IT MIGHT be the furthest north a People Makes Glasgow bike has ever been on a 24-hour hire - and it’s all for a good cause.

Lenzie Academy teenager Andy Caldwell set himself a spectacular fundraising challenge – to ride one of the city bikes all the way to the top of the UK’s longest continuous hill climb at Applecross in Wester Ross.

The famous Bealach na Bà is a 626 metre ascent over 10km and at its steepest is a 20 per cent gradient.

Doing it on a sleek racing bike with many gears is hard enough – doing it on a city bike with hardly any is almost impossible.

“It was fine, actually – I reckoned doing it on a normal bike would be too easy,” grins Andy, 17, who is in sixth year at the school.

“I wanted it to be a proper challenge.”

His bike attracted a lot of attention, with one lot of motorcyclists stopping to find out what he was up to.

“They took the charity details and ended up sponsoring me online, which was lovely,” smiles Andy.

Andy was inspired to make the trip as part of a fundraising trip he is making to Malawi later in the summer.

He is visiting the village of Namisu, to help paint classrooms in the local school, repair mosquito nets over the windows and carry out general maintenance work.

Andy has paid for all his own expenses for the trip but is raising money – with the help and support of his younger sisters Hannah and Katie – to pay for materials when he gets there.

So far, his cycling efforts have raised £1000 and Katie, who is 10, raised a further £500 by completing 1350 lengths of her local swimming pool – the equivalent of swimming the Channel.

The reason behind the trip is one close to the Caldwell family’s hearts, as Andy’s mum Joy explains.

“Twenty years ago, my uncle John Searle visited Malawi as a lay pastor, to talk about his own conversion to Christianity,” says Joy.

“Shocked by the levels of poverty and need he saw there, he decided to stay and help. It’s improving now but back then, many women – something like one in seven – died in childbirth so there were very many children without parents.

“My uncle started to employ local people to build houses for the children, and took on a 99 year lease for a huge area of land. He irrigated it, built fish farms and a school, and it now houses around 1400 people.”

John set up the charity AquAid Lifeline Fund to raise money for the region, and was also the driving force behind the creation of a centre for disabled children in response to pleas from a young mother whose son had been badly brain damaged.

“It now supports 50 children with disabilities and it has the only special needs teacher in Malawi,” adds Joy. “It’s a phenomenal achievement.”

Crucially,

Crucially, thanks to the village’s network of 11 daycare centres, most of the orphaned children are looked after on a day care basis, meaning they can remain in their communities rather than isolated in an orphanage.

Each daycare centre benefits from its own clean water supply, its own agricultural projects, and in some cases a simple solar powered irrigation system for the year-round growth of vegetables.

“My uncle John has made Namisu his life’s work – he is almost 80, but he is still involved and until this year, still went over to Malawi to visit.”

Andy is making the trip with his great-aunt Priscilla, who is a retired teacher.

“Andy had wanted to go for a while, and Priscilla was keen to go back and help out in the school, so they decided to go together,” explains Joy.

“I’m really proud of Andy for wanting to do this – for wanting to help people.”

If you would like to support Andy’s efforts visit his MyDonate page at www.mydonate.bt.com

IT’S the new tough challenge for die-hard cyclists and one Glasgow woman has turned it into a fantastic fundraiser.

Everesting – riding up and down a hill continuously until you have scaled the equivalent height of the world’s highest mountain – is not for the faint-hearted.

But Beth Sutton, a data analyst from Anniesland, has completed it, raising almost £500 for charity in the process.

“I completed an Iron Man challenge, which combines running, cycling and swimming, and that’s what really got me into cycling,” explains the 30-year-old.

“When I heard about Everesting, I wanted to give it a go. Fewer than 100 women in the world have done it and I’m only the second in Scotland.”

Beth cycled up Crow Road from Lennoxtown in the Campsies, a distance of around three miles, “34 and a bit times,” giving herself a target of 24 hours to do it.

“I started at 6am and finished with 40 minutes to spare,” she laughs. “The hardest time was during the night when it was dark.

“But during the day, it was lovely – it’s a beautiful cycle to do in the sunshine. It was actually too hot at times, which is unusual in Scotland, but there was a tail wind going up the hill and the scenery was amazing.”

Supported by her boyfriend Michael Holmes, who joined her on some of the night time runs, Beth was also touched by the support shown by fellow cyclists and passing motorists.

“Everyone was really kind, shouting out support and I got lots of messages online afterwards,” she says.

Beth is raising money for the charity Re~Cycle (Bikes to Africa).

“While for me and many of us in the UK riding a bike is a hobby, for rural communities in Africa where people often have no access to transport and spend hours walking to access healthcare, education, employment and so on, it can make a huge difference to people’s lives,” she explains.

“Re~Cycle takes unwanted bikes from the UK and donates them to communities in Africa to make transport easier and improve people’s lives.”

If you would like to support Beth, visit her JustGiving page at www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Elizabeth-R-Sutton