotland to get to our room is always, inevitably, the same:  “take the first flight of stairs, walk all the way to the back of the hall, take the second flight of stairs and then walk all the way to the back of that hall,” all the while hauling two panniers each, bike batteries, and water bottles. It’s just Murphy’s Law with us that we get the room on the upper floor at the very end of the hall and there is never a lift. Dave thinks it’s because I book through booking.com and there is some truth to that - just not the whole truth. I feel because I already ask for bike storage and a bathtub I don’t want to add to my list of requests/demands, and I am sure they keep the lower placed rooms for people with mobility issues or those that request a lower floor.

The room was fine, but basic and warm. Truth to tell, these 3* hotel rooms are fine, but a bit shabby and worn. Dave did his thing opening all the windows and running the fan to get a good cross breeze. Unfortunately, we had a drunk guy at 3:30 am in the street raising a fuss, which wasn’t great when your windows need to be opened to keep cool. 

Door at the top of the stairs and end of the hall, with a scenic mattress in the hall
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Our bike shed for the night
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That night we ate at Coltman’s Kitchen which was really good and original. Scottish food has continued to impress us.

Today's ride: 42 km (26 miles)
Total: 2,794 km (1,735 miles)

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Steve Miller/GrampiesYour logistics for the cruise, a project that was supposed to sidestep logistics, are exciting but a bit mind boggling. I know this because I tried to recite the plan to Dodie, just after reading it, and got muddled. But it goes through some of our favourite areas and will be fun to follow.

About the rooms at the end of the corridors - yes, we find this too. When I am looking at the numbers on the doors, trying to find our spot, I can almost always assume that through Booking we got the one way down at the end!

About Rosslyn Chapel, surprising that neither you nor apparently they mentioned the Da Vinci code?
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