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Tuesday Bonus
I had an early start this morning, up at 5am to get the 6.26 train from Oxford. However, rather than heading into London I changed at Reading and caught the train to Staines. The meeting started at 8.30am and we worked straight through to 1pm. The client had to finish our meeting as he had another meeting to go to. This meant that I had an early start back to Oxford, getting home around 4pm. It had been a wet and windy start to the day and the blustery weather had continued all day. However, arriving home it looked like the sun was trying to shine through, although it was still quite breezy.
So I decided to head out on the mountain bike to make the most of the weather.
From home I headed up to Headington and crossed under the A40 to Barton. First stop was the little park area where I had seen local kids playing on a small pump track. Luckily for me there was no one there today, so I tore across the grass and pumped over the few bumps. It was a good place to refresh the techniques learnt from the mountain biking course, but there weren’t enough bumps to really make a track, so I pushed on. Back up the roundabout and then down past Barton leisure center to follow the bridleway to Forest Hill. For some reason it didn’t seem as fast as it had done in the past. May be it was because the grass was longer, I don’t know. I do know that I found the bar ends to be too far up, I need to adjust them to be flatter. I was going to do it on the ride but found that my Smart Tool doesn’t have a small enough Allen key. Do I really need to carry another multi tool as well as the smart tool?
From Forest Hill I headed down the road towards the A40 and Wheatley. At the junction of the A40 and the Forest Hill road there is a bit of woodland with some tracks in it. There was no one else there today so I dropped in for a quick play. I think the tracks must have been made by trail bikes rather than mountain bikes. Even so there were some good drops and slopes, there were some that I considered but rejected as being just too steep and too long to tackle by myself.
From there I crossed the A40 and dropped into Wheatley, turning right towards Littleworth but then taking the side road to Shotover. I saw the long hill in plenty of time and dropped to the lowest gear. I managed to crank it out for a few minutes and made good progress up about 80% of the hill. But, by then my legs just ran out of energy and I had to push the bike up the final section of the steep bit. The road evens out a bit near the end and I was able to cycle the rest of the way to the top.
Near the car park on the city side of the park I dropped into the wood and headed down the bridleway. It was a mixture of bone dry and slightly damp. A fast but by no means scary descent via some small steps. From the bottom of the hill a quick blast through Brasenose Wood took me back to Horspath road. I rode up to the ring road and across to the Slade. I took a side road to cut the corner and came out near the cross roads of Old road,The Slade and Windmill Road.
I had a quick tour of the single tracks in the old quarry before heading home via Headington.
The full route is on Trailzilla, 19km (11.8 miles) in abut 1.5 hours.
Wales – 2 weekends on the trot
PYB
At the beginning of April we were up at our favourite North Wales location, well mine anyway – Plas-y-Brenin. This time it was for a Discover Mountain Biking course. We had a great weekend, and although the main purpose was for D to become more confident off road, I have to admit that I learnt a lot as well, and had a great time.
All my photos from the weekend can be seen on my Flickr site here.
Putting it into Practice
Keen to put our new found mountain biking skills into practice we planned to head back to Wales the following weekend – Easter. The original plan was to travel up on the Thursday night to give us Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday in Wales. However, even with me working from home on the Thursday it was a big ask to get everything together. I therefore rang the campsite to let them know that we would still be going but would be there Friday instead. The campsite, Celyn Brithion , was appreciative but laid back.
Rather than travel up to the Snowdon area again, and face the hordes of tourists tramping along the motorway around the Snowdon summits, I wanted to explore some of the other areas of the National Park. So, I had looked to the South East and found Dinas Mawyddy, complete with a decent summit – Aran Fawddwy.
Friday
Having arrived at the campsite in the early afternoon we went for a short walk to stretch our legs.
The overiding memory of the walk must be: “Sheep”, or, more accurately, “Lambs”. They were everywhere, some of them were obviously very very young, as evidenced by the presence of afterbirth on the track and long remnants of umbilical cords hanging from the lambs.
This short circular route can be seen on Trailzilla.
While research the town of Minllyn we found reference to the Brigands Inn, about a mile down the road. We headed down there for a meal and were very disappointed. D had a burger that was fairly tasteless and there was so much dressing on the salad that the plate was swimming in it and the bun was soaking. I had steak, and despite talking to the waitress about how I wanted it cooked it came back overcooked. Basically the trouble seemed to be that the chef was trying to do too much and be too fancy.
Saturday
Saturday we decided to head out on the mountain bikes, to try to put into practice some of the skills we had learnt the previous weekend at Plas Y Brenin and to build on our new found confidence. I had pored over the maps to find bridleways for us to u se and come up with a circular route from a picnic spot up a side road from the small village of Corris.
We did not get off to a good start as the first part of the route headed off into an area that was closed due to logging. So we headed down the road into Corris and battled up an extraordinarily steep bridleway that left us both wondering if it was all worth it. After another push up a bridleway we made it to a junction of forest trails and it was downhill all the way after that. A mixture of forest trail, farmer’s track and steep twisting singletrack. Excellent fun.
Our route for Saturday can be seen here.
On our way out from the campsite we had spotted a pub just round the corner from the campsite – the Buckley Arms. We decided to give it a go for dinner and had a great time. The staff were all friendly and welcoming, the food was simple but excellent and they had decent beer. I can totally recommend the Buckley Arms.
Sunday
With Aran Fawddwy just up the road I had planned a fairly long mountain day. I had planned to park on the road, near the open access land in Cwm Cywarch. However, once there the opportunities were not as good as I had hoped. Luckily I spotted a sign post indicating that there was parking further up the valley. Amazingly, the farmer had developed a parking on a small piece of his land. Complete with all weather surface and a portaloo he had decided that this was better than tourists blocking his road, ruining his land and generally causing lots of problems by parking all over the road. By adding a collection box the farmer had managed to collect £1,300 over the last year, which was donated to the Welsh Air Ambulance.
Parking there a more obvious and slightly shorter route presented itself to us. We climbed up the stream, leaving the stunning views behind us and headed into the mist. It was soon raining hard with strong winds blowing from the side. Adding in the occasional snow drift and the going became quite hard work.
Our walking route can be seen on Trailzilla.
I’m sure that the views from here are truly stunning in clear weather, in the limited visibility we had in the clouds it looked fairly hairy, particulary on the crossing from Drws Bach to Drysgol.
We had planned to ascend Waun Goch and come down the steep sided valley of Cwm Terwyn. Unfortunately, D twisted her ankle coming down from Drysgol so we cut short our plans and headed down the gentle path, with stunning views back across the valley. The ridge we had walked across was hidden in the thick cloud.
When we got back to the camp site we got changed and headed out for dinner, back to the Buckley Arms Hotel again. It started raining just as we started dinner and continued to rain all evening. It carried on raining all night and by morning it was still raining and blowing a hoolie. Rather than head out to the hills we headed home in the rain, beating the bank holiday traffic.
Result, one day excellent mountain biking and one epic quality mountain day to add toward the ML assessment.
The First Ride of the New Year
Its the last day of the holidays and back to work tomorrow. The weather is better than yesterday and we need to get fit for out mountain biking weekend at Plas Y Brenin. So, we ventured out on the Mountain Bikes around Christmas Common, near Stokenchurch.
The full map of the route can be found on Trailzilla and the photos are on my Flickr site.
We parked the van at the car park at the top of Watlington Hill (SU710 935) and headedSouth East on the Bikes to Christmas Common itself, before turning left towards the M40. We had intended to park at the car park on this road (SU726 955) but there is a 6′ 6″ height limit and we could not get the van in. If you have an ordinary car then there should be no problem.
Just before the bridge that crosses the M40 we took the bridleway to the right. This runs parallel to the road before dropping down into Hailey Wood. The first section was quite slippery but it gets better as you go down. We followed the bridleway all the way to Wellground Farm – a fantastic bit of downhill. There is a bit of a road section but the bridleway carries straight on when the road turns sharp right.
We kept straight on, coming out at the spot height (128m – SU742 932). From here we took the bridleway that leads to Northend. The first section of this is very very steep and very wet but it does eventually meet a tarmact track which is easier to follow into Northend. Turning right we followed the road through Northend until we came to the wooden signpost on the left indicating a permissive bridleway.
This leads down past Launders farm and across a very flinty and slippery field before entering a wood. The trail gets easier in the wood and very soon we got to the junction with the Oxfordshire way. We turned left and followed the bridleway down through the woods and out past Turville Park Farm. About 1km further on the path becomes a track and the going gets easier.
We followed the track all the way to the road, where we turned right to meet the B480 at Whitepond Farm. From here we turned right and followed the B480 for about 300m. As the road carried on round to the left we went straight on up the permissive bridleway that leads to Whitehill Shaw and then to Hollandridge Farm where it becomes Hollandridge Lane.
With a bit more hard slog and a final effort this leads back to Christmas Common, from where the car park is easily reached.
In total about 19.6km (12.25m) over the course of 3.5 hours or so. Quite hard work due to the wet and slippery conditions, especially on the steep up hill sections and where the mud was particularly deep.
Carl Sprake 