ON THE ROAD
Lost Lanes West author Jack Thurston is on a mission to remind us that riding isn’t all about smashing goals, we should connect to the world around us too
Lost Lanes West author Jack Thurston is on a mission to remind us all that smashing goals is just a part of the cycling landscape, one that should also feature lazy days connecting with the world around you. We join him to discover some of Wiltshire’s hidden riding gems.
We picked the last day of February to join Lost Lanes West author Jack Thurston on a ride exploring the quiet lanes and hidden byways of Wiltshire in the hope of encountering the first signs of spring, instead we’re huddled inside Bradford-on-Avon’s Lock Inn hiding from the fiercest blast of winter weather so far as the ‘Beast from the East’ battered at the hatches ahead of a week of snow.
Jack is here to provide a masterclass in avoiding the same old busy roads and loops, and instead plot routes this summer to take in the roads and byways less travelled, to ignore ‘performance’ and revel in the simple pleasures of riding a bicycle.
I’ve borrowed a Tifosi Cavazzo gravel bike from the Cycling Plus tech team for some of the ‘lessertarmaced’ sectors of Jack’s route, but am otherwise wearing my usual Lycra and feeling rather conspicuous alongside my more modestly dressed companion. Perhaps that’s lesson number one: you don’t have to kit yourself out head to toe in the latest gear to go for a bike ride – although today you do have to wrap up warm whatever you wear.
Jack has compiled the route to demonstrate the traffic-light riding available on our doorstep from a couple of entries in his latest Lost Lanes book, Lost Lanes West. It sees us leave the cosy confines of the Inn and head east along the towpath of the frozen Kennet & Avon canal – ducks are walking on the surface of the water – we should probably have stayed for another coffee.
That thought passes as the low, late winter sunshine lights an idyllic scene as we pedal through a landscape where the only traffic is the slow passing of the odd narrowboat doing its best impression of a Russian icebreaker.
Parallel paths
“Not realising facilities like this exist is one of the main reasons for people not to cycle,” explains Jack as the frosty gravel of the towpath crunches beneath our tyres. “If you think to yourself, can I make that journey I make every day by car by bike, you’ll decide not to because the road you drive on is horrible. But have you thought about the fact there might be a parallel route on a quiet road, or a path like this, that you can’t take your car on? People don’t look so they don’t realise.”
Our destination along the canal path is the famed Caen Hill locks near the town of Devizes. Apparently, it takes five-and-a-half hours to navigate the 29 locks in a boat, but we nip up and down the snowcovered towpath alongside the most famous rise of 16 locks in a matter of minutes just for the fun of it, despite the fact our route actually takes us onto tarmac just before the hill.
From here we head to the village of Rowde and then along the wonderfully named Conscience Lane to Roundhay, where no obvious road links the hamlet to Heddington across the western fringe of the Pewsey Downs. Jack knows better, however, and we are soon climbing towards a rough but deserted stretch of byway (we do later see a small car tackling it even more slowly than we did) across the exposed countryside with views of Oliver’s Castle, site of a huge Civil War battle, and the most recent of Wiltshire’s white horses carved into the chalk downland.
“The concept of cycling as travel, as opposed to sport or transport, appeals to me,” explains Jack. “Getting out into the countryside, watching someone thatch a roof, popping into an ancient church, I find connecting with history quite moving.”
From here more quiet lanes take us across the busy A4. It is heading for Avebury, and so are we, but while the motor traffic ploughs on we head through the villages of Cherhill and Yatesbury on peaceful roads to the site of the ancient stones. Often heaving in summer, on such a cold day we find the ancient henge and avenue of stones eerily quiet and bathed in that soft winter sun, a scattering of snow on the ground helping the stones really jump out from the background. To ride straight through without stopping to take in the majesty of the scene would be to miss one of the joys of bike riding: how close it brings you into contact with your environment.
“To arrive at somewhere like Avebury by bike,” says Jack, “under your own steam, is a very different experience to turning up in a car park – especially here in Wiltshire, with its sacred sites, which archaeologists now understand were part of a sacred landscape not just a collection of monuments. Riding up and down the hills and
The concept of cycling as travel, as opposed to sport or transport, appeals to me
seeing the shapes and relating to it in a bodily way gives you a greater understanding of why this region would have been so important to people.”
Share your passion
This is lumpy country, and at over 110km ours is not necessarily a route for inexperienced cyclists, but Lost Lanes West is full of rides that could be, rides you can use to tempt your non-cycling family and friends to join you out on two wheels.
“When you love doing something, the natural inclination is to share it with other people,” confirms Jack, “and that’s what I set out to do with Lost Lanes – to share the sort of riding I did with my friends and inspire people with interesting stories, some history, so that they would want to discover things for themselves.
“I also wanted to give people who were into cycling the tools to persuade their friends or partners who weren’t cyclists to come out with them, to explain that cycling can be about exploring, not just raising your heart rate and bagging KOMs.”
None of our climbs are too tough individually, but Jack and I are both out of the saddle as we make our way from Urchfont up on to Salisbury Plain and the Imber Range Perimeter Path. The village of Imber was evacuated by the army for training purposes in 1943 and remains empty, surrounded on all sides by a vast military firing range, and the property of the MoD. The
Perimeter Path skirts all the way around the restricted area, and despite a thought of tackling a stretch of the old Salisbury to Devizes coach road (Jack’s most lost of west country lanes, see boxout) a red flag ensures we stick to the original route.
At Gore Cross another lost lane, to the ghost village itself, is open for a couple of weeks a year. It’s well worth timing your journey to visit the Grade One-listed church of St Giles, but continuing along the Perimeter Path to the Westbury white horse rewards with quiet riding and stunning views, both across the Plain itself with its ice age valleys and out across the lower lying land towards our start and finish point in Bradford. It is, however, an absolutely freezing wind that pushes us along nicely at times and whips through our winter clothing when we change direction.
Journey of discovery
From the Plain we drop down towards the village of Rode, and avoid the network of major roads in the area to wind our way past Farleigh Hungerford Castle and Westwood Manor to return to the Lock Inn for a much-needed hot chocolate. It has been a cold but enlightening day: these roads and routes have been available to us for many years, and yet without Jack’s prompting we would probably never have found
It is an absolutely freezing wind that pushes us along nicely at times
them. We will be inclined to delve deeper in future.
As we sip, we ask Jack for any tips for those of us looking to shake up our riding and plan some adventurous routes of our own. “I’m inspired by the spirit of old cycle touring guides,” he says, “but the big difference in our lifetimes is that for a book from the 1980s, say the CTC’s guide to cycle touring in Britain, the B-road network would be the backbone of that book. Now I find the B-roads are the worst roads to be on: they’re rat runs, they’re quite narrow with no space to pass safely and yet people expect to do 60mph on them. They have a centreline, too, which gives people false confidence that the road is wider than it is.
“These days, when you look at an OS map as a cyclist, it is the narrow, faint yellow lines that are your friend.”