The road now, with Crawford in the distance, sharply bends, and crosses the infant Clyde at New Bridge.
Crawford, situated in a wide strath, or green vale, where several streams join the Clyde, is a scattered village whose white houses show pleasantly at great distances. It is a favourite place among the wealthier Glasgow folk who like rural holidays. The New Crawford Inn of coaching days, a substantial, mansion-like building, opened in 1822, on the completion of this portion of Telford’s new road, is still in business as the “Cranstoun Hotel.” The old road, from Elvanfoot, goes straighter than the new one to Abington, but with severe gradients; while the new continues its even way alongside the river, to Abington, where it bids good-bye to the Clyde altogether, until Bothwell is reached.
“BRIG O’ CLYDE.”
ABINGTON
Abington is a typical Scottish anglers’ resort: just a tiny place with an inn, a post-office, a few cottages, and a fine park or two; very neat, very still, and looking very expensive and exclusive. A gamekeeper, or an angler in waders, with rod and creel, are almost the only figures seen here, in the road.
Beyond Abington, the river and the rail alike turn aside and leave the road to solitude. Not even Telford’s road-engineering genius could abolish the ghastly pull-up over the bleak and beastly moor that stretches between this point and Douglas Mill. You deceptively descend to it, to Denighton Bridge, crossing a little stream that comes down the valley from Crawfordjohn, but then rise to an exposed lonely plateau, bleaker than Shap and without its interest. Down at Denighton Bridge, where the view ranges along the gloomy valley wherein the Covenanters skulked and the troopers of Montrose hunted them, the sheep graze and the lambkins frisk in spring. Even a wet and cold cyclist (who is not easily amused) must shriek with laughter at the antics of the lambs, which are a good deal funnier than those of any low comedian I have ever seen. No need to encore them either, for they continue all day, or at least until, exhausted with laughter, you depart, to face the muir above.
Heaven send the traveller who travels here by his own efforts has fine weather and a following wind, otherwise his progress is slow martyrdom along eight miles of shivery loneliness, and thrice welcome is the longed-for descent to Douglas Mill.
The Douglas Water runs in a deep and beautifully wooded valley at Douglas Mill, where the wayside Douglas Mill Inn stood in the coaching era, and where, behind an imposing gravelled sweep, the entrance to the beautiful park of the Earl of Home is seen. For five miles another stretch of old road goes to the right, across Broken Cross Muir, as far as Lesmahagow: the new road pursuing an eventful course, past the Newfield Inn.