Detour #176: Fairway to heaven: a golf drive with a difference in the Tweed Valley, Scotland, UK
Golf, mountain bikes and electric cars come together on a road trip to Scotland’s most scenic links.
It’s been said cycling is the new golf, given the scope for those of a certain demographic and disposable income to lavish large sums of money on flashy kit and ‘me time’ away from the home or office.
Given you can easily lavish five figures on a fancy road bike or electrified mountain bike the idea that cycling is now the go-to sport for a new generation of monied, middle-aged hobbyists perhaps isn’t so far-fetched. If nothing else it provides an alternative excuse for dressing in brightly coloured clothes. And, for all golf’s enduring grassroots popularity, the whiff of Trumpian, country club values at the top level, and pros casually setting aside sporting principle to follow the money into breakaway tournaments of dubious provenance, presents a bit of an image problem. That a golf course near me has literally been turned into a cycling centre is perhaps a symbol of these changing tastes. But up in Scotland the two sports seem able to rub shoulders more peacefully, symbolised by the affectionate ‘Golfie Trails’ nickname for one of the Borders’ hottest mountain biking spots.
Carved into the forest looming above the charming Innerleithen Golf Club, their semi-official status gifts them rebellious cool lacking in the more carefully curated Glentress trail centre just down the road in Peebles. Host to the Enduro World Series, The Golfie Trails are at the vanguard of this most fashionable branch of mountain biking and attract riders from all over the UK and beyond.
When I first came to Innerleithen a couple of decades back I remember it as a sleepy, one-horse kind of town, as grey as the perpetual mizzle it seemed shrouded in. Now, and thanks mainly to the influx of mountain biker cash, the high street is buzzing with trendy cafes, bike shops, craft stores and a vibrant, enterprising atmosphere at odds with stuffier, old-money border towns like nearby Peebles. Earwig on conversations and alongside the borders burr you’ll hear accents ranging from Surrey to New South Wales, this influx of riders all following the road through the golf club and to the hillside above it.
It helps that the journey here is always a scenic one, whether you choose to come up the east coast and through Northumberland or follow the M6 over the Lakeland fells and via the gorgeous borders roads from Moffat and into the rolling hills south of the Tweed. On the basis my transport, and indeed accommodation, is an electrified camper conversion based on a Skoda Enyaq I decide on the latter as the motorway should provide a wider range of charging options to get me there.
This proves wise, given my dream of lunch and a charge at Tebay services is scuppered by a lack of available charging points. This is a blow as stopping here is a rite of passage for many a northbound Sassenach seeking food a cut above the franchised service station norm. I fare no better at the next services, my 40 minutes nursing a Costa wasted when it turns out the charger has only dribbled out a few miles of extra range. All the charging points at the next services are occupied and it’s only on my fourth stop I manage to plug in and draw enough to get me to Peebles and my plan to leave the Skoda charging while I go for an early-evening pedal.
I’ll spare you the sob story but if you are planning to drive an EV north of the border my advice would be to plan ahead and order a ChargePlace Scotland RFID card, on the basis the network appears to have something of a monopoly. Meaning if the app doesn’t work, or you can’t get phone signal to connect to it, you could end up stranded.
All’s well that ends well and, with a fully charged battery, I glide silently along the road running through the middle of the golf course to my wild camping spot beside the babbling Leithen Water. With the fancy James Baroud roof tent deployed and a belly full of food cooked on the pull-out Egoe kitchen I enjoy the moon dropping between the hills at the end of the valley with a nip of Glenfarclas purchased from the fabulously knowledgeable chap at Villeneuve Wines in Peebles. A smooth Speyside, it has been sold to me on a local connection with a couple of whisky trading rogues called the Pattison brothers, whose various attention seeking antics included an innovative guerrilla marketing campaign employing specially trained African Grey Parrots. Look it up.
All of which is a convoluted build-up to the real motivation for being here. As the sun lifts over the valley the next day I leave my cosy little encampment, pedal past the first group of pastel-shirted golfers teeing off for an early morning round and then sweat my way up to the top of the hill and graffitied ruins of the derelict Kirnie Law reservoir.
The particular ground into which the Golfie trails have been painstakingly hand-carved actually runs better with a bit of rain on it, the cement-like consistency helping contain the speed all too quickly attained on the plunges between the trees. The visit earlier in the year by the Enduro World Series has seen a degree of gentrification to the tracks, but trail names like Nae Spleen, Jawbone and Liver Damage nod to this being at the wilder end of the riding spectrum, with a huge network of routes down through the forest. There are plenty of riders on the hill to chat with, all of them with the time and money to devote to an expensive hobby in what might otherwise be considered working hours. They are a different breed from the chino-wearing fellas hacking away on the greens on the valley floor. But we probably have more in common than either party would necessarily realise, or admit.
After a few runs my legs are spent and I spin back to camp, a bracing dip in Leithen Water washing off the mud and sweat and soothing my aching muscles ahead of the drive back. Less ‘cycling is the new golf’ in conclusion, then. More that both happily coexist in this most stunning of locations, gifting their participants a head-clearing escape from the daily grind. Whether you visit to swing a club or turn pedals there are few better places in the world to be doing it.
The drive there ain’t bad, either.