Landsurfer
Veteran
Yes, it is, and a memorial at the Working Mens Club and of course his grave in the local cemetery ....
Your ride today....
- Thread starter gbb
- Start date
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Richard A Thackeray
Legendary Member
Thanks!!
I keep meaning to have a drive down
Likewise, I'm told that the Wetherspoons (of all places!!) in Morley, has a Beryl Burton tribute wall/corner!
EltonFrog
Legendary Member
What a lovely day! Bright sunshine, no rain, no wind, and quite mild.
The Fragrant MrsP wanted to go to Oxford today and suggested a ride on the road bikes to the city of dreaming spires, then changed her mind because she wanted to my some stuff from the Nespresso shop which is bulky so we took the hybrids with the pannier bags.
The route is mainly traffic free from here to the city, using the old railway track, then cycle route 5 from Didcot to Sutton Courtney, Abingdon, Radley, and along the Thames path, (they’ve started to re-surface and widen some of the pathway from Radley to the Thames path) to Oxford city centre.
We did our errands had an indifferent pasty, and cycled more or less the same way back.
No incidents though there are some dopey feckers that use the Thames path.
35.65 miles today, the longest ride this December, 23rd bike ride of the month, that’s probably a record for me.
The Fragrant MrsP wanted to go to Oxford today and suggested a ride on the road bikes to the city of dreaming spires, then changed her mind because she wanted to my some stuff from the Nespresso shop which is bulky so we took the hybrids with the pannier bags.
The route is mainly traffic free from here to the city, using the old railway track, then cycle route 5 from Didcot to Sutton Courtney, Abingdon, Radley, and along the Thames path, (they’ve started to re-surface and widen some of the pathway from Radley to the Thames path) to Oxford city centre.
We did our errands had an indifferent pasty, and cycled more or less the same way back.
No incidents though there are some dopey feckers that use the Thames path.
35.65 miles today, the longest ride this December, 23rd bike ride of the month, that’s probably a record for me.
Goldenretriever
Veteran
- Location
- Near Norwich
Finally had a ride and on my new bike as well
Life, family and chest infection has kept me from riding since mid September. At that point I was the fittest I have ever been, certainly brought down to earth with a bang this afternoon. 30 miles at 15.3 ave, legs are sore but great to be out again.
Life, family and chest infection has kept me from riding since mid September. At that point I was the fittest I have ever been, certainly brought down to earth with a bang this afternoon. 30 miles at 15.3 ave, legs are sore but great to be out again.
I had a great day out on the Stumpjumper today at Danbury Common with a bunch of friends 
It's less than an hours drive from my door yet I hadn't been until today - I'm sure I'll be back again though
Only 7 miles ridden and 930ft climbed but I'm exhausted! The trails were a bit muddy but not too bad, the tyres were largely sticking around the bends but the climb back to the top got harder as the day went on
Unfortunately the day was cut short when I noticed my driveside crank arm was loose. I could have just tightened it back up but decided it was a better idea to call it a day and strip the cranks off once home in the garage. Plus it gives me an excuse to play in the garage all evening
It's less than an hours drive from my door yet I hadn't been until today - I'm sure I'll be back again though Only 7 miles ridden and 930ft climbed but I'm exhausted! The trails were a bit muddy but not too bad, the tyres were largely sticking around the bends but the climb back to the top got harder as the day went on
Unfortunately the day was cut short when I noticed my driveside crank arm was loose. I could have just tightened it back up but decided it was a better idea to call it a day and strip the cranks off once home in the garage. Plus it gives me an excuse to play in the garage all evening
derrick
The Glue that binds us together.
- Location
- On the edge of London
Built a bike up just before Christmas for a mates other half. She had her first ride on it today. Only a short shake down ride. She was grinning for the whole ride. Her first carbon road bike with Di2. She is looking forward to our next ride. Obviously we had to end the ride in the pub. Although she was a bit nervous at times as there was a lot of traffic around at certain parts of the ride.we put a few little bunps in trying to get her used to the way Di2 works.
Check out my activity on Strava: https://strava.app.link/36u7t2QyQ2
Check out my activity on Strava: https://strava.app.link/36u7t2QyQ2
Dave 123
Legendary Member
- Location
- Cambridgeshire alps
A late Battisborough loop this evening. It was nice to be out in the dusk.
https://www.strava.com/activities/2968228185
once home Lisa asked if I’d read her message....?
No.
Could I pick up a cooked chicken from her friend Rachel. It could be found in the garden.... another 3 miles done!
https://www.strava.com/activities/2968293037
https://www.strava.com/activities/2968228185
once home Lisa asked if I’d read her message....?
No.
Could I pick up a cooked chicken from her friend Rachel. It could be found in the garden.... another 3 miles done!
https://www.strava.com/activities/2968293037
footloose crow
Veteran
- Location
- Cornwall. UK
30 December. Through the gates of Hayle to Mounts Bay
There is a steep hill out of Truro that I have not done before. I will not do it again. I have been playing psychological games with myself, pretending I have no intention today of getting to Marazion and St Micheal's Mount. The distance is too great.
'Just get to the top of the first hill' is my initial target, no point in intimidating myself, something I find all too easy but the hill leaves me breathless as it steepens more and more all the way to the top. I cannot see how I will make it to Marazion, to see St Michael's Mount, just to see if I can. Or can't. Thirty-two miles there, thirty miles back; it's a metric century but a random number of miles. The barrier is mental, not physical. Actually on the hills the barrier is both.
A fast downhill to the Bissoe Valley, once more down to the valley, that wasteland of blasted hillsides patched here and there with russet bracken and gorse. Then new (to me) lanes but oh so quiet. Ten miles and five cars. The sun is out on the hillsides although the tops are in cloud. I am cycling more up than down and gaining height for once, heading for the roof of Cornwall although it is just a bungalow roof, a mere 750 feet high but all of those feet are above sea level and they all count. Cornish feet are longer than English feet.
I transit villages whose names roll off the tongue in a thick Cornish rumble - Cusgrane, Crofthandy, Frogpool and then at the top of the bungalow roof of Cornwall, next to the TV aerials you can see from Truro, is the prosaic Four Lanes. A Saxon name, not Celtic. There are four lanes - perfectly accurate but no soul. Its cold up here though and mist is falling on me, beading on my jacket and face.
Some downhill now: this is not the sawtooth kind of ride I have endured further east in Cornwall. The hills here are time-worn granite domes and the lanes lead you up and down majestically, gracefully and without hiding sudden gradient changes after every bend as the knavish hills further east are wont to do. I can see over the broken roadside walls to the lines of hills that mark the beginning of the granite landscape of West Penwith. This is an uncompromising land and farmers make little impact with ploughs or drainage - leaving tufts of moorland, brown now in winter time and rock strewn pastures. The walls here may have been in place since the Bronze Age - they enclose small, irregular fields making no logical pattern to my 21st century eyes.
Praze-an Beeble has a traffic jam. A tractor and trailer is trying to pass a lorry and there are several cars backed up. A number of people are standing and watching. I thread the needle between the cars and head off up another quiet lane. The GPS tells me to turn right but it is just a field. Not even a path. I ignore it. After a hundred yards of hissy buzzes and red flashing LEDs it goes into sulk mode.
Carnhell Green, a bastard Saxon/Celtic name and then Gwinear, a name to say slowly with the emphasis on the second syllable, leads to Angarrack and I am almost in Hayle. The road surface is corrugated, shaking the bike and me, a deep vibration through my fore arms and some bad tempered clicks and rattles from the bike. This is daffodil country, our own flowers and not imported by jet, but who will pick them next month? They are ready now, green stalks pushing through the earth with a yellow fuse about to light.
Down into Hayle, a fast downhill and now some traffic. The world has woken up. Holiday timings where the urgency of a 8 am start has gone for many but now it is 11 am and everyone is on their way to somewhere, to do something with the day. Out through the gates of Hayle and onto the NCN route to Marazion. It's quiet and reasonably flat - at least to my eyes that have been led up, up, neck bendingly up so many Cornish hills this last month. The GPS begs to differ and says it is uphill.
Marazion is heaving. The car parks are as full as they are in August and people are sitting on the beach despite the cold wind and temperatures around 8c. Time for a photo. I have made it. More than halfway along my self imposed target. Two flapjacks disappear before shivering I turn the bike around and tell it to head for home.
Back to Hayle. It is 'Heyl' in Cornish and that sounds even more like the land of the Devil, but its name means 'estuary'. I pun on the name, invoking Meatloaf songs and old films as I spin through the traffic. Out on the road to Gwithian it is very busy, lines of cars waiting to get into the car park, VW camper vans and conversions, surfboards and dogs, families on walks. Sand lies across the road after the recent gales. Up the steep hill then until a quiet lane gives me respite from the traffic always just behind me, itching to get past. Views across Hayle Bay to St Ives, lit up by a winter sun in the clearer skies offshore. I can see a full moon, a pale orb, through the clouds that are moving faster this afternoon. The moon is bisected by the bare branches of the hawthorn and sycamore, oak and ash that line the road.
I am two hundred feet above the hungry Atlantic that waits just ten yards away sometimes, just a thin line of blackthorn and bramble between us. The sun has illuminated the sea in places, creating pools of turquoise. The coast strides off, headland after headland until lost in the mist on the horizon. The road is flat and fast but all too quickly come the hairpin bends down into Portreath, sweeping views across the bay, depositing me with hot brakes on the beach. It's doing a winter impression of summer here, well wrapped visitors on the sands, some body boarders playing in the soupy swash. No lifeguards today and this can be a dangerous beach. Time for another photo. I send it to my son who has just returned to Hong Kong and get a testy reply as he finishes his 28 hour journey home and faces reporting to work in a few hours.
Madame Crow is equally unimpressed as promises made of tasks to be done today have been sacrificed to my obsession with a number. She takes delight in telling me that the septic tank drain has blocked and I have a specific and unpleasant job to do with rods on my return.
I am tired now and the long hill up from the coast to the heights of Redruth feels harder than it should be. Scorrier follows and then the dip and climb around Chacewater. The legs keep spinning, the lungs keep inflating and I know I can make it. Down into Truro, through the traffic and then home, watching the distance covered until it hits 62.6 miles at the top of my lane.
A hundred kilometres is just a number. I am happy to stop. It was a psychological barrier for me but there is no sense of victory now. Just five hours the saddle, watching the landscape unfold and lost in my own thoughts as always. Another circle around Cornwall, a snail track of electrons.
There is a steep hill out of Truro that I have not done before. I will not do it again. I have been playing psychological games with myself, pretending I have no intention today of getting to Marazion and St Micheal's Mount. The distance is too great.
'Just get to the top of the first hill' is my initial target, no point in intimidating myself, something I find all too easy but the hill leaves me breathless as it steepens more and more all the way to the top. I cannot see how I will make it to Marazion, to see St Michael's Mount, just to see if I can. Or can't. Thirty-two miles there, thirty miles back; it's a metric century but a random number of miles. The barrier is mental, not physical. Actually on the hills the barrier is both.
A fast downhill to the Bissoe Valley, once more down to the valley, that wasteland of blasted hillsides patched here and there with russet bracken and gorse. Then new (to me) lanes but oh so quiet. Ten miles and five cars. The sun is out on the hillsides although the tops are in cloud. I am cycling more up than down and gaining height for once, heading for the roof of Cornwall although it is just a bungalow roof, a mere 750 feet high but all of those feet are above sea level and they all count. Cornish feet are longer than English feet.
I transit villages whose names roll off the tongue in a thick Cornish rumble - Cusgrane, Crofthandy, Frogpool and then at the top of the bungalow roof of Cornwall, next to the TV aerials you can see from Truro, is the prosaic Four Lanes. A Saxon name, not Celtic. There are four lanes - perfectly accurate but no soul. Its cold up here though and mist is falling on me, beading on my jacket and face.
Some downhill now: this is not the sawtooth kind of ride I have endured further east in Cornwall. The hills here are time-worn granite domes and the lanes lead you up and down majestically, gracefully and without hiding sudden gradient changes after every bend as the knavish hills further east are wont to do. I can see over the broken roadside walls to the lines of hills that mark the beginning of the granite landscape of West Penwith. This is an uncompromising land and farmers make little impact with ploughs or drainage - leaving tufts of moorland, brown now in winter time and rock strewn pastures. The walls here may have been in place since the Bronze Age - they enclose small, irregular fields making no logical pattern to my 21st century eyes.
Praze-an Beeble has a traffic jam. A tractor and trailer is trying to pass a lorry and there are several cars backed up. A number of people are standing and watching. I thread the needle between the cars and head off up another quiet lane. The GPS tells me to turn right but it is just a field. Not even a path. I ignore it. After a hundred yards of hissy buzzes and red flashing LEDs it goes into sulk mode.
Carnhell Green, a bastard Saxon/Celtic name and then Gwinear, a name to say slowly with the emphasis on the second syllable, leads to Angarrack and I am almost in Hayle. The road surface is corrugated, shaking the bike and me, a deep vibration through my fore arms and some bad tempered clicks and rattles from the bike. This is daffodil country, our own flowers and not imported by jet, but who will pick them next month? They are ready now, green stalks pushing through the earth with a yellow fuse about to light.
Down into Hayle, a fast downhill and now some traffic. The world has woken up. Holiday timings where the urgency of a 8 am start has gone for many but now it is 11 am and everyone is on their way to somewhere, to do something with the day. Out through the gates of Hayle and onto the NCN route to Marazion. It's quiet and reasonably flat - at least to my eyes that have been led up, up, neck bendingly up so many Cornish hills this last month. The GPS begs to differ and says it is uphill.
Marazion is heaving. The car parks are as full as they are in August and people are sitting on the beach despite the cold wind and temperatures around 8c. Time for a photo. I have made it. More than halfway along my self imposed target. Two flapjacks disappear before shivering I turn the bike around and tell it to head for home.
Back to Hayle. It is 'Heyl' in Cornish and that sounds even more like the land of the Devil, but its name means 'estuary'. I pun on the name, invoking Meatloaf songs and old films as I spin through the traffic. Out on the road to Gwithian it is very busy, lines of cars waiting to get into the car park, VW camper vans and conversions, surfboards and dogs, families on walks. Sand lies across the road after the recent gales. Up the steep hill then until a quiet lane gives me respite from the traffic always just behind me, itching to get past. Views across Hayle Bay to St Ives, lit up by a winter sun in the clearer skies offshore. I can see a full moon, a pale orb, through the clouds that are moving faster this afternoon. The moon is bisected by the bare branches of the hawthorn and sycamore, oak and ash that line the road.
I am two hundred feet above the hungry Atlantic that waits just ten yards away sometimes, just a thin line of blackthorn and bramble between us. The sun has illuminated the sea in places, creating pools of turquoise. The coast strides off, headland after headland until lost in the mist on the horizon. The road is flat and fast but all too quickly come the hairpin bends down into Portreath, sweeping views across the bay, depositing me with hot brakes on the beach. It's doing a winter impression of summer here, well wrapped visitors on the sands, some body boarders playing in the soupy swash. No lifeguards today and this can be a dangerous beach. Time for another photo. I send it to my son who has just returned to Hong Kong and get a testy reply as he finishes his 28 hour journey home and faces reporting to work in a few hours.
Madame Crow is equally unimpressed as promises made of tasks to be done today have been sacrificed to my obsession with a number. She takes delight in telling me that the septic tank drain has blocked and I have a specific and unpleasant job to do with rods on my return.
I am tired now and the long hill up from the coast to the heights of Redruth feels harder than it should be. Scorrier follows and then the dip and climb around Chacewater. The legs keep spinning, the lungs keep inflating and I know I can make it. Down into Truro, through the traffic and then home, watching the distance covered until it hits 62.6 miles at the top of my lane.
A hundred kilometres is just a number. I am happy to stop. It was a psychological barrier for me but there is no sense of victory now. Just five hours the saddle, watching the landscape unfold and lost in my own thoughts as always. Another circle around Cornwall, a snail track of electrons.
Congratulations on your first 100km @footloose crow 
. With the terrain in Cornwall makes it even more impressive
. With the terrain in Cornwall makes it even more impressive
footloose crow
Veteran
- Location
- Cornwall. UK
Thank you. I will rest for a couple of days now!Congratulations on your first 100km @footloose crow
AndreaJ
Veteran
It was another beautiful day in Shropshire today and despite the many useful things I really should have been doing at home it was just too nice not to get out even if it was just for a short ride. Did some useful stuff first as the lanes were a bit icy after a frost last night and did a quick tour of the Whixall lanes. The plan was to spend as little time as possible heading into the sun as it was making it quite difficult to see. Lots of dog walkers out today and had to stop to let a pair of Muscovy ducks waddle across the lane by one of the farms. 18.3 miles in the sunshine @15.3mph.
Grant Fondo
Guru
- Location
- Cheshire
Fab ride, great way to end the year
Grant Fondo
Guru
- Location
- Cheshire
Lovely pics!
Dave 123
Legendary Member
- Location
- Cambridgeshire alps
Another short ride today. My legs felt like lead, they didn’t improve at all!
I rode the quiet lanes in between the A379 and the A38. I did have to cross and recross the A38.
I spotted Llama, black sheep and bullfinch.
https://www.strava.com/activities/2969735755
I rode the quiet lanes in between the A379 and the A38. I did have to cross and recross the A38.
I spotted Llama, black sheep and bullfinch.
https://www.strava.com/activities/2969735755
Noodle Legs
Winging it
- Location
- Coalville, Leicestershire
Nipped out this morning with two purposes- a) to complete the 2019 50km a month challenge and b) to grab some veloviewer squares which had been eluding me for months.
Both were achieved.
There’s nothing spectacular to note about the ride or the route- it was all familiar territory with little peel offs to grab squares and so this write-up will be concise but I will say the weather was lovely when the sun came out which did make everything so much more pleasant!
44.7 miles today.
Both were achieved.
There’s nothing spectacular to note about the ride or the route- it was all familiar territory with little peel offs to grab squares and so this write-up will be concise but I will say the weather was lovely when the sun came out which did make everything so much more pleasant!
44.7 miles today.
