We have been writing a personal blog about our travels and cycling here in Galloway. Recently it had it’s 200,000 visitor, which was rather exciting. Recently we have had time to write more, documenting how we are using the lockdown times to explore and plan new routes for our holiday company. We try and spread the love for Galloway and its people and customs. This is what we have been doing in the last couple of weeks, I hope you enjoy it.

Some of the oldest May Day traditions are connected with dew. According to folklore, the dew on 1st of May has magical properties and anyone who washes their face in it will have a flawless complexion for the entire year. May dew was also said to be able to remove spots, freckles and pimples. The best way to be sure of catching the early dew was to stay out all night in the woods or meadows - though some might suspect other motives for such an adventure. In 1583, puritan Philip Stubbes recorded that of the girls who spent the May Day eve in the woods, "scarcely the third part of them returned home again undefiled."

I think we had a sharp frost this year, so that would put a stop to some of the fun. From day 1 of Lockdown we have had blue sky and hardly a drop of rain. A biting wind and single digit temperatures has often sent us back indoors to change to something thicker and woolly. From the village you can still see a patch of snow on the hills to the North West. Which is not to say that the sun has not had some power as a red and peeling tip to both our noses would prove. It is factor 50 on the nose but every moment on a bike presents the nose as a sharp leading edge full on to even a weak sun.

If you were being asked to pick somewhere to spend every first few days of May, you could do far worse than to tick the box ' in a beech wood in the sun '. Nature turns up the green values to close to the fluorescent setting for the young beech leaves and adds pinks and blue flowers of bluebells and a russet or red of last autumns beech mast on the forest floor.

Some years are more intense than others, and much like trying to book a holiday to see the fall colours of Upstate New York, you can get the timing wrong by days and possibly weeks. A friend runs a hotel near one of our most spectacular bluebell woods, and is often asked when the best time to book a stay to view the bluebells. I am not sure he can ever keep a straight face as he just plucks a date from the lowest occupancy week a month in any direction plus or minus.

It is now warm enough to have a more leisurely picnic as part of the longer rides. We are spending time looking over the finer detail of Bing.com/maps for new routes from home, new areas to explore and ways to link tracks and paths together. The area has such a spiders web of routes that we realise that we have not repeated a off road route to Corsock that we did almost two years ago. I have no idea how we did it when I try to plot a route so we make a guess and set off with the gpx file loaded.

Until it turned so dry quite a bit of the route would have been a mud bath made worse by forestry vehicles. Now it is slippy through dust and ball bearing sized gravel. We come to a section clearly marked on the map and obviously a short drove road for taking beasts up onto the moorland. It is overgrown now and we have to pick our way through young trees. A Curlew calls, recently up from the coast for breeding. The call is heartbreaking and very rare now, our version of the North American Loon.

Overlooking Corsock Loch we sit down for flapjacks and coffee, warm enough not to have to pull on down coats for the first time. We have not seen a soul, not even one. Silence, even the wind has dropped for once and then an official start of Spring began with a Cuckoo call not far from us. We sat in the grass drinking and trying to work out how the bits that are road bike rides, that we know so well, fitted into this new landscape that being on gravel bikes had given us. The Cuckoo called again and I managed to record it on the phone, just in case there are doubters.

We have time on our hands at the moment, time rich money poor, as they say. We are trying to keep active and test new routes and experiences for when we can guide guests again. We have a new ' twig stove ' to test on a bike picnic. The Bushbox XL which weighs rather more than you would like but would cope with being tripped over and possibly sat on. It folds out into a mini cooker into which you feed pencil sized twigs. The pure and simple joy of making a barista level coffee in the middle of nowhere starting with lighting a fire with a steel is hard to better on a perfect Spring morning. Castramond Wood is one of the largest semi-natural broadleaved woodlands in the area. The oak trees were once used for making charcoal and supplying the local mill with bobbins. If your passion is bluebells, this is your place at this time of year.

Bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) have long had a place in people’s imagination as shown by their many names including wood bell, bell bottle, Cuckoo’s Boots, Lady’s Nightcap and Witches’ Thimbles. In some places they are called ‘fairy flowers’ as according to an old myth bluebells were used to summon fairies to their gatherings. If humans heard the bells they would soon die. In other places it is said that wearing a wreath of bluebells compels you to tell the truth.

I have wanted to find the time during dry weather to check out the tracks around Kenick Wood above Laurieston. I put a route together, but just as we are thinking of doing the ride I see thick smoke coming from the hills in that area. There are sirens all that afternoon and overnight when I open the window there is a horrible sight. The whole horizon to the Northwest is a rim of flames. I can not sleep feeling so sad for this beautiful part of Galloway Forest.

Next day there is smoke for miles hanging over the hills. We can smell the burning moor and it goes on a second night and day, burning out 5,000 acres. It feels very personal, the place where we have learned every track and path. For a few days we go to the coast on our Boris Rides. Almost five days and the fire is out.

There is some hope from the social media film of the helicopter company. It looks as though much of the fire was kept away from the forest and burned quickly across the moorland grass. Ironically not having cows or sheep grazing had left so much tinder dry grass for the flames to consume. Very few of the trees are native here, the forest is a construction that has driven off the stock farms. Perhaps there will be a rethink about the old hardy breeds of cow up there?

We take a look as part of a long ride across to the coast at Gatehouse and are relieved at what we see. It will regrow quickly I think and very little of the burnt area can be seen from roads. We head on towards Glen Gap and take a lumpy track to above Gatehouse and then drop down to Cally Woods. We pass a Lunkie Hole, the best example that I know in the area. It is a wonderful Scots word that I would mangle with a short explanation, so do look it up.

Evenings are now warming enough for an early barbecue before temperatures drop to near freezing overnight. We pick something very simple and start a fire in the lorry wheel fire pit. This is the simple life we wanted when we moved here and chucked away thoughts of career and jaguars. Sitting by the fire making an evening meal that ends in the perfect camp indulgence, toasted marshmallows.

Lockdown continues and we will keep on riding our Boris Rides. I have no idea how anyone sleeps without a bike ride every day. We know we are so lucky to have great friends around us and a garden to retreat into. If you are in the international tourism business like we are it pays not to think too much and certainly have the news on for under 10 minutes a day. We sit outside tea in hand, the first Orange Tip Butterfly of 2020 passes across the garden from right hedge to left and on up the village to the green where its food plant Lady's Smock grows - The Cuckoo Flower. If you would like to see more of our stories take a look at https://estherwarren.wordpress.com/

May, the blue sky of lockdown

Galloway Cycling Holidays

May, the blue sky of lockdown

If you seek remoteness

Not quite Spring yet

Galloway Cycling Holidays