Hawick is a town in the Scottish borders. We are very fortune to have some lovely friends who live there and invited us up to stay with them. The local council have four cycle routes around the area and we combined these to make our own longer route. The routes were all well marked and colour coded, so you could do them without using a map.

The green route goes round Vertish Hill and is 7 miles. The yellow route goes to Roberton and is 14 miles. The blue route goes to Denholm and is 14.5 miles. The red route goes Cavers and Stobs being 19 miles.

It was a really hot day, almost too hot to be cycling up hills and there were certainly plenty of them!

We headed out of Hawick, up the hill next to the golf course.

From there we were able to join the green route for a while before joining up with the red route.

There was a great looking Church at Cavers.

We picked up the green route for a while and then followed the yellow route back.

Past Branxholm Easter Loch, where I was tempted to stop and dip my feet in for a while, but kept moving.

Having dropped down again on our way towards Roberton, Andy got a puncture! We had a bit of trouble getting the tyre off, managing to snap one of the plastic tyre levers but were soon on our way again. We finished  the ride in Hawick centre.

There was a parade through Hawick centre of three groups of Pipers from USA, Canada and Scotland.

On the way back from Hawick to our friends house we stopped to look at Hawick Mote which was on the way back.

The total ride we did was about 33 miles with about 2800 feet of climbing. The ‘macho’ way to end the evening was to sit with your feet in the paddling pool until they went numb!