Sometimes taking your bike on the train is more hassle than it’s worth. But not on this journey! We took the ScotRail service from Dumfries to Carlisle, then hopped onto the Northern Service a couple of stops to Brampton. Getting your bikes on these services is extremely low drama, unless you happen to coincide with the party train – the last service on Friday or Saturday nights from Carlisle, or a train that coincides with a local football derby – when you’re likely to get a load of pissed teenagers asking if they can have a go on your bike and whether there’s lager in your bidon.

But we had none of this carry-on on a Saturday morning. From Brampton we took some lovely quiet backroads to RSPB Geltsdale, a lo-fi, free admission moorland reserve on the edge of the North Pennines. There’s a lovely tarn where you can peep at waterfowl from a rugged hide and write down your sightings on a form in a waterproof box. We’d picked a mild, still day with low cloud cover and there wasn’t much rustling in the reeds save a couple of mallards out for a paddle.

This wasn’t what we came for though. Our sights were set on the grouse, black and red, that are known to waddle through the hillside scrub here and gorge on the berries of the hawthorn trees.

We took a pitstop at the reserve’s only building, a visitor centre and exhibition space housing plant and animal identification posters, field guides, shed snake skins, animal skulls and other discovered organic hillside paraphernalia and – for a short time only – an interactive synthesiser console known as the ‘Concrète Mixeur’, which is based on the machine used to make the Doctor Who soundtrack in the 1960s. It was worth the trip for that alone. Then we headed up the hill along Howgill Beck towards the viewpoint. We were in luck! The grouse made their presence known first with eerie chuckles that bounced off the valley’s contours, making them difficult to locate; it gave a sense of being followed but at an unknowable distance and by an unguessable number. As we traipsed further up the hillside the grouse got a bit bolder and flew up out of the scrub here or there with laboured take-offs for short-haul glides over the brow. As raptors flew over there were flurries of communication, presumably of warning, calls and responses that echoed the length of the beck like a distant tummy-gurgle heard in stereo.

Mission accomplished, we doubled back to pick up our road to Haltwhistle, but not before stopping at the community hub, café and general El Dorado of edibles at Hallbankgate to stock up on calories, coffee, cooking ingredients and a pack of the most delicious chocolate buttons I’ve ever eaten.

If you’ve got this far on our tour then you might have found this entry’s title misleading; there are a few rolling hills to get your crank shafts round between Brampton and Geltsdale. But from now on, the cycling gets seriously easy, I promise. There’s smooth tarmac, lots of flatness and huge, mercurial skies in the sub-10 miles between you and your destination, which is Haltwhistle. The low cloud shifted hours ago to reveal seraphic cloud formations against a sky that’s now pinking in the west and greying to the south. The last hour of daylight is such a great time to see nature at its busiest and our highlights included a grey squirrel diving into a large tree hollow, a flock of lapwings, an unidentified small predator bird with something caught in its talons, and a couple of brazen waxwings staring plumply down from roadside shrubs still full of berries.

(The cycling was so easy, that I kept up with Hubs without breaking a sweat, even though he was on his fancy road bike and I was on my winter mule).

The road hadn’t been very busy; we’d maybe been overtaken by five cars. But then it gets EVEN BETTER. And if you like viaducts, then boy is this place for you. Following signs for Coanwood we took the South Tyne Trail, a delightful off-road bridleway that flows through a river valley and gets you within a whisker of the train station at Haltwhistle.

Job done! A memorable jaunt and a healthy dose of fresh air that gets us back in time to catch the first episode of the new series of Gladiators, and an Off-Peak Day Return train journey that leaves change from £15. (Buy your tickets from Dumfries to Carlisle and Carlisle to Haltwhistle separately mind you; you know how unhinged the logic of UK rail pricing can be). You won’t have quite enough change for the RSPB red grouse badge!

Saturday 13 January, 2024