While spending a few days in Penpont, I took a walk along the Scaur Water to visit the Old Graveyard at Keir Mill. Sunlight flickered through the heavy covering of trees around me as I walked along a well-trodden dirt path. Down a slight embankment the river gurgled and burbled while reflecting diamonds of bright sunshine and flickers of the blue grey of the sky above.
Cutting up from the river by a bridge that led to the road, I walked on to the small village of Keir Mill and then down another dirt path and through some woods that brought me to the Old Graveyard. Through the iron turnstile gate, I walked around the lichen covered gravestones through long, wet grass that soaked my feet. Like all graveyards around here, hundreds of rooks squawked from nearby trees, the braver ones flapping down to gravestone perches to keep an eye on what I was up to.
At the far end of the graveyard, I came to a gravestone marking where various members of the Macmillan family lay buried. To anyone who is a fan of cycling, or even just enjoys getting out and about on a bike, this gravestone is an important memorial to one of the fathers of the bicycle, Kirkpatrick Macmillan.
Kirkpatrick Macmillan was a blacksmith from Keir and was the man who in 1839 created the first ever pedal driven bicycle, or velocipede as it was known back then. Prior to this, bicycles were really nothing much more than hobbyhorses powered by walking or by just zooming on them down a hill. Macmillan’s invention meant that a rider could now propel themselves along with pedals which made cycling much more efficient, and to prove this he took to cycling along the country roads around his home to show the potential of his machine. On his bike he travelled from his home in Keir to Dumfries, some 14 miles away, in less than an hour. In 1842 he set out from his home to Glasgow, 70 miles away, and completed the trip in two days. Approaching Glasgow, he became one of the first people to be prosecuted for what we’d now see as reckless cycling. A large crowd had gathered to see him and his marvellous invention when he accidentally knocked down a little girl. The child was not badly hurt, but Macmillan had to appear at court the next day and was fined five shillings. It was rumoured that the magistrate who fined him asked to see a demonstration of his bike and was so impressed that he paid the fine for him. On his cycle back from Glasgow to his home it is said that he overtook the mail coach, his bike managing the stupefying speed of 8 miles an hour on the rough road.
Macmillan never took out a patent for his invention or tried to monetise it, however the design for his bicycle was copied by several others who cashed in on it. Not one to complain or care too much about that, Macmillan preferred to live the quiet life in his home in the countryside, where in 1878 he died at the age of 65. The Smithy and house in which he lived still sits on a road just outside of Keir Mill and is adorned with various plaques celebrating his invention.
In a hollow in a tree standing near Macmillan’s grave I left the Skulferatu that had accompanied me on my walk.
The coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are -
Latitude 55.219208
Longitude -3.788853
what3words: trap.harmonica.pocketed
I used the following sources for information on Kirkpatrick MacMillan –
Cycling – 5th December 1896
Dumfries and Galloway Standard – 8th March 1939
The History of Cycling in Fifty Bikes
By Tom Ambrose
2013
Information plaque at the Old Smithy by Keir Mill
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