Friday 26 June 2009 - Lockerbie to Kendal

Lockerbie - Carlisle - Penrith - Shap - Kendal

After breakfast in the spacious dining room, while loading our bikes we chatted to a group of fellow guests who were cycling LEJOG. Most if not all of them were older than me and Paul, and they were clearly experienced cyclists with a variety of bikes, some of even earlier vintage than our Raleighs. They were Geordies and bemoaned the fact that their native toon was too far off route to make an overnight stop at home feasible. They weren’t looking forward to their day’s route which lay between Glasgow and Edinburgh on busy roads.
When we checked out of the hotel, the headlines of a tabloid on the desk grabbed our attention: “JACKO DEAD”. I will probably never own a Michael Jackson album, but he was undoubtedly a truly great entertainer and I salute him for his originality.
For once we had an easy start to the day. Our route between Lockerbie and Carlisle crossed one of the few consistently flat tracts of land we encountered during the ride, straddling as it did the inlet of the Solway Firth. Our first stop was at Ecclefechan where I bought Vaseline to soothe my cracked, bleeding lips, ravaged by the wind and sun. A few miles further on we reached Gretna and its mandatory photostops of the old blacksmith’s shop and the border with England.
At the bridge marking the border, we met a young JOGLEist who had come via Arran. Once he had described the unavoidable horrors of all possible ways to get from the ferry point of Ardrossan to our current position, I realised that Arran, my preferred route, wouldn’t have been an easy option. He obliged us by taking our photos by the border sign and rode with us for a while along a blissful minor road off the B7076 which ran by the side of the M6 all the way to the northern end of Carlisle where it met the A7.
We rode along the busy A7 for a few hundred metres past extensive industrial estates before stopping at a pub and sitting in the shade with ice cold Cokes. We found our way through Carlisle easily enough, the A7 becoming the A6 in the centre of the town, and began to encounter hillier terrain as we headed through the outskirts, continuing to the Golden Fleece Roundabout over the M6 where we stopped.
I had been carrying front as well as rear panniers since we set out from Derby, but had soon realised that I could have accommodated all my luggage in the two rear ones and that the front panniers were therefore superfluous. I put up with the needlessly increased wind resistance until this point, where I finally decided to repack my bags and bungee strap the empty front ones to the rear rack.
As we left the roundabout, a sign warned of the dangers of the ensuing stretch of the A6 and quoted its toll of victims over the past year. The road, of Roman origin, is straight and crosses undulating ground, resulting in many blind summits and hidden dips, with predictable results for reckless motorists and those unfortunate enough to be in their way. It’s actually fairly safe for cyclists, as it’s not too busy and you’re visible from afar on the long straights.
The road sweeps up and down along a ridge with wide views of the surrounding hills and moors. At one point I was overtaken on one of the uphill grinds by a couple of guys who I soon caught up with when I found them talking to Paul and John at a lay-by at the top of the rise. They were fellow JOGLEers. They went on their way and we proceeded through Low Hesket, High Hesket, Thiefside and Plumpton, before dropping down into Penrith whose narrow, busy streets we circled a couple of times before locating a suitable café for coffee, sandwiches and cake. As we sat outside the café, I thought of the vast extent of the Brythonic language in days of yore and the Cumbric origin of the name Penrith, cognate as it is with Pen Rhudd in literary Welsh, meaning Red Hill which is consistent with the local sandstone topography.
The exit from Penrith is guarded by the formidable Kemplay Bank Roundabout, an enormous structure out of all proportion to the rather diminutive town. It was a terrifying, whirling mass of metal, but Paul and John, seemingly indifferent to traffic, plunged straight in without batting an eyelid between them and were out the other end a few seconds later. I however, fearful of entering the maelstrom, kept bearing left and picking my way gingerly across the exit and entrance roads, a lengthy process given the absence of gaps in the traffic.
The A6 then climbs steeply to Clifton before gaining height more gradually in a series of gentle steps. The road crosses the M6 several times, with superb views east to the Pennines and west to the Lake District, passing through Hackthorpe and Sapbeck Gate before reaching Shap. The section north of the village has one of Britain’s few remaining “suicide lanes”, a centre carriageway over which traffic travelling in neither direction has priority. Most of these have now been phased out to reduce the number of inevitable head-on collisions, but now that the A6 is no longer the main north-south route, it is presumably considered to be quiet enough for the risk of such accidents to be negligible.
The ascent to Shap summit at 1344 feet above sea level was easier than I had expected. In my father’s vivid accounts of his experiences as a trucker in the 1950s, he would often describe the lines of lorries parked up in Shap village during periods of bad winter weather when the A6 was impassable. The local economy was badly damaged by the building of the M6, after which nobody got stuck in Shap any more and the B&Bs all folded.
Fortunately it wasn’t winter, it was late June and we were having something of a heat wave. I stopped to rest and take a few photos at the summit before happily commencing the longed-for descent with a steep, exhilarating drop from this eastern spur of the Lakeland fells to a lay-by where I met Paul and John. From there we continued to coast downhill virtually all the way to Kendal, completing a very enjoyable day’s cycling. Our B&B was at the south end of town on our exit road.
We rounded off the day with an excellent Chinese meal and a couple of lagers at a restaurant close to the B&B. We were there until well past their closing time of 10pm, but the staff were very welcoming and made no attempt to hurry us.