Beyond Abington, the river and the rail alike turn aside and leave the road to solitude. Not even Telford’s road-engineering genius could abolish the ghastly pull-up over the bleak and beastly moor that stretches between this point and Douglas Mill. You deceptively descend to it, to Denighton Bridge, crossing a little stream that comes down the valley from Crawfordjohn, but then rise to an exposed lonely plateau, bleaker than Shap and without its interest. Down at Denighton Bridge, where the view ranges along the gloomy valley wherein the Covenanters skulked and the troopers of Montrose hunted them, the sheep graze and the lambkins frisk in spring. Even a wet and cold cyclist (who is not easily amused) must shriek with laughter at the antics of the lambs, which are a good deal funnier than those of any low comedian I have ever seen. No need to encore them either, for they continue all day, or at least until, exhausted with laughter, you depart, to face the muir above. Heaven send the traveller who travels here by his own efforts has fine weather and a following wind, otherwise his progress is slow martyrdom along eight miles of shivery loneliness, and thrice welcome is the longed-for descent to Douglas Mill. The Douglas Water runs in a deep and beautifully wooded valley at Douglas Mill, where the wayside Douglas Mill Inn stood in the coaching era, and where, behind an imposing gravelled sweep, the entrance to the beautiful park of the Earl of Home is seen. For five miles another stretch of old road goes to the right, across Broken Cross Muir, as far as Lesmahagow: the new road pursuing an eventful course, past the Newfield Inn. Lesmahagow, _i.e._ the Court, or Place, of Mahego, an early Gaelic saint, was once the site of an Abbey. It is now a small, but prosperous, town, looking very new and neat, in spite of the fact that it is situated on the edge of the Lanark coal-field. The traveller who pursues a dogged way along the road, and looks to neither right nor left, will know nothing of Lesmahagow, which lies slightly to the left hand; and I am sure he will not miss much. But, in the crossing of old and new roads here, at the bridging of the little river Nethan, and with the railway passing near by, a singular complexity of ways is produced. [Sidenote: _THE LANARKSHIRE COALFIELD_]