CYCLING ADVENTURE
Emily Chappell found there was more tussock than tarmac on a crosscountry cycling challenge in Wales.
Our countryside is often wilder and more challenging than we imagine, as
Emily Chappell found when she accepted the offer of a weekend’s off-road cycling to the Welsh coast with veteran mountain biker Isla Rowntree
Iwas nervous about riding with champion crosscountry mountain biker Isla Rowntree, but relieved when she volunteered to take charge of route planning, and also amused when she issued a disclaimer a few days before we set off. “This type of ‘cycling’ may involve: a lot of walking; wet feet; tracks on the map that don’t actually exist on the ground; river crossings.”
The plan was to meet at my place in Llanidloes, Mid Wales, and ride to the coast, 30 miles away, where we’d spend the night and then ride back the following day. After the tussocky exertions of the Bear Bones 200 the previous weekend – where I’d covered 124 miles in 19 hard-won hours through the worst of Mid Wales’ mud, peat and slurry – this looked like it would be the right sort of weekend ride, with café stops, reasonable mileage and possibly even fish and chips at the end. Despite her disclaimer, Isla assured me that we’d “go slow” and “soak up the landscape”, lulling me into what turned out to be an entirely false sense of security.
We set off into gentle rain, optimistically reminding each other that the forecast had been “patchy” and hoping that we might be lucky enough to ride into the right patches. Less than three miles in, things started to get interesting. Isla led me off the usual well-trodden route into my local town, along a forestry track and out across a muddy field. A rainbow appeared. And I got my first puncture.
Tempting though it was to walk the few hundred yards into town and fix it over a coffee, we agreed that we hadn’t quite covered enough distance yet, so I hastily replaced the tube, realising in the process that I’d left my second spare on the kitchen table and so had only one.
Ten minutes later we turned on to another muddy bridleway, smelled the tell-tale scent of freshly cut hawthorn and a moment later heard a malevolent hiss from my back tyre. But the sun was now edging its way through the clouds and our spirits were high, so we laughed as I flipped the bike, and Isla offered to patch my spare tube while I wiped my muddy hands on my shorts and set about replacing the holey one.
We left the floodplain and found ourselves ascending an ancient drovers’ road, sunk deep into the landscape between two hedgerows, with autumnal trees clasping hands above us, so that we climbed into a tunnel of gold and amber, shafts of sunshine dappling us as our feet and tyres squelched through the mud.
MUD, SWEAT AND SMILES
Another puncture. This time it was Isla’s, which made me feel slightly better. We stopped under a shower of hawthorn berries to fix it and found ourselves still smiling, as the red fruit glowed above us in the sun, and we looked back down the hill on a view of my town I’d never seen before. So far,
“We stopped under a shower of red berries to fix a puncture and found ourselves still smiling”
we had averaged one puncture every two miles, but we weren’t in any hurry after all, and we had the whole day to get ourselves to Borth, which really wasn’t all that far away.
I had, of course, reckoned without Isla’s route planning, which largely eschewed tarmac and sent us straight over the hills, on winding forestry roads and vertiginous singletrack, frequently obliging us to get off and push or carry our bikes through knee-deep peat bog.
“So this was what she meant by ‘soaking up the landscape’,” I thought to myself, as cold brown water seeped into my shoes and I spied a river up ahead, with large stone piles separated by five metres of empty air, whatever bridged them existing only in memory or ambition.
Our river-crossing tactics differed. Isla triumphantly produced a pair of Crocs from her pannier, whereas I just stripped off overshoes, shoes and socks and went in barefoot, holding my breath as I slid and stumbled across the stony riverbed. The water was cold enough to sting, but once I’d fumbled my damp socks and muddy shoes back on, I found that my feet were glowing and tingling deliciously. Perhaps river crossings weren’t so bad.
We emerged into civilisation briefly at lunchtime and spent an hour or so being regarded with curiosity and disgust by the other patrons of the Hafod Hotel at Devil’s Bridge, most of whom seemed to be out for a sedate Saturday drive and hadn’t an ounce of mud on them. We patched our muddy tubes at the table, wolfed down our chips and paninis, insisted they refill our teapots and then were on our way, speeding down through still-green woods into a steep-sided valley, where a narrow-gauge railway overlooked a broad, brown river.
ALONG STONY HIGHWAYS OF OLD
We squinted through the reflection of the sky on the water, trying to ascertain the size of the rocks beneath and whether we might reasonably expect to ride through, then inevitably erred on the side of caution, and once again sat down to take off our shoes and socks.
A stony track crept up the other side of the valley, through yellowing trees shaggy with moss, then reached a small white cottage and abruptly turned into a footpath, slicing up through ancient woodlands. At one point it bisected another old drovers’ road, set deep into the hillside, lined with trees that perhaps were once hedges, and recalled long-ago journeys made by people no one now remembers, for purposes at which we could only guess.
Centuries ago, this road wouldn’t have been seen as the back route or footpath (or overgrown gully) it is today. It would have been a highway as much as any other, and those who trudged along it would have had none of the sense we had, of the way being slow and stumbling, since this was the only way they had of moving. Although both Isla and I unquestionably prefer cycling (and even pushing, as we were) to driving or sitting on a train, we had still undertaken this journey on the understanding that it would be slow and occasionally frustrating. “If we manage five miles an hour, we’ll be doing well,” she’d warned me at the start, and we couldn’t help but compare it, even subconsciously, even unfavourably, to the smoothness and effortlessness of travelling along a tarmacked road or gazing through a train window as busy rails chattered beneath us.
A couple of hundred years ago, human beings had no concept of that type of movement, or even of the freedom and exhilaration of a bicycle. They would have trudged patiently up the hillsides through muddy leaves churned up by the feet of their livestock, hauling their loads over rocks and intervening roots, covering just a few miles every day. The paved road we had briefly followed into Devil’s Bridge would have been as alien to them as the surface of Mars.
A little further on, I glanced down the hillside and happened to see the roof of a very old car, half-buried in the undergrowth, broken and crumpled, with weeds growing out of its windows. Someone must have pushed it off the top of the hill many years previously, either as the culmination of a drunken joyride or just as a way of disposing of unwanted property. I imagined the great disturbance it must have made as it ripped its way down the hillside, finally coming to rest against a few straining tree trunks, and realised that this was not only a place that predated the motor vehicle – it was also a place that would continue to exist and slowly evolve, long after all cars are consigned to the scrapheap and the way we move through the landscape has changed once again.
A couple of hours later, after following the fire roads through the Bwlch Nant yr Arian mountain biking centre and skirting a lake, we found ourselves thundering along another stony track, glancing repeatedly over to our right where an enormous fold of rock thrust up out of the valley, signalling the beginning of Snowdonia and speaking of a violent landscape that was there long before even our ancient drovers’ roads. We raced our bikes headlong towards the sea, the sinking sun and the hot dinner that surely awaited us at our overnight stop in the coastal town of Borth. We were exuberant that our end was in sight, yet also anxious to rest and recover, knowing that the following day would be even slower, damper and tougher.
DAY 2: THE RETURN JOURNEY
“I think at this point we’re about as far as you can get from a road, almost anywhere in the British Isles,” Isla announced a few hours after our start the next day.
I felt my now customary mixture of fear and excitement. We were pushing (and sometimes carrying) our bikes along a wide valley, carpeted with golden grass whose pale-green roots were occasionally exposed by the rustling wind, and which fell away at the summits of the nearby peaks,
“Isla’s route planning largely eschewed tarmac and sent us straight over hills on forestry tracks”
revealing craggy grey rocks. On Isla’s map, a bridleway was marked with a bold green line, but here on the ground there was nothing at all – nothing but acres of unrideable tussocks, here and there interspersed with rusty looking peat bogs into which we’d sink up to our knees. We had long ago given up trying to keep our shoes dry.
The weather had finally taken a turn for the worse and a thick grey cloud was rolling along the valley behind us, occasionally flinging us a scattering of raindrops as a warning of what was to come. Isla’s legs were tired. My hands were sore. Both of us were keeping our hunger at bay with handfuls of sweets, knowing that our calorie deficit was growing by the minute. Our shorts were caked in mud, our socks were squelching and our noses were running uncontrollably. And we still hadn’t stopped smiling.
Every now and then the line on Isla’s GPS tracker would lead us to a sheep track, and for a minute or so we’d get back on our bikes and whoop as we pedalled along the rim of the valley, momentarily confident we now had a path, and surely that would lead to a track, which would lead to a road, which would, eventually, lead to civilisation, people, houses, warm beds, and the moment when we could look back on all this and laugh. But then the track would disappear, the sheep having evidently decided it wasn’t worthwhile breaking their way through all of those tussocks after all, and we’d heave the bikes back on to our shoulders and laugh anyway.
Far, far away, at the end of the valley, we could see a stone building – unquestionably abandoned, but nonetheless encouraging, because it suggested that humans had been here, had considered the place accessible enough to live and work in, and had managed to haul in several tonnes of stone, meaning there had to be some sort of track.
But at our slow, arrhythmic pace, the tiny edifice kept its distance, and it was over an hour before we eventually climbed a fence, crossed one more river and laboured our way up the final slope to a flat, grassy ledge. It had looked from afar like it might be a track, but it turned out to be an ancient drystone wall now overgrown with grass and moss, buried in the landscape like the old car we’d seen the previous afternoon.
We stumbled along the wall for a few more minutes, slowly climbing up the side of the valley as the sky darkened and the rain began to fall in earnest. Finally, the track we’d feared we might never find lay ahead of us, and we got back on our bikes and accelerated toward civilisation, my log-burner and Isla’s train home, our fingers twitching and cramping on our brake levers, our socks squelching inside our sodden shoes as we pedalled – and both of us still smiling.