Great rides: A spot of bothying

It is dark. Really dark. You have pedalled along a disused railway track, far away from any road, never mind civilisation. Your heartbeat quickens as you turn off the path and descend into the trees along a narrow track.

The forest throws back a forbidding blackness as an affront to your puny light. At the end of the track is a near-derelict stone hut, its silhouette against the night sky. Wait! There is a sound coming from inside. You are not alone.

Tentatively, you push the creaking door. There is a man. With an axe. A scene like this in a film would have any survivors running and screaming through the woods, Blair Witch-style. But we’re actually pleased to see the axe-wielding stranger.

It’s a freezing cold night at the end of October, and David, who is actually a cheerful paramedic, has been busy chopping a small mountain of logs and firing up the stove to make Leyburnsfoot Bothy warm and cosy for him and his pal Kieran – and for anyone else who might happen to seek shelter from the elements.

This is the ‘bothy code’ and David is an excellent ambassador.

It’s our first time bothying. In spring I’d fallen into conversation with Brian who, at almost 70, still spends three weeks each April covering hundreds of kilometres across Scotland. “You should try the bothies”, he said. “Unlike a lot of things in Scotland these days, they’re free.”

Spring turned to summer, then the leaves began to fall. It was late October before I could get around to organising a short half-term trip with my son, Jacob.

While camping was still just about an option, the promise of a dry place to sleep, an actual roof, and smoke curling from the chimney of a stone cottage in a forest clearing began to take on a certain romance.

A sky full of stars

Leyburnsfoot Bothy is near Riccarton Junction, a former station on the disused Waverley Route between Edinburgh and Carlisle. To get to it, we left Newcastle and followed part of the Reivers Route (NCN 10) north-west through the ‘debatable lands’, which were once ravaged by warring Armstrongs, Thompsons, Carrs and other clans.

We cycled through pretty villages with church spires and cricket greens, like Stamfordham and Matfen, then reached wild moorland and rugged sandstone crags.

At Bellingham, just over halfway between home and the bothy, we ate well in a superb repurposed railway carriage (‘Tea on the Train’). We also visited the appropriately named, for this frontier land, First & Last Brewery taproom.

Our plan was to skirt the edge of Kielder Water, eventually crossing the border through an unlikely gap in the trees to follow the North Tyne through Saughtree (blink and you’ll miss it). From there a winding gravel track rises away from the valley to reach the Waverley Route, a line that last saw service at the end of the 1960s.

While that is indeed how the journey unfolded, we may have spent a little more time in the taproom than we had intended. We pedalled through and out of Kielder Forest as twilight turned the sky rose gold, and a waxing moon, purple at the edges, appeared in the firmament like a sci-fi backdrop.

It’s difficult not to think of space, in every sense, in this part of the world. Kielder Observatory has the darkest skies in England and has been named as a Gold Tier Dark Sky Park because of the clarity of its sky. As we tilted our heads in slack-jawed amazement, it positively glowed with wispy nebulae tracing between uncountable stars.

The bothy code

The Mountain Bothies Association maintains eight bothies north of the Tyne Valley and into the Scottish Borders. There are plenty more (about 100 altogether), often in some of the most remote and most beautiful places in Scotland, Wales and northern England.

Yet there is no guarantee that you will be able to find splendid isolation. Bothying can be a very sociable experience. Within 10 minutes of setting foot in Leyburnsfoot Bothy (also known as Will’s Bothy, in memory of a much-missed young man who died tragically young in a climbing accident), we were sharing beers around a travel-sized Monopoly board.

There is a sort of frisson from being beyond the reach of the law when bothying. While some bothies do have signs warning partying ‘ne’er do wells’ that police visit the bothy from time to time, Leyburnsfoot has been the victim of vandalism.

There is no booking, reception or money changing hands. The whole premise runs on a reassuring reliance on human decency: keep the place tidy for other people; be nice to whoever puts their head through the door; leave some candles or firelighters for the next visitors; and chop plenty of wood.

We left early the next morning in the rain and headed first for breakfast in Hawick, which was once the centre of the Borders textile trade and is still home to Pringle sweaters. Then we followed the River Tweed to Peebles, where we stayed very comfortably at the Neidpath Inn.

One of us needed wi-fi for work and both of us decided there was no shame in having one warm shower this trip. You can expect a raised wooden sleeping platform at most bothies, and a multi-fuel stove if you’re lucky. But plumbing is usually a toilet and a bucket filled from the stream.

Over the hills to Over Phawhope

We made a clean start the next morning in the direction of Over Phawhope Bothy, at the far end of the valley made by Ettrick Water. The road south of Innerleithen took us over the beautifully named ‘Paddy Slacks’ climb. The name is a corruption of Pas du Lacs, due to its proximity to St Mary’s Loch and other waters.

It’s a gentle, Continental-style pull over more than three kilometres which, with panniers and gear, is merciful going up and gleeful going down, with sweeping curves and thrilling views of heather-clad mountains slashed with the silver of water.

Turning onto a dead-end track, occasionally stopping to let forestry lorries past, we traced the river, Ettrick Water, higher and higher up the valley until, finally, we crested a hill and saw Over Phawhope nestled between two burns.

This stone hut was described by poet James Hogg, ‘the Ettrick Shepherd’, whose grandfather had lived in it, as “one of the most lonely and dismal situations that ever was the dwelling of human creatures”.

Yet when we rolled up to the front door, just as the late autumn sun threw the last of its rays, smoke was already rising out of the chimney, thanks to the wood-cutting labours of two more bothy dwellers, Aaron and William. Rosy cheeked, they sat by the multifuel stove with whisky glasses in hand. It looked far from dismal.

We cooked sausages on the stove. Two more hikers joined us. There was room for everyone and the conversation was easy. The lack of any internet signal in most of these remote places is a blessing and means that you either make your own entertainment or get a nice early night.

Notwithstanding the earlier comments about plumbing, Over Phawhope is blessed by having not one but two toilets. One of them is outside, open on all sides to views of the valley and the forest beyond. There can hardly be a better place for your morning contemplation.

Meditating on the trip

Well, perhaps there is. Retracing our route as far as the River Esk, we turned south and had not gone very far before the sight of multi-coloured prayer flags led us towards a dazzling gold stupa and, beyond it, a multi-storied temple bedecked with yet more flags.

We had chanced upon the Kagyu Samye Ling Monastery, which has offered a retreat in a tiny Tibetan corner of Dumfriesshire since 1967. It claims to be the first traditional Buddhist monastery in the West.

The centre welcomes visitors who want to enjoy the quiet of its gardens and the atmosphere of reflection. The rain stopped and the sun shone. We admired a golden Buddha.

Tibetan monasteries have prayer wheels that turn continuously, emanating blessings and removing barriers to enlightenment. I’ll leave you to draw the appropriate parallels with cycling.

Nearby Eskdalemuir Community Hub provided lunch, while Pelosi’s Corner Café did terrific coffee in Langholm. We crossed the border back into England and dropped down to Brampton, east of Carlisle, where we hopped on a train back to Newcastle.

The Mountain Bothies Association has been running for 60 years now. It feels like a miracle that, in an age of commercialism and individualism, a group of people keep these refuges going for long-distance walkers and adventure cyclists to enjoy for free.

The MBA’s mission is “to maintain shelters in remote places for those who love wild and lonely places”, which it accomplishes marvellously. Yet in the best possible way, our experience was the very opposite of ‘wild and lonely’.