For those in the know: A921, Forth Road Br. ~ Dalgety Bay.
Coddiewomple, possibly an Edwardian term for an affliction of giddiness, an archaic item of Victorian lady’s headwear or a Dickensian definition for a truthful inexactitude. Only its none of the above, but is an old English slang verb, defined such: to travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague destination. A neat summation of our travelling philosophy.
The wind was coming from the left as we stepped from our front door: so we turned right, a sentiment that sits nicely with an intended free spirit travel. I have no idea where we will be tonight, what we might find. How we get there and by which road are equal mysteries. We’re going coddiewompling.
We’ve been suggesting to those who had enquired as to where we might be off to this year, saying that we hoped to find places in Scotland that neither of us had visited before. The Outer Hebrides for example. However a quick weather check with the prognosticators had predicted that copious quantities of rain, measurable in inches, was imminent around Largs, just around the time we might expect to arrive there. Now we’ve both bunkered down before, eating fish and chips in a dripping bus shelter, in an out off season, closed down, holiday town. It’s can be fun: once. So we’ll purposefully travel counter-clock and head vaguely off up the east coast instead.
Cycled all day, navigated a capital city, negotiated a highway construction, found a closed campground and discovered a rocky promontory. One with a timeline-view of Scottish history.
A span that starts around AD800 with Inchcolm Abbey, passes the ferry landing point where King Alexander falls down a cliff and in so doing, sparks off the warring animosities between England and Scotland. Moves across the Edinburgh horizon etched by Salisbury crag and the Castle that houses a compendium of black deeds and finally arrives in the twenty-first century with the nearly completed third river crossing bridge. In so doing it travels through my vantage point and this millennia of history, for our tent is pitched in the lee of a Second World War gun emplacement. There once to repel invaders.
Ghosts of history, shored up bunkers, bricked up workshops slowly being consumed by couch-grass and storm-scalped sycamore trees. Trees that were themselves once an alien invasive species a mere four millennia ago. Despite the forest, it’s easy to envisage this knoll’s strategic importance seventy years ago; the rail bridge was the solitary dry crossing. Now that iconic structure is being dominated, even diminished, by this new bridge.
Hopetoun Monument
Just one day away from home and already we’ve found a vague destination which seems most erratic, as I can clearly see our starting point, one that’s punctuation marked by the Hopetoun Monument, a tower that stands outside our flat’s back window. That eponymous crow would have covered our first day’s ride in a quarter of the distance, such is the convoluted geography of our shorelines. It’s a foretaste for this year’s venture, which will take us a thousand kilometres and twenty-two days just to reach Inverness. You could drive there in under three hours.
Today we’ve Purposefully found a vague destination. We’ve Coddiewompled.