Scotland’s highest cyclable tarmac road is, delightfully, closed to motor traffic. It’s the access to a NATS air-traffic control radar station and suite of comms towers up the top of Lowther Hill. They’re a couple of miles’ ascent from Wanlockhead, Scotland’s highest village – which, surprisingly for some, is not in the Highlands but down south in Dumfries and Galloway.
Wanlockhead is up at 467m, on a fabulously scenic ride up the Mennock Pass. But a gated-off road leading from the friendly village takes you much higher, and free of motor traffic: up to the dizzying heights of 725m at Lowther Hill’s NATS golf-ball (as the locals nickname it).
The radar here tracks civilian and military aircraft movements within a hundred miles. Apparently wind turbines can be hard to distinguish from planes, which is clearly an issue round here. Recent upgrades to the scanning equipment have enhanced its ability to screen out this clutter.
I can’t find the exact dimensions of the golf-ball shell itself (which protects the radars from the often extreme weather). But assuming it’s 5m in diameter – which is about 1200 times bigger than a normal-size golf ball of 42.7mm – then a typical 320m par-4 hole would be around 380km at this scale, putting the hole somewhere around Stratford-upon-Avon.
If you could find a 1.4km-long club to tee off with, a decent amateur 200m-plus drive would go 250km, about as far as Chester, assuming you didn’t land in the water hazard of the Mersey or Dee estuaries.
A mile or so of ridgetop riding away, still on tarmac, is the yet higher 732m top of Green Lowther, complete with trig point and quite awesome 360-degree views.
Well, awesome on a day like today, which offered that unusual combination of baking hot sun, cloudless skies, Scotland and September, not words frequently found in the same sentence. When I came here a few weeks back it was thick fog, and I saw little else apart from my handlebars.
But today my timing was good. I was here for a magazine photoshoot with snapper Henry, whose camera and (away from the radar station) drones could take full advantage of the weather bounty.
Because of roof-rack issues he hadn’t been able to bring his bike to photograph this car-free road, so had to hike to the top, and back. As an experienced mountaineer, though, he didn’t find this an insuperable challenge.
I was able to enjoy the downhill hurtle to the full, more confident in my bike’s brakes this time (discs, on my green steel Spa Tourer) than last time (98%-worn rim brakes, on my other green steel Spa Tourer) and with astounding views all the way, unspoilt by motor traffic.
They say that on a totally clear day at the top you can see both Irish and North Seas. It was a tad too misty on the horizon for that, but I had been able to see something of significant interest from the summit of Green Lowther: the Lead Mining Museum Cafe back in Wanlockhead…