Glasgow to Edin- burgh by train takes less than hour. It's an uneventful kind of journey – fast, anonymous and insulated – a four-times-an-hour service that gets you from G to E without too much interference from what's in between. But there is another way of doing the trip – cycling along the Forth and Clyde then the Union canal, more than 60 miles of traffic-free towpath.
Our seven and nine-year-old boys were up for the challenge, so we set off from downtown Glasgow one Saturday morning to follow the leafy banks of the Kelvin for a couple of miles. That brought us to the only canal T-junction in Scotland, policed by
the first of many families of swan we were to meet along the way.
The tower blocks disappeared behind us as we zipped along enjoying the complete lack of hills and generous following wind. Before we knew it, we had arrived at the Stable Inn outside Kirkintilloch, our scheduled lunch stop – yet it wasn't even time for morning tea. Help was at hand in the shape of the gloriously named "Craft Daft on a Raft", an old barge tied up at a new mooring. Slightly off message, the boys picked out the largest plaster casts available (Porsche 993s they tell me) and spent the next two hours lovingly giving them customised paint jobs while their parents enjoyed an undisturbed couple of hours with the papers.
After lunch, our panniers bulging with bubble-wrapped performance cars, we followed the canal as it undulated through broad sweeps of woodland, giving us grandstand views of the Campsies and fleeting glimpses of downy ducklings, until we arrived, slightly weary-legged, at our B&B in the canal-side town of Twechar.
The next morning we were held up by the need to watch the lifting bridge do its thing, by good-humoured charity walkers, then by canal men pressing the boys into service to help open and shut the lock gates.
The Falkirk Wheel came as a surprise, a sudden intrusion of infrastructure and tourism into our bucolic journey. It's also a dramatic sculptural statement on the landscape, measuring up the difference in height between the Forth and Clyde Canal, which continues on a few miles to Grangemouth, and the start of the Union Canal with Edinburgh the prize at the far end.
However, it didn't seem likely that we could take our bikes on the tour barges that provide the wheel's main traffic, so we puffed up the brae, making use of our gears for a change.
No sooner does the Union Canal begin, than you are plunged into the dripping darkness of the Falkirk Tunnel, 631m of wheeling your bike along while wondering if you are about to go for a swim and if the rock-hewn roof will hold.
Safely back in the sunshine, we pedalled on, chased by birdsong and butterflies, until we suffered our first puncture, conveniently right opposite Linlithgow Union Canal Society tea rooms. Thirsts quenched and puncture mended, we recharged our batteries with a curry and slept the sleep of the just, oblivious to the rowdy quiz going on in the hotel bar downstairs.
The following day was just drizzly enough for us to get our waterproofs out, but before long it eased off and the sun came out to light up the West Lothian bings
Soon enough we were back into woodland, long quiet stretches of canal with green-roofed tunnels punctuated by bridges where we dinged our bells and hoped no-one was coming the other way. At Ratho we stopped at the climbing centre to giggle at the adventurers dangling from the roof and wishing the boys were a few inches taller so they could dangle too. As compensation, we put on a burst of pace, and got ourselves to the outskirts of Edinburgh, announced from a distance by the grumbling rumble of the city bypass. The reward was a visit to the Sighthill Aston Martin and Rolls-Royce showrooms so the boys could put the salesmen through their paces. Luckily with a Porsche each already, there was no need to make another purchase.
Back on the canal we passed along the newly recreated but hard-edged sections at Wester Hailes. As the banks became gradually leafier we enjoyed the blissful slickness of our first taste of Tarmac-surfaced towpath, now busy with dogs and pushchairs, the canal alive with rowers. Tenements crowded in on either side, along with new-build apartments complete with private wharves, until all of a sudden we had reached the end of the line, modern high-rise offices, a plate glass café and a family of bronze swans in the heart of Edinburgh.
We had travelled about 65 miles over three days, just about right for little legs and frequent stops for refuelling. Though we've made the journey many times by train, going by bicycle gave us a much greater sense of the geographical connection between Scotland's two great cities, a physical link traced out first by the Roman wall, then by canals and railway. But it's also a linking of towns and communities, a blurring of edges to form a chain of connection, a unity you don't quite get the hang of going any other way. sm
