July 14, 2015
Dunbar, Scotland: The magic of Lindisfarne
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KAREN's happy. A chap called John Muir was born in Dunbar. Indeed, the signs through town point to his cottage. We'd never heard of him but he's big news in America. Started off the national parks, apparently (and I can't emphasise enough my surprise at the pronunciation of Yosemite...)
His birthplace is at one end of the main street through an otherwise grey but not unpleasant town. It lies at the end of a long road on which the marked bike lane is actually narrower than the painted cyclist sign that denotes it. There's some evidence of the ridicule that this useless measure attracted because the cyclists have since been painted out. Only to be revealed again by passing tyres.
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We were up early this morning. The rain had gone but the sky was still heavy and the wind blew. We were up early for two reasons. The first was that we wanted to ride the long causeway to Lindisfarne before the car people arrived and spoiled the solitude. And the second is that the tide floods the causeway twice a day. Get it wrong and you're stuck at one end or the other until it goes down again. Or get it badly wrong and you sit it out in the elevated wooden huts built for just that.
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The road was still damp as we rode past rock pools, slimy seaweed and uncaring sea birds. The only traffic was from locals and the occasional van marked with the names of restaurants or contractors. Everything was closed and that suited us fine.
We rode the earth path out to the castle under the disapproving eyes of dog-walkers used to having it to themselves. The castle was built as a fortress - even now there's what look like tank traps along the shore, souvenirs of a later conflict - and was eventually bought by the founder of Country Life.
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Anyone with the cash to buy a castle probably has enough left over for the internal decoration. And internal decoration there was in a big way, because the man commissioned to do it was Edwin Lutyens. Who, among other things, designed Trafalgar Square in London and almost all New Delhi in India.
Beyond the castle, surrounded by the droppings of uncaring sheep, rounded huts had been designed like upturned cobles, the local traditional fishing boats.
A lot of off-road riding took us to Berwick. If for nothing else, the place is famous for still fighting the Crimean war until the 1970s. I should point out that, for everyone else, the war ended in 1856.
The problem was that Berwick had so often moved from England to Scotland and then back again, as wars shifted the border, that it acquired an independent status of its own. It was in neither England nor Scotland. It was just Berwick.
This satisfied a local problem but the people who wrote the treaty to end the Crimean war against Russia overlooked it. England and Scotland were named but not Berwick. In the 1970s, therefore, Berwick-upon-Tweed glared in defiance at Leonid Brezhnev and defied him to attack.
Brezhnev never did. And some time in the the otherwise gloomy decade of the 1970s, the city's mayor appears to have signed a peace treaty with the visiting Soviet ambassador.
There are, inevitably, certain doubts about this story. But it's too good not to be true, isn't it?
The view over Berwick from our clifftop path was spectacular. It stretched out and it beckoned us for coffee and sticky buns.
Beyond there our route went inland, to avoid the main road north. Where much of the morning we had the genial but slow progress of coastal trails, now we had sharp hills, a brisk wind and the creeping fear that we'd never get there. Two Germans pushing their bikes had the same worry.
"It's not easy," the round-faced, grey-haired man sighed as his wife looked on in resignation.
No, it wasn't.
Today's ride: 104 km (65 miles)
Total: 2,003 km (1,244 miles)
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