A 6.30am start from Peebles to try and find the alternative route via The Southern Upland Way over the Border Hills and link up with the Old Drove Road to Gypsy Glen and Peebles again
.
All went well to begin with and we found the Southern Upland Way just after we'd passed Traquair, all was looking good (so far)
Barrie found the going tough on his non e-bike
The climbing seemed to be never ending, I was ok on the e-bike and had quite a few stops to admire the view and photograph Barrie suffering!
This was where it all went wrong as we went up this climb which is a lot steeper than it looks in the photo when we should have gone round the track at bottom right hand side and up a forest fire road
Anyway the views were tremendous and I managed most of it on the e-bike although it was in a high assist mode and I was eating up battery power quite quickly
We thought when we reached this telecommunication tower we'd see where we were....unfortunately we found we hadn't a clue and every hill looked more or less the same, it's easy to see how you could become lost if it became foggy
.
After biking and pushing through semi boggy heathery terrain we at last caught sight of a track in the valley below that was bound to lead back to Peebles and began to make our way down to it by way of sheep tracks, the last 500 feet or so was as steep as I've gone down and the brake discs could have fried an egg by the time we reached the bottom!
The track crossed a small river about six times, and the river bed was covered in loose boulders making things tricky at times
Here's Barrie going....
going...
and gone!
Though he managed somehow to avoid falling into the water, escaping with one wet foot!
We got back to the car at Peebles after 4.5 hours never having managed to find the link to Gypsy Glen but had an epic trip in fabulous weather (for a change) and thinking, weather permitting of having another go maybe next week but only after consulting the map a bit more closely!
No comments:
Post a Comment