50 Classic Cycle Climbs: The Bristol-Bath Region E-Book

J J Wheeler

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Riding up hills is the ultimate challenge for a cyclist. This guide is a compilation of some of the best hills in Bristol, Bath, and the surrounding area. It's not just a definitive list of the top 50 toughest climbs; instead, author J J Wheeler has selected some of the most iconic, the most thrilling, the most interesting, varied and, of course, hardest hill climbs that this region has to offer. There's something here for everyone, from the Weekend Warrior to the serious road racer. Just get out there and enjoy the ride!

Leseprobe

CLASSIC CYCLE CLIMBS

The Bristol-Bath Region

J.J. Wheeler

THE CROWOOD PRESS

First published in 2016 by

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2016

© J.J. Wheeler 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 131 4

Photographs

Climbs 13, 14, 16, 35, 36 and cover © John Meredith climb 26 © Lee Montgomery.

Dedication

For my dad, whose wheel was the first I tried to follow. And to Richard and Colin, whose wheels I couldn’t

CONTENTS

Overview map

About the author

Acknowledgements

About the book

Introduction

Technical matters

The climbs

1. Alfred’s Tower

2. Ayford Lane

3. Bowden Hill

4. Brassknocker Hill

5. Bridge Valley Road

6. Bristol Hill

7. Broadoak Hill

8. Burrington Combe

9. Castle Road

10. Charlcombe Lane

On climbing hills

11. Cheddar Gorge

12. Claverton Hill

13. Crowcombe Hill Road

14. Dead Woman’s Ditch

15. Dundry Lane

16. Dunkery Beacon

17. East Dundry Road

18. Ebbor Gorge

19. Gare Hill

20. Gold Hill

21. Harptree Hill

22. High Street

23. Hinton Hill

24. Holt Road

25. Langridge Lane

How cyclists conquered Britain’s hills

26. Lansdown Lane (Weston Hill)

27. Lansdown Road

28. Margaret’s Hill

29. Mere Hill

30. New Road

31. Newtown

32. Old Bristol Road

33. Park Hill

34. Park Street

35. Porlock Hill

36. Porlock Toll Road (New Road)

37. Prospect Place

38. Rosemary Lane

39. Shaft Road

40. Shipham Road

41. Smitham Hill

42. Steway Lane

43. The Wrangle

44. Two Trees

From Taunton to Bath by bicycle

45. Vale Street

46. Westfield Lane

47. Widcombe Hill

48. Winford Lane

49. Winsley Hill

50. Woods Hill

Local bike shops

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph’s love for bicycles and bicycling began in the mid-1980s when he saw his first mountain bike in a cycle shop in Cheltenham while studying for a Fine Art degree. He bought it and spent his weekends for the rest of his studies riding and exploring the nearby Cotswold hills.

In 1988 he travelled to London where he worked as a cycle courier, clocking up 60 miles a day on a second-hand Raleigh road bike. Two years later, Joseph moved with his partner, Jenny, to Bath where he worked as a bicycle mechanic for a few years. Then, along with a bit of amateur racing for local teams, he began a full-time career as an artist and illustrator.

Now with a young son and alongside his work as an established illustrator, he continues to ride, fettle and occasionally race his bikes around the countryside and hills of his adopted home in Somerset.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’ve ridden a lot of miles in the search, discovery and detailing of the climbs that make up this book. It’s true, many I fought alone, but I’ve also battled my way up a good number in the welcome company of brave friends who often had no idea of the horrors that awaited them.

So to those cycling accomplices, thanks! To Lee Montgomery, who must never have thought his first year of ‘proper’ cycling would include some of the very steepest hills in Somerset (some more than once) and who did some sterling work with the camera on a few of them. Also to Miles Peyton, whose endless patience when venturing twice into Dorset in search of the ‘missing hill’ that we never found, deserves a special mention. Thanks to Miles too for his ‘116 per cent’!

A very big and special thank you also to friend and photographer John Meredith who took time out with his camera and his bicycle to meet me at some of the more remote locations for this book, as well as taking some outstanding pictures – at least once in the most trying of conditions.

Thanks also to Bob Latchem and Victoria Ratcliffe of Somer Valley CC, whose impromptu and unexpected morning tour across the Mendips found me Two Trees when I had nearly given up hope. And thanks to the nurse at Frome Hospital who repaired my eye following a very painful and incapacitating encounter with a piece of grit.

A really big thank you to my partner Jenny who put up with it all for thirteen months and to my son Louis who watched enthusiastically as it took shape.

And finally, I’d like to say a huge thank you to Sholto Walker, without whom absolutely none of this would have been remotely possible.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The climbs in this book are ordered alphabetically. Each description starts with a table of acts about the climb, including the address of a local café or tearoom where tired riders can compare their own experience over a tea or coffee and slice of cake.

Difficulty

Distance

2km

Av. Gradient

11%

Max. Gradient

20%

Height Gain

226m

Start Point

Beck Side. GR: 235 822 (OS Landranger 96)

Local Cafés

The Coach House Cafè Ford Park, Ulverston, LA12 7JP 01229 581666

www.ford-park.org/uk/cafe,asp

A map shows the start and finish point of the climb and the route it follows. We would recommend taking an OS map or a GPS system to help in plotting your route in more detail.

Art the end of the book is a list of bike shops in the region. Each shops relates to one or more of the climbs listed in the book so there will be one nearby if you are in need of spares, repairs of just good local advice.

INTRODUCTION

It was August 1976. I was ten. Up ahead, through tear-filled eyes I watched miserably as my best friend Richard and his dad pulled inexorably away, working their pannierladen bikes up the side of one of the biggest hills the French countryside near Cherbourg in Northern France could chuck at us. Just ahead, with me on his wheel, my dad toiled stoically, trying to ignore my whimpers and whinings as he concentrated on the silent fight being waged in his sleep-starved head to get himself and his over-geared, second-hand Sun ten-speed to the top of the hill before he stopped on the spot, threw the whole lot in the ditch and announced he was taking the first ferry back to Southampton.

The four of us were on a cycling holiday and things had begun badly. The day before, in a spectacular and not untypical failure of planning, we had arrived in Cherbourg to discover that it was a bank holiday and every guesthouse and hotel in Northern France was jammed to the rafters with French holiday-makers. Consequently we had spent a chilly and rainy night swathed in our voluminous cycling capes trying to snatch a few hours sleep amongst the discarded beer cans, carrier bags and roadside detritus of a tatty strip of woodland beside a French B-road somewhere just outside Cherbourg. The experience had left none of us feeling ready (if we ever were) for the 30-mile ride we had planned for that day. It had done nothing either for the chest-aching homesickness to which I was then so often prone.

So as the new morning sun began to trickle through the leaves and branches, we had opened bleary eyes, extracted ourselves from our condensation-soaked capes and pulled our bikes from the undergrowth where we had resignedly let them fall in the unfamiliar woodland dark the night before. Apart from just going home, the only thing on our minds that chill, damp early August morning was to get out of that fetid wood, warm up and find something to eat.

But it was that hill nearly forty years ago that stuck hardest in my memory on that day. The tiredness, the misery of my freezing hands, the hunger, the pain in my legs, the sight of my best friend pulling away from me, the sense of defeat and hopelessness as I rode alone, my only thought the desperate wish to be anywhere but on that terrible hill, at the back. Last. It was a defining moment.

After that otherwise completely idyllic week-long adventure in Northern France I didn’t really ride a bike again until my early twenties when I found myself, in a late-80s post-degree career hiatus, weaving around London as a cycle courier, any memories, sore or otherwise, of French hills by then so distant as to be forgotten.

Forgotten that is until I came to bumpy Somerset. It was here in 1989 that I pitched up with my bike and a keen ambition, inspired by Channel 4’s new interest in professional cycle sport, to try a bit of amateur racing. It was here too that I re-discovered hills. And it was here I stumbled upon the still-smouldering ashes of my private defeat on that little hill in Northern France. Failure, I resolved, on these new English hills was no longer an option. But my re-discovery of cycling and its inevitable hills was to be a painful journey. I began at first alone, on over-sized gears, straining to turn cranks up steep muddy lanes, often finding myself grinding to a halt on the steepest parts of the toughest climbs and shamefacedly pushing my bike alone the rest of the way. I then graduated in a year or two to finding I could hold my own in a group of decent clubriders on the hardest of local hills.

So now, after many thousands of miles riding these roads and climbing their hills and after several summer seasons racing and occasionally competing in the local hill climbs, I find the glowing recollections of one of the best holidays a ten-year-old boy can have remain intact, while the misery of those five minutes on that Northern French hill in 1976 has been expunged finally and for ever. In fact, nearly forty years later, I find I’ve even managed to write a book celebrating fifty of the toughest.