Short Borders Backpack Innerleithin to Peebles

OK, so it’s quite possible to walk from Innerleithin to Peebles on a flattish route of little more than six miles. Not the sort of distance where an overnight may be required.
CAMRA have published a guidebook of walks linked to pubs (this seems to be quite a good idea by the way) and they asked if I’d like to review it. What, me, beer and walks? I thought it was a good idea anyway, so they sent me a couple of extracts, one of which was a ten mile walk from Innerleithin to Peebles mainly along the “Old Drove Road”. More of the review when I’ve done the other walk, but Peebles/Innerleithin is a bit too far from Pietowers for a day walk, so I thought what a neat idea it would be to drag Dawn from her cosy seaside changing hut and have an overnight on the hill somewhere along the route. So this is what we did.


We parked prettily and freely in Peebles and caught the X62 bus to Innerleithin, scoffed some pies from a bakery and wandered up the road to Traquair and then into The Glen. The Glen is an estate which doesn’t have shooting, but does seem to welcome walkers, which makes a nice change , as it happens. We found a flattish spot near the Glass Burn which provided a nice water supply and camped a warm and sticky  summer night amongst ticky bracken. I caught two ticks scrambling up LTD’s muzzle. another, intent on evil heading up my arm, one on my cooking pot and one on my map case. None of these survived. I can’t find any on my body or, indeed on LTD although he may be hiding some somewhere.  I may get Mrs K to check my more secret parts. She might enjoy that. Even if she doesn’t, I might enjoy it anyway. Ticks don’t survive on LTD anyway due to the tablets we get from the vet, so he should be safe.

We were roughly half way along the route.
It rained a bit in the morning, leading to a late-ish, relaxed kind of start and then varied between hot sunshine and squally, heavy showers and we finished the walk in waterproofs. The second half of the walk is much better than the first and, unusually for half a walk, it’s six miles longer than the first half… (dhuhh  ??!!)

The drove road towards Peebles is quite delightful and there are cracking views to be had of Glen Sax. Some pre-TGO challengers may remember a couple of expeditions in this part of the world, one of which ended in a wet and windy atlatntic storm at Tibbie Shiels and the other finished with Mr Sloman doing himself a nasty of a barbed wire fence just outside Moffat. Maybe I shouldn’t remind them about these things.
Anyway, the walk is fine, and quite nice in parts. I’ll be doing a proper review later, once we’ve worked out the logistics of a Malham-to-Settle stravaig.
I measured the Peebles walk at eleven miles, though. So that’s a bonus mile, innit.?