East midlands: Glorious ride

Bike staffers have been enjoying this Glorious Ride for decades…

Not all Glorious Rides are in Scotland, the Peaks, Yorkshire Dales or the Pennines – but we all have our favourite local routes and sometimes they’re so good it’s worth spreading the word, even at the risk of making them busier. This one has been pretty popular with Bike over the years too and plenty of road tests have been photographed on almost every section. In fact Triumph and Suzuki used much of this route to launch a couple of their latest models, the incredible Speed Triple and the ballistic Hayabusa.

The ride is 100-ish miles and it passes through Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Rutland. The roads are almost all B-roads, which means they’re usually pretty quiet, and cram in a lot of variation.

The ride starts outside Bourne, Lincolnshire and heads towards Corby Glen on the A151, diving under a green canopy of overhanging trees. A right outside Corby Glen onto the B1176 goes off to Bitchfield with some crazy undulations and whoops, then it’s the B6403 to Colsterworth – an old and (mostly) dead straight Roman road, but watch out for some recent pot holes that’ll swallow your front wheel whole. At Colsterworth grab a cuppa at the truckstop café then pick up the B676 which bombs into Melton Mowbray, home of pork pies. There is, however, a fly in the ointment here – average speed cameras. On the positive side this is all classic British B-road riding, with plenty of rolling hills and sleepy villages.

After Melton the B6047 heads for Market Harborough, but a quick detour before you get there picks up the B664 back to Uppingham – this is the rollercoaster part of the ride. At Uppingham stop for another bite to eat before taking a short hop on the fast, wide A6003 down to Caldecott where the B672 takes you under the magnificent Welland Viaduct, built in 1878 and still in use today. After that blast back towards Bourne via Ketton, but dodge the narrow, traffic strangled, streets of Stamford.

All in all the ride should take three to four hours, if you do it right and stop often enough for a brew. The scenery is as good as it gets in this part of the world ie it’s not Glen Coe, but it does have a pacifying calm about it. And judging by the number of motorcycles I hear from my garden, throughout the fine months of the year, I’m not the only one who thinks this route is a hidden