The Tay by Bike – Broughty Castle, Tayport and Tentsmuir Point
A day by bike, from Dundee station and back.
The route
Broughty Ferry is Dundee's seaside, and across the mouth of the Tay lies Tentsmuir, a pine forest and a great spread of dunes where seals haul out on the far sandbanks at low tide.
A day by bike joins the two. It runs east along the river to the Ferry, where fishermen's cottages line Fisher Street and a castle of the 1490s guards the harbour. Then it's back to the city and over the Tay Road Bridge, whose walkway runs down the middle to Fife, for Tayport's harbour, the forest tracks out to Tentsmuir Point and the long beach at Kinshaldy. It's about 28 miles, flat but for gravel in the forest: a long day on an ordinary hire bike, an easier one on an e-bike.
The day
Tay
A day by bike on both shores of the Tay, from Broughty Ferry's castle over the road bridge to the pinewoods and sands of Tentsmuir. The morning follows the river east to the Ferry's old fishing street and the castle at its harbour. The afternoon crosses to Fife, by Tayport's harbour to the Point and the beach at Kinshaldy, and home over the bridge.
Broughty Ferry
An attraction
Collect your bike at Forks, the café beside the V&A that hires bikes and e-bikes from 9.30am (book online). Then it's about 30 minutes' ride east on National Cycle Route 1, flat all the way, by the docks and then a riverside path, to Broughty Ferry. Dundee calls it the Ferry. It was a burgh of its own until 1913. Come in along Fisher Street, past the old fishermen's cottages, the lifeboat station and the Ship Inn, to the harbour. Visocchi's, on Gray Street, sells the Ferry's ice cream.
3 min by bike
Broughty Castle
An attraction
It's a 3-minute ride along the front to Broughty Castle, on its rock at the harbour mouth. Andrew, Lord Gray, built the tower in the 1490s to guard the Tay; the English took it in 1547 and held it until 1550, and in the 1860s the army made it a gun fort. Inside is a free museum. Climb to the observation deck, where binoculars from reception look across to Tayport and the Tentsmuir sands; watch the water for the Tay's dolphins. The beach runs east from below the walls.
35 min by bike
The Tay Road Bridge
There's no boat across from the Ferry, so it's back the way you came, about 35 minutes' ride to the bridge's landing by the waterfront. A lift big enough for a bike takes you up to the walkway, which runs 1.4 miles down the middle of the Tay Road Bridge, opened in 1966. Halfway over, the firth opens out to the sea on your left. At the Fife end a path runs under the road to the bridge's car park, on the east edge of Newport-on-Tay.
20 min by bike
Tayport harbour
It's about 20 minutes' ride east by the shore road to Tayport, past the West Lights, two old lighthouses on the common at the west end of the town. Tayport was once Ferry-Port-on-Craig, the Fife end of the crossing to Broughty, and from 1851 a steam ferry carried the railway's wagons between the two. Its harbour is full of small boats, with the Larick Beacon, an old lighthouse on legs, in the water off it. Lunch is at the community-run Harbour Café, or the Larick Café on the way out.
25 min by bike
Tentsmuir Point
The ice house, where the salmon fishers once kept their ice, is about 25 minutes' ride by Tayport Heath and the forest's gravel tracks. Leave the bikes there and walk the dunes to the shore. Seals haul out on the far sandbanks around low tide. This day brings you here at about 1.30pm. If low water falls between 8am and noon, turn the day round and cross the bridge first; if it falls before 8am or after 4pm, the seals are seldom out. Keep well back, and never follow the ebb out onto the banks.
10 min by bike
Kinshaldy Beach
It's about 10 minutes' ride south through the pines to Kinshaldy, where the forest opens onto a great sweep of sand and dunes. Wartime concrete blocks, laid at the tide's edge against landing craft, now stand back in the dunes where the sands have grown out past them. Then it's home the way you came, past the ice house to Tayport and over the bridge, about an hour's ride, to hand the bikes back at Forks by 4.30pm.
If it rains
Broughty Castle is the day's only roof, and the rest is open shore, bridge and forest. On a wet day leave the bikes: the Xplore 5 bus runs from the Nethergate to Broughty Ferry about every 15 minutes, and the train takes 6 minutes, about hourly from Monday to Saturday. Give the castle longer, walk Fisher Street and the harbour, and keep Tentsmuir for a dry day. In a strong wind the bridge's walkway shuts to cyclists at gusts of 60mph, and the Point is no place to be.
Photographs by Princess_Mia, Ian Lindsay, Thomas Andy Branson and Alex Keighley via Google