Guess Who's Back...

Hello, friends.  It's been a while, I bet you thought this ole blog of mine was dead and gone.  It almost was, but I've decided I'm going to keep on running, as someone once said in a song. I think it was the Spencer Davis Group, but I'm not 100% sure.

I know it's been a long time since I wrote anything here. No idea why, I guess I partly didn't have much to say, partly I always seemed to be doing something else, and partly... yeah, partly no idea. But, if nothing else, it gives me a backlog of ideas to work through!

Kincardine Bridge

So, what's been happening this year. Actually not much, other than I've started on a new fitness programme and diet. Again. Only this time, I'm determined to make it stick. Aided by my best friend Ian and his other half, I'm going to be spending time walking along the Fife Coastal Path.  Now, given that I'm the size of a small Eastern European country, this isn't going to be easy. A fact proved to me on the first leg of the walk, which was...

Stage 1

Stage 1 took us from the Clackmannanshire side of the Kincardine Bridge, to the fairly quaint little village of Culross (pronounced Koo-riss).  I know some of you are fond of details, well, never let it be said that I wasn't one to give you all the stats and details you may have wanted! So, leg one was:

Distance: a shade over 5 miles.
Time: about  1hr 45min.
Blisters: 2 massive ones.
Degree of Pain: On a par with stepping on a lego brick. Constantly. For almost 2 hours.
Ability to walk normally the next day: Impaired

A street in Culross

Culross itself is a picturesque little place, although I couldn't be persuaded to live there. It is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and the vast majority of the houses there are listed buildings.  Many years ago, I worked with someone who had a house in Culross, and found myself subject to her daily litany of gripes about Historic Scotland (or whatever body was covering listed buildings at the time), who had to be consulted  for pretty much everything, from wanting to upgrade the windows, making any structural changes inside, down to prescribing the colour the walls outside had to be painted, and many many more. Like most little villages around Fife, there's not really much there, a shop, a pub and a castle. Actually, when you think about it, it's pretty cool that having a castle is more or less the norm in Scotland. We do like a good castle here and there, Fife having a fair few, in varying stages of decay. Some, like St Andrews Castle, Rosyth Castle,
Ballanbriech Castle and the like, are ruins, whilst others, like Pitrievie Castle (now converted into apartments), Falkland Palace, Fernie Castle (now a hotel) are intact. Fife has (or has had) 36 castles within it's borders, alongside a few palaces here and there, like the famous, but now sadly ruined, Dunfermline Palace, birthplace and home of various Scottish Kings.  Actually, as we traverse our way through the Kingdom, I should see how many castles, palaces and old churches we pass, and take some pictures.

So ended the first leg of the coastal marathon. I'd like to say I enjoyed it, but I really didn't. Had I not developed blisters from Hell within the first mile and a half, I dare say I would have been happier, but I learned a very valuable lesson from stage 1.  Of course, as I'm dumber than a box of frogs, I failed to heed said lesson, so in stage 1.5 (which apparently, according to Ian, doesn't count toward the grand walk as it was a) done out of sequence, and b) was done with his better half), which was about 6 or so miles between Kirkcaldy and Aberdour (and will be reported in more depth later on), the parts of my feet which weren't blistered from stage 1 made up for it. Still, I did actually take on board the feedback my poor tootsies gave me, and invested in Compeed plasters, and walking socks. Suitably armed, I was ready for...

Stage 2

Starting where we left off on stage 1, we perambulated our way from Culross to another vaguely picturesque part of the land, namely Limekilns. Don't let the name put you off, it's actually quite nice there. For this leg of the walk, I'd actually installed an app on my phone which used a combination of GPS and mast triangulation to plot our progress, and give us actual data, rather than guesswork! So, the facts and figures from stage 2 are:

Distance: 7.75 miles

Limekilns

Time: 2 hours 38min 10sec
Blisters: None! Yippee!!
Pain: Whilst walking, not too bad, more just tiredness, but after we stopped at the end, when I tried to get moving again, yeah, that wasn't fun!
Ability to walk without looking like a penguin with a rod stuck up his arse the next day: None at all. 

This leg started off quite well, we crossed the train tracks at Culross to join the path, and walked our way along the coastal path, past Valleyfield (one of the original one-horse towns - and even then they stole the horse from somewhere else), pat Torryburn (where Ian used to live), and then making a little jaunt a bit further inland up to Crombie, following the A985 until we cut back down to Charlestown (surprisingly, there were no dancers. I was disappointed), and then on down the Promenade, to our finishing point, which was, by some strange co-incidence, the Ship Inn public house. Who would have thought it! The irony of it is, when we got there, we each had a coffee. Not a drop of the demon alcohol touched our parched lips!

As I mentioned, the start of this walk was much better.  It took a mile or two for my perennial backache to abate (it's one of the side effects of being the size of a fully grown hippo, sadly), once that happaned, the part of the walk between Torryburn and the start of Ordinance Road, which is where we turned inland (and uphill!) was really quite enjoyable. Then, I hit the walking equivalent of the wall. Or in my case, the hill would be a better analogy. I don't know if it was psychosomatic, but when we turned away from the coast, the walk seemed to get harder, and not just because of the incline, when we reached the top of the hill at Crombie, even the downhill part wasn't fun.  By the time we hit Charlestown, I was really not enjoying myself, the last mile and a half or so really wasn't fun, even Ian admitted that he wasn't really having much of a good time by then. However, we made it to the end, rewarded ourselves with a coffee, and then I went home to collapse into a broken heap.

Charlestown and Limekilns themselves are nice enough, although Limekilns is significantly older than it's next door neighbor.

Charlestown

The 'Charles' in Charlestown was Charles Bruce, 5th Earl of Elgin who not only named the village after himself when he founded it, but decreed that the village be mapped out in the shape of the letter 'E', for Elgin. It's most recent (relatively speaking) claim to fame comes from the end of WWI, when the small shipyard which existed in the village at the time was used to break some of the vessels of the German Imperial Fleet, which were brought down from Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. Ironically, Charlestown, and not Limekilns, is the home of the Scottish Lime Centre Trust (which we walked past on our way).

Our finishing point of Limekilns can trace it's provenance back to the 14th century.  The oldest datable building in the town is the King's Cellar, which was built in 1362. Currently, it's a Masonic Lodge, of all things!  Back in the days of yore, Limekilns was a busy little fishing and soapmaking village, these days, however, it's a sleepy little residential area, popular due to it's closeness to Dunfermline and the Forth Road Bridge.

So, dear readers, it's time to leave you on a cliffhanger - tonight sees the 3rd leg of our walktacular extravaganza - Limekilns to North Queensferry. Will our heroes make it unscathed, or with they be find themselves transported to a mirror universe.

Stay tuned to find out!