Cathkin Braes

The southern cousins left early this morning for their long train ride home. We had a 3 and a bit hour car journey home and debated when was the best time to actually leave, it being a rubbish length of journey which bites into the day anyway you play it. We settled on 4pm and ended up leaving nearer 6.30, but ach that's holidays for you isn't it.

In the morning my lovely husband went to visit his granny (of nearly 101 years) with our eldest and littlest and in the afternoon we took our middle boy out for some mountain biking at Cathkin Braes.

I haven't been at Cathkin Braes for probably nearly thirty years. Our family used to go sometimes for Sunday afternoon walks, dodging the burnt out cars and left over carryoot cans to walk along what seemed like the windswept edge of the city, high up on a ridge, under majestic beech trees, overlooking the urban sprawl below. I thought of the place many a time when studying urban forestry and again every time a new woodland grant scheme targeted at woodlands in and around towns was launched (incidentally its hard to get funding for woods around the 'urban' settlements of rural Aberdeenshire when you are competing with the problems associated with woods such as Cathkin Braes!).

Grants are available from Forestry Commission Scotland for all sorts of capital improvements in urban woodlands but Cathkin Braes lucked out by being the ideal location for mountain biking when Glasgow hosted the commonwealth games in 2014. The woods were revitalised as part of the development for the games, creating international standard cross country mountain bike trails which criss cross the wood.

To be honest while the trails are pretty good, technical and too tricky for a fearty like me, I found it amazing how the whole place really didn't seem to have lost much, if any of its original character. Sure we didn't see an actually burnt out car, but it had the feeling of a place where that might happen any time and while there were plenty new buildings in the foreground, including a fancy new school, the view over the city was strikingly similar.

The woods still had an edge of the world feel to them, it was still really empty (even with international standard bike trails and even on a dry Saturday afternoon) and the mature beech trees were still pretty majestic.

At the risk of repeating myself endlessly, when it comes to Glasgow, it really is funny how some things change and how some stay exactly the same.