I’m riding a legendary route: Dumfries to Glasgow. It’s the one that Scottish blacksmith Kirkpatrick Macmillan, ‘inventor of the bicycle’, never rode in 1842, on the nonexistent bike that he didn’t invent.
Macmillan features in many a 20th-century history of cycling as a pedalling equivalent of phone trailblazer Alexander Graham Bell, or TV pioneer John Logie Baird. However, unlike those two other Scots, most aspects of KM’s supposed role in the development of the pedal bike are largely cobblers.
Circa 1839, the story goes, he made a treadle-powered, steerable, two-wheeled velocipede at his smithy in rural Dumfriesshire; he rode it regularly to Dumfries; he made the seventy-mile journey to Glasgow over two days, ending ignominiously when he was fined for hitting a pedestrian in the Gorbals. If you go to Glasgow, do not hit any pedestrians, and especially not there.
Trouble is, beyond conjecture and hearsay, there’s no first-hand evidence for any of this. Not a Lorne sausage. No written records, no patents, nothing.
KM probably did experiment with treadle-driven tricyles, as did contemporaries such as Gavin Dalzell. There are second-hand accounts and family folklore, but pretty much everything you read stems from a claim without evidence by his nephew in a letter to a newspaper fifty years later, and subsequent embellishments, additions, and thinkful wishing.
Right, then: in that case my Uncle Frank invented the mobile phone, and my great-grandad Robertson discovered jam. They just never sought fame or fortune. You’ve just read it on the internet, it must be true.
Still, there’s something attractive about the Macmillan legend. Hard-working local man beats the world; yet another example of Scottish invention, like the steam engine or penicillin or fried Mars bars. When a new Scottish coast-to-coast bike route was opened in 2023, they named it after Kirkpatrick Macmillan. There was already an 11-mile KM Route, a circular jaunt round his home village of Keir Mill, north of Dumfries. And celebratory replicas of KM’s supposed machine (more probably by a contemporary of his, Thomas McCall) litter Dumfries and Galloway like abandoned hire bikes.
Anyway, for a magazine article, I decided to emulate KM’s alleged 1842 ride, from Dumfries to Glasgow. I don’t believe for a minute he ever did it. Reconstructions of his putative machine have proved uncomfortable, cumbersome, and almost impossible to steer. Too hard for a few miles of flat smooth tarmac, never mind seventy over rough, hilly country tracks. (Plus it didn’t have brakes. In my experience, these can be useful.)
Nevertheless, Dumfries to Glasgow – on a nice modern steel-framed bike with gears, brakes and pneumatic tyres (partly thanks to the very genuine efforts of Scot John Boyd Dunlop) is a very enjoyable ride. There’s lots to see, including Scotland’s highest village, and an extraordinary bikes-only road up to a 750m summit with a giant golf ball.
So this is what happened when I followed the enigmatic shadows of Kirkpatrick Macmillan. The man who didn’t invent the bicycle.
Day one was all about KM: twenty-ish miles from his nearest town Dumfries along lanes to Keir Mill, the village where he lived and died. I like Dumfries; I’ve cycled here a few times and always found it friendly and easy-going, like many an isolated town (cf Hull). It has a lot of connections with Robert Burns, the Beethoven of Bad Poetry, and the world’s oldest Camera Obscura.
And it has replicas of Macmillan bikes. The first I bagged was in Loreburne Shopping Centre in the centre of town, oddly placed above the car park payment machine. (As Burns himself put it, ‘So gat the whissle o’ my groat, An’ pay’t the fee’, whatever that means.)
The next was in Dumfries Museum, part of their bike display on one wall of an upstairs gallery. With wise curatorial caution, they avoid any mention of the KM legends and stick to the facts. The only reference to him is in the label for a machine in display: ‘Velocipede built by Thomas McCall in 1896. Said to have been built to a design by Kirkpatrick Macmillan. Both McCall and Macmillan are from Dumfries and Galloway.’
Another sort-of replica is an iron artwork guarding the entrance to the Maxwelltown Path, a cycle route along an old railway out of Dumfries. I couldn’t resist sitting on it, and judged it just as comfortable as the real thing would have been. In other words, agony.
The cycle path heads over the River Nith on a viaduct, and on the other side is a silhouette-sculpture of Macmillan himself, proudly astride his imaginary machine.
The plaque here is the full-on KM legend: ‘…he invented the first self-propelled bicycle… It was heavy and slow, but he enjoyed riding it and in 1845 [sic] made the 68-mile to Glasgow in just two days!’.
Soon after, I headed off the path, following the KM Trail signs along quiet lanes through pleasant if unremarkable country. Macmillan would recognise this all today – not much has changed; it’s still rolling farmland, sheep and cows, and, er, poorly surfaced lanes.
I was pleased to see an old-style (pre-Worboys) road sign for DANGEROUS HILL, which would have been a challenge to Macmillan on his treadled contraption: lacking brakes, you could only slow down or stop by pressing back on the pedals.
Keir Mill is the village where Macmillan had his smithy, Courthill. There’s not much here – a church and a few houses – but KM is commemorated a few times. On the wall of Courthill itself, now a private house at the north of the village, are two plaques and an information board conforming to the usual myths. (On his phantom Glasgow trip, ‘…he is reputed to have beaten the mail coach at about eight miles per hour!’)
Macmillan’s grave – well, a memorial family headstone – is also in Keir Mill. Not in the churchyard, but the old churchyard to the east, down a signed footpath. It’s a scruffy jumble of stonework, with KM’s family plot down at the bottom, marked by a plaque. It reminds us of the harsh realities of the mid-19th century: in 1865, Macmillan lost his wife, a baby and ten-year-old son. KM himself (‘inventor of the bicycle’, the stone says) died aged 65.
I had one more replica bike to collect, from nearby Drumlanrig Castle. But that would be tomorrow. Now I had to head to my campsite at Penpont, via the Co-op at nearby Thornhill for something to go with dinner.
As KM no doubt appreciated, lubrication is a vital part of cycling.
Miles today: 31
Miles from Dumfries to Keir Mill: 18