Innerleithen to Peebles along the old Railway Line

There is a certain attraction to walking along an old railway line with the main one being a lack of hills. The Last of the Summer Wine Walkers seem to be more attracted these days to walking on the level. Maybe it just enables us to talk more as this seems to play an important part of our walks.
Todays walk chosen by Tom started at Innerleithen at 10.30am where Tom and I met up with john, Martin, and Ken from Edinburgh to commence the 6 mile walk to Peebles. Innerleithen in a lovely small town and used to be the Rolls Royce of the Cashmere Knitwear Industry. In my days with Atlasair and UPS I used to ship thousands of Cashmere garments every week from Ballantynes of Innerleithen and Murray Allan of Innerleithen all over the world. Sadly neither of these companies now exist leaving Innerleithen a much poorer place. In the background of this photograph is the old Innerleithen railway station which is now in somebody's garden.

We crossed the River Tweed several times with this new pedestrian bridge having recently been built at enormous cost.

The walk took us through the new village of Cardrona which I have passed many times but never actually walked through. I had preconceived ideas of it being not a very nice place but I have to admit it looks rather nice with a village green surrounded by some lovely but expensive houses. 

The old railway station is used as the village store and a small cafe. Service was very slow and it took 20 minutes for us to get a cup of coffee. There was only one young girl working there and she was overwhelmed with a full house of customers.

On our walk we met this lovely pony who managed to eat my lunch time Apple.

The three golfers in our party are standing here discussing the merits of the 2 golfers playing a hole on the Cardrona Course. I thought it was only women that were bitchy but there is nothing quite like golfers commenting on other golfers who are not as good as them.

As we waited for the bus in Peebles I was telling the lads about the problems Niall Weatherstone was having with IKEA who were fitting his kitchen at Birkwood while he was in Australia when who should come round the corner but his daughter Lorna with her 2 children. What a coincidence so she just had time to have her photo taken when the bus appeared and we were off back to Innerleithen. An excellent walk on a nice day in good company what more can a man ask for. 

This is the new bridge we crossed over next to the Cardrona Golf Course. We passed along the entire length of the Golf Course and only counted 5 people playing so for this to pay its way it will need to have many more customers especially as this is Easter week and a time when many people are on holiday. We did pass many cyclists on the walk especially families with kids on tag along bikes and this proves how popular this area has become with cyclists.