Somersby, St Andrews Drive
History Training

Club Training routes: Sherbrooke Hills, Pollokshields

by |Published |2 Comments

We thought it’d be fun to write up some of our favourite club sessions and routes, to perhaps give a few ideas and inspiration, or take a look at in more detail. The club’s full training schedule is on our website, and detailed each week by our coaches during the lockdown, via social media. We’re grateful to Niall Murphy for his excellent twitter posts and pictures, that served as the inspiration to this first post.

Sherbrooke Hills

A core session for our winter training schedule is the Sherbrooke hills. We’d even suggest it’s one of the very best hill rep routes in Glasgow: we even have members, who’ve moved away or further afield, comment to us of their “fond” memories of the session, and all the hard work. To borrow a term from cycling, it’s perhaps the Queen of our training sessions. It’s well worth hunting down, to create memories of your own: have a look at the map, or read our summary below, or why not become a member of the club, so when we resume our winter training schedule we can introduce you to it properly!

The Strava segment helps visualise it, but:

  • It starts on St Andrews Drive/Dalziel, right next to the lampost adjacent to ‘Somersby’. Head up the punchy (first!) hill, turning left on Nithsdale Road, then next left (by Sherbrooke castle).
  • Head up the Sherbrooke Avenue hill (second!) – the famous three parter. Continue over the top, and down a bit, turning right on Springkell avenue just by the postbox (watch out when it’s wet).
  • Continue down, then next right on Hamilton Avenue, up the steep (third!) hill, turning right and continuing up as it levels off.
  • Turn right again, to the junction with Springkell again (by the postbox), but this time turn and run back up Sherbrooke Avenue for the fourth hill.
  • Then it’s a brief downhill for a bit, taking the second right down Hamilton avenue, and first left to complete the loop at the junction with Dalziel.

Club sessions are generally a timed tempo hills session (eg. 30 minutes), a number of loops (3-4), or efforts on the uphill/recover downhill.

Do watch out for leaves in the autumn months, which – with some intermittent lighting – can absure uneven surfaces, ties. Roads can sometimes be busy too, so be sure to be careful, and wear highviz, and of course give way to others on the route, and during coronavirus, take care to follow applicable rules.

A guided tour

For those who know the Sherbrooke hills as a classic, we will all have found ourselves peering up at some of the houses whilst doing the session, thinking (perhaps initially) Is there a story to that house? – Pollokshields is Scotland’s first Garden Suburb, so if you’re on Twitter Niall Murphy (@MurphyNiallGLA) is well worth a follow for interesting and engaging stories of the architecture of this neck of the woods.

A few highlights to look up next time you’re along.

This whole thread is lovely, but some of the background to the house the Sherbrooke hills starts at.

and opposite:

Then further round, the Sherbrooke Castle:

And a little further afield, some fascinating detail about a building I’d seen in passing countless times, but never thought twice about:

Or further afield on Shields Road no less:

With many thanks to Niall Murphy for the tweets, and permission to use his photographs as the featured image in this post. Do give him a follow on twitter, or check out his #MomentsOfBeauty hashtag for more Pollokshields architecture.

You may also like