Day 9 – to Edinburgh, Scotland (75 miles)

Another great day on the road...

We woke to a beautiful, sunny day in Langholm. Brittany got her dream breakfast of porridge with cinnamon, cranberries and brown sugar while watching a woodpecker in the B&B garden (Simon had a full Scottish breakfast with really good black pudding).

We started our way through Eskdale at just before 9:00, following the Esk River and then the White Esk. The roads where nearly empty, and we spotted numerous birds of prey hunting on the grassy hillsides. The sheep and cattle seemed a lot less tame – most sheep began running for their lives as soon as we approached.

At Eskdalemuir, some Tibetan monks have built a monastery next to the river – quite a bizarre site in the middle of the Scottish wilderness. However, they did have a tea room which served excellent coffee and soya hot chocolate – it would have been rude not to stop.

From the Tibetan monastery, we headed up through plantation pine forests and one or two-house 'villages' to Traquair. By this stage, the sheep and cattle were free roam the road, with the houses and gardens being fenced in. We started noticing more and more different breeds of sheep, some with one lamb per ewe, some with two. Brittany was particularly fond of the white lambs with the black faces, and was impressed to see the local farms herding sheep with dogs.

The scenery was glorious in the sunshine and the cycling was wonderful – long, flat river valleys broken occasionally by slow steady climbs through the hills, often climbing over 1000 feet.

At Traquair, we stopped at the oldest continually inhabited house in Scotland (the Stuarts/Stewarts have lived there for over 900 years). We sat and had lunch in the garden, fending off a hungry pea-hen and chatting with some friendly locals. Our lunch was rounded off by the arrival of a peacock doing his display, which appeared to be for the benefit of the humans rather than the peahens (whom he completely ignored).

We had a quick tour of the house before heading off towards Peebles and then Edinburgh. Once through Peebles (which looked like a lovely town alongside the river Tweed ) we joined a busy A road for the last 17 and 7/8 miles /(that is what the old road marker said) into Edinburgh. Simon groaned various times but we made in safely an were at the YHA by 5 pm (Simon did almost maim himself getting the tandem down the long steep stairs to the store room) . The weather had turned cold though. We enjoyed the best shower we have had on the trip and are now ready to go find dinner!