Lochore Meadows

Took the folding bikes across to Fife for a wee ride around Lochore Meadows - bit of a test run to see how easy it was to fit them in the car (very) and what Lochore itself was like. Not the best of starts as there was a herd of cows blocking the track, surrounding a couple of guys sitting on a bench with two large, unleashed dogs that were intermittently barking and running at the cows. We gave them all a wide berth as did other walkers. A guy in front of us said something to the two men and one of them shouted back something along the lines that he was sitting there before the cows appeared so why should he change his behaviour and keep his dogs under control. You do slightly wonder about the common sense of grazing the cows across the path at the weekend and during the school holidays when the park is at its busiest, even if the grazing is an important element in preserving the grassland habitat. Still, if people and cattle do have to co-exist then keeping dogs on a lead seems basic common sense as you do read about cattle trampling people and if the dogs did seriously spook the cows, who knows what they would do. Still, after that it was a very pleasant ride, along quite varied paths, sometimes by the water and sometimes not. And then back at the car park we cycled up to the old winding gear pictured here. This was the winding gear for Shaft 2 of the Mary Colliery that operated on the site until the 1960s.