I’m riding a legendary route – Dumfries to Glasgow. It was the ‘world’s first long-distance bike ride’, by Scottish blacksmith Kirkpatrick Macmillan, ‘inventor of the bicycle [in 1842]’.
Except… he never rode the route. And his bicycle probably never existed. But facts shouldn’t get in the way of a good story – ask any anti-cycling newspaper columnist.
Macmillan (1812–1878) features in many a 20th-century history of bicycles as a pedalling equivalent of phone trailblazer Alexander Graham Bell or TV pioneer John Logie Baird.
However, unlike those two other Scots, most statements about Macmillan’s inventions are largely false.
The story goes that circa 1839, Macmillan made a treadle (foot-lever)-powered, steerable, two-wheeled velocipede at his smithy in rural Dumfriesshire – the world’s first pedal bike.
He rode it regularly to Dumfries, and at one point made the 70-mile journey to Glasgow over two days, which ended ignominiously when he was arrested for hitting a pedestrian in the Gorbals.
The trouble is, it’s all hearsay, family folklore and conjecture. There’s no primary evidence. Not a Lorne sausage. No written records, no patents, no surviving machines.
According to design-history academic Nicholas Oddy, Macmillan probably did experiment with treadle-driven tricycles, like several of his contemporaries.
The bicycle tales we read come from a claim without evidence by his nephew in a letter to a newspaper 50 years later, with subsequent embellishments, additions and wishful thinking.
It’s like me claiming that my Uncle Frank invented the mobile phone, or my great-grandad Robertson discovered jam (spoiler: they didn’t).
It’s understandable people want to sustain the Macmillan legend. Local hero beats the world – another pioneering Scottish innovation, like the steam engine, penicillin or fried Mars bars.
So, when a new Scottish coast-to-coast bike route opened in 2023, they named it after Macmillan. He also has a namesake 11-mile trail in his home village of Keir Mill.
And celebratory replicas of Macmillan’s supposed bicycle litter Dumfries and Galloway like abandoned hire bikes.
People have reconstructed Macmillan’s putative machine, based on surviving contraptions by his contemporaries Thomas McCall and Gavin Dalzell (whose 1845 treadle bike is in a Glasgow museum).
But they’ve proved impossible to steer and terrible to ride. Too hard for a few miles of flat, smooth tarmac, never mind 70 over rough, hilly tracks.
Nevertheless, Dumfries to Glasgow – on a bike with gears, brakes and pneumatic tyres (thanks to the genuine invention by Scot John Boyd Dunlop) – is a grand ride.
There’s lots to see, including Scotland’s highest village/pub, a goldrush stream, a bike-only road up to a 730m summit with a giant golf ball, and a Wellington statue with a traffic cone on his head.
