May road trip journal, part 1

Where to? 

I wanted to visit a bit of Western Scotland I’d never previously been to, Kintyre, the long strip of Argyll & Bute that separates the Firth of Clyde from the Atlantic Ocean. It isn’t blessed with a lot of public transport options, no railways, you can get to the main town of Campeltown by bus and there are a few limited local bus services once you’re there. So practically I was going to need to take the car and it’s a long way from home - about 562 miles in fact. I know some people would happily do that in one go. I’m not one of them, 5-6 hours driving is quite enough else it becomes un-enjoyable and this was intended to be a relaxing holiday. So I broke the trip up into sections and booked accommodation at convenient points which also meant not just pounding up motorways all day.

Day one, Home to Laneshaw Bridge, Lancs. 244 miles. 

I plotted a route that avoided both London and the M25, and Birmingham and the M6, instead heading towards Oxford then Northampton before going north towards Sheffield and Leeds and then north-west across country to Laneshaw Bridge (or Laneshawbridge on some signs) in the Borough of Pendle. The weather was warm and sunny, which is unusual for any time I decide to take a trip, and the journey easy until the last few miles where the closure of a local road near Stanbury resulted in the sat-nav becoming unhelpful and eventually finding a way through that involved driving over the very narrow road on the top of the Ponden Reservoir dam. I’m still not sure that was the official diversion route or whether there even was an official diversion route. Signs? What signs? Once I’d passed that obstacle finding my way to the Alma Inn at Laneshaw Bridge where I’d booked a one night stay was a comparative doddle.

 

The Alma Inn sits on a hill above the village, surrounded mostly by fields and sheep. The room was comfortable with a nice rural view. The food was good, the beer was good, the decor in the bar and restaurant very much in the modern corporate pub style so almost entirely devoid of any atmosphere, and the free Wi-Fi was free in the sense of requiring all your personal and device data, presumably to sell on to third parties (there’s no other reason they’d need it) so it was good that there was 4G data coverage. After dinner I decided to have a little stroll in the evening sunshine, which turned into a slightly longer stroll down to the village and then up alongside High Laith Beck and across the fields back to the inn. I slept well after that.

 

 Top tip: Don’t park under the tree in the inn’s car park, it drops sticky sap all over your car which is a bugger to remove.

In part 2 I get to South West Scotland.