Back in the day

JANUARY 2011 WAS dark, cold and wet. The perfect time to hunker down inside and plan your summer tour. The trick is always knowing where to go – but RIDE had at its disposal a database of recommendations from its readers. And as we set about planning how to link the roads together, editor Colin Overland decided we should put them together in a series of regional magazines.

That all sounded like a grand idea – with only one catch. Someone would have to go and ride these roads, in every corner of the country, to illustrate the project. Oh, and it’d need to be done sooner rather than later, to make sure we got the Great Rides supplement into people’s hands while they still had time to go and ride the roads.

So, in the last week of January, Simon Weir was set off, armed with a BMW R1200GS Adventure, a heated vest and a map covered in highlighter. The weather was not, it must be said, ideal for this kind of caper. Britain’s crammed full of fantastic riding but the conditions in the first two months of the year aren’t necessarily what you’d wish for. Salty, slithery roads, fitful sunshine giving way to drizzle, sleet, snow, and – on Rannoch Moor in Scotland – a hailstorm that left an inch-deep layer of icy ball-bearings across the road.

And yet it was a fantastic ride. While photographers Weeble and Graeme Brown rolled from location to location with the heaters and stereos on in their cars, the GS-A turned testing conditions into brilliant day after brilliant day – for more than 1800 miles.

There were two runs to Scotland – an initial loop with Weeble up through the Lincolnshire Wolds and Pennines to the Borders, before heading down through the Lake District to Wales, the West Country and back to the RIDE offices along the South Coast and East Anglia.

The second trip to Scotland was more challenging. Meeting Graeme in Ballachulish, the plan was to photograph the Highlands. Then the weather intervened: black clouds rolled down the Great Glen, laden with snow, to chase RIDE out of Scotland. One early shot was bagged in Glen Coe before the snow and hail arrived; Weir and Brown outran it and started photographing the A85 by Loch Earne but the clouds caught up again. Crossing the Forth Bridge, it looked like the clouds of Mordor rolling out of the hills behind us. The weather only faded by Berwick as we crossed back into England.

The result was a quartet of 32-page magazines, stapled into the main title and distributed to different regions; one for Wales & South-west England, one for Scotland, one for Northern England and one for Central & South-east England. Each had an overview of roads in the other areas, with more detail in its specific region. Each road was accompanied by a basic map and a rating for traffic, bend quality and surface – we also suggested nearby roads to link to for a better ride.