Lee Pen

Crawford Macnab

18 February 2025

Only one late call off saw ten walkers (and Meg) meet at the Hall Street Car Park in Innerleithen.

While waiting for Stuart and Karen to arrive there was time to admire Andrew’s new waterproof jacket, finally having retired his very faded and no longer waterproof old jacket!

In a slight change to the walkhighlands route we headed past the tennis courts to join an alternative route to Lee Pen via The Strip, which went through some short sections of woodland paths gradually climbing up to join St Ronan’s Wood.

This offered the option of stopping briefly to look over the wall to St Ronan’s Well. The visitor attraction with its garden and museum was opened in 1896 and may well still be open to the public from April to October.

Before long the slight detour returned to join the original route with a small section of tarmac road to reach a crossroad of paths. At this point we turned north and began the steady pull up to Lee Pen.

The final section is quite steep and made more awkward with the recent sleet but with some care taken everyone arrived safely at the top.

Despite having chicken wire on them, the steps of the summit stile were very slippy.

As there was a logbook in the small wooden box at the summit, Andrew registered the teams succesful midweek marauding.

We dropped off the summit a short distance to the north to find a good sheltered spot away from the cold wind for our lunch stop.

After lunch, with the weather improving the group were happy to descend off the other side of Lee Pen rather than retrace our steps down the way we had come up. Heading north west and before reaching the bump of Lee Burn Head, we turned north east then east following a faint but good path to join a farm track that took us all the way down to the B709.

We then headed briefly north along the B709 to cross the bridge over Leithen Water and join the Leithen Water path that heads back in to Innerleithen.

The path climbs gradually through the woods before descending gently as it enters Innerleithen. At this point we left the path to cross the Leithen Water again over the Cuddy Bridge.

(The Cuddy Bridge, also known as the Old Bridge, was built in 1701 to provide access across the Leithen Water to the former church at Kirklands. The bridge was constructed to allow the congregation living on the eastern side of the parish to reach the Kirk on Leithen Road more easily. It is a single-arch pack-horse bridge that was too narrow for carts, thus only horses or packhorses could cross it. The Scottish word for a small, rough horse is ‘cuddy’, hence the name ‘Cuddy Bridge’.)

Before returning to the car park we stopped at Loulabelles cafe for tea, coffees and some excellent scones / cakes!