ON THE ROAD
Trevor Ward takes a trip to North Wales to sample a taste of the rough stuff and retrace the footsteps of pioneering off-roader, Walter MacGregor Robinson, aka the Wayfarer. Suffice to say there was more tweed than lyrca on the mountain that day...
I’m riding up a steep, rocky drover’s path on a mountain in North Wales when, with a polite cry of ‘Inside!’, a slender figure powers past me on a fixed-gear 1930s Raleigh. She is wearing a tweed jacket, corduroy jodhpurs and leather brogues. Shortly afterwards, I see a rider wearing shorts and a woollen sweater carrying his ancient road bike through a stretch of ankledeep bog. The bike is a 1920s Granby with a saddle reinforced with masking tape and half its rear mudguard hanging off. The rider’s only concession to marginal gains is that he has cut off the bobble from the top of his bright red woollen hat.
Catching up with us is a blond, tanned surfer type in a sleeveless vest riding a modern, fat-tyred ‘gravel bike’ festooned with frame, handlebar and saddle bags.
A ribbon of tweed and gingham with the occasional glint of garish lycra now adorns the hillside above us. Every cycling tribe is present and correct, from roadies and mountain bikers to bikepackers and gravel riders.
“Pah, it’s all a load of ‘emperor’s new clothes,’” says the rider next to me. “Who cares what we call it, as
long as it gets us riding?” And suddenly I realise what is missing from today’s ride, the one element that often spoils previous group rides I’ve been on – the whiff of testosterone in the air.
The rider next to me is Oliver Taylor, who has travelled up from London for today’s event.
“We’ve become Strava-crippled,” he says, expanding on this theme. “It’s all about being the fastest. Outside my front door in Brixton it’s like a racetrack because there is a Strava segment there.”
Taylor, along with the rest of us, has been drawn here today by history, rather than a hunger for PBs or KOMs. We are celebrating a style of riding that encompasses all – and predates many – of the aforementioned cycling tribes.
“I got into mountain biking as a kid,” he says, “and to later learn that people had been doing off-road long before the mountain bike was even invented was very appealing, especially when you learn that they were doing it with fixed gears. I like the audacity of ‘rough stuffing’, the idea of riding your bicycle in places you shouldn’t.”
Our ride is taking place exactly 100 years to the day that three members
Forget new-fangled gravel riding, it was invented during a snowy March morning !"" years ago. We head to North Wales to follow in the tracks of a legend...
of a local cycling club set off on this same route. Though they didn’t know it at the time, their feat would go on to influence riders and bike designers of the future.
All three were members of Anfield Bicycle Club – a club that has since left its palatial club rooms close to what became the home of Liverpool FC and is now based in leafy Cheshire – and were wearing tweed jackets and bow ties and riding fixed-gear bikes. Quite a lot of pushing was involved on that last March Sunday in 1919 as the mountain was covered in snow.
One of the trio, Walter McGregor Robinson, wrote up his account of the day for Cycling magazine.
Under the pseudonym Wayfarer, he wrote: “We decided to chance it - to face such risks as there were and, in the event, our enterprise, or courage, or folly, or whatever you like to call it, was rewarded.”
His account, published under the title, Over the Top, caused a minor sensation. Did I mention he’d taken a bulky camera up with him as well? The resulting photographs formed a lantern slide show that he toured around the country to resounding acclaim. One presentation in Liverpool had to be repeated immediately afterwards to cope with the crowds outside.
“Wayfarer was the godfather of the rough stuff movement,” says Mark Hodson, the rider wearing the bobble-less red woollen hat. He should know, as he’s the archivist for the Rough Stuff Fellowship, formed in 1955 by a group of enthusiasts who believed in “traversing the rougher and less beaten ways” by bike. As Hodson’s archive of photographs on Instagram shows, this often involved a lot of pushing and pulling of bikes up and down tracks, cliffs, crevices and other extreme terrain.
“One of our members decided to cycle from his home in Derby to Derby in Australia in 1984,” says Hodson. “Along the way, he thought he’d take a little detour to Everest Base Camp ‘for a bit of fun’.
“That’s what rough stuff riders are like. They do all these amazing things without making a song and dance about them.”
Today we are following Wayfarer’s route from the village of Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog at the head of Ceiriog valley and over the Berwyn mountains to Corwen on the River Dee where the three Anfield BC members had a well-earned lunch.
We have several Anfield BC members with us today. President David Birchall is proprietorial about his predecessors’ exploits, telling me that Wayfarer and fellow club member W P Cook were pioneering advocates of cyclists’ rights.
‘Wayfarer’ was the godfather of the rough stuff movement...
“And old man Cook may have been wearing a jacket, collar and tie on this ride, but he only fell into a crevasse once,” he says.
One of the club’s younger generation, Chris Pickles, riding a full-suspension mountainbike with a Camel hydration pack on his back, says to me: “Can you imagine doing this through a foot of snow on heavy, fixed-gear bikes? They were hard in those days.”
Of course they were. Many young men at that time had recently survived the horrors of the Great War. Wayfarer himself had returned home injured from the trenches of northern France. No bike ride, no matter how arduous, could compare with that.
Our route takes us up Swch-CaeRhiw – ‘Snout Field Hill’ – via a four kilometre long, centuries-old drover’s track. It is rocky, rutted and occasionally waterlogged. One section has been covered in duckboards that, as one of our number discovers to his cost, have been neglected for years and in parts are rotten to the core.
The steepest section of Swch-Cae-Rhiw is near the summit when even with the 42T cog on the back of my ultramodern Fuji Jari 1.3 gravel bike and 40mm tyres, I am forced to dismount and push.
At the top there is a memorial stone to Wayfarer and a metal box containing a visitors’ book. The pages of scribbled signatures are a testimony to Wayfarer’s continuing allure, even if he’s probably spinning in his grave at the number of those pilgrims who return home, upload their ride to Strava and include the word ‘suffering’ in the title.
I get talking to the rider who had powered past me earlier. She owns up to being three-times national cyclo-cross champion and bike designer Isla Rowntree. She’d only heard about today’s ride a few
“Following a route from Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog and over the Berwyn mountains to Corwen on the River Dee”
days before and decided she had to come to “pay [her] respects.
“I personally relate to Wayfarer’s desire to go off the beaten track,” she continues. “He was a real celebrity in his day and inspired loads of people to go outside and discover nature. That’s what this kind of cycling is – it’s weekend escapism, it’s soul food.”
As founder of the successful children’s bike brand, Islabikes, Rowntree says she has also taken inspiration from the machines of Wayfarer’s day. She points to the 90-year-old Raleigh she’s riding and says: “This has got cup and cone bearings in the hubs, and look at those grease ports! Back then, things were built to last. These days, we are more focused about the performance rather than the durability of a bike.”
Around us, veteran rough stuffers are brewing up over camping stoves while others are comparing knitwear. The unexpectedly warm sunshine means no-one is in a rush to leave.
Pushing his heavy 1928 Sunbeam fixed-gear up the final stretch is Graham Nevett. A member of the Rough Stuff Fellowship for 30 years, Graham tells me his most extreme adventure was across the remote Knoydart peninsula in Scotland. How far did you ride, I ask.
“Ride? I couldn’t ride any of it, I strapped the bike to my back and walked,” he says.
I get talking to Mike Hayes, a former aerospace engineer who has spent many years cycle-touring all over the world.
“I used to road race and then started touring about 20 years ago and discovered something that had a much more, fully-rounded flavour,” he says.
“I get product fatigue with all the new names being given to things these days, everything seems to be a marketing opportunity, including history. There’s also competition creep in organised events - everything has to be bigger, longer or harder, nothing is just for fun anymore.”
Echoing this theme is Nick Hando, who has travelled from the village of Wymeswold in Leicestershire.
“Our village cycling club is like FightClub. It’s all about being the fastest,” he says. “The Wednesday night rides are like an arms race with all the bikes and equipment they turn up on. The reason I’m here today is so I can put it on Strava for them all to go, ‘Why on earth?’”
The descent to Cynwyd offers sweeping views of a landscape that, apart from some distant wind turbines, appears to have barely changed since Wayfarer’s day. There are some sudden, steep dropoffs along the way – described by Wayfarer with characteristic understatement as “tricky” - and a
“This kind of cycling is weekend escapism, it’s soul food”
number of gates to be negotiated before the final stretch of rocky track tumbles steeply down to the tarmacked B-road that will take us along the Dee valley.
From here, LostLanesWales author Jack Thurston leads us back to Llanarmon DC via what is surely one of the most beautiful routes in his book. After following the River Dee for 16 km, we start the twokilometre climb to Panorama Walk where the gradient barely dips under 10 per cent for the duration.
The road then lives up to its name with expansive views over the Dee Valley and the ruins of the hilltop mediaeval fortress of Dinas Bran.
Even at the end of a long, swooping descent the drama isn’t quite over, as Thurston leads us on to the Thomas Telford-built Pontcysyllte aqueduct that carries the Llangollen canal 40 metres above the River Dee. The towpath is barely a metre wide and we have to dismount and weave in and out of throngs of sightseers.
Once the canal has re-joined terra firma, the tow path widens and we can regain some speed, before another 18th century feat of engineering forces us to slow down and form a single file once again – the 420m long Chirk Tunnel.
After this we scramble up a steep path to join a B-road back to Llanarmon DC where a Wayfarer centenary dinner of salted cod fritters and braised beef awaits us.
It’s here that various theories are discussed as to why Wayfarer’s style of riding should capture cyclists’ imagination. One suggestion is that it was in response to the increasing amount of motorised traffic on the roads at the time. Another is that it wasn’t even considered as “rough stuff”, as a drover’s track in 1919 wouldn’t have been in much worse condition than Britain’s post-war road network.
Wayfarer himself put it far more succinctly:
“Some of the best of cycling would be missed if one always had to be in the saddle or on a hard road.”