Gravel Culture: Travel Gravel – Edgelands
Posted By Gravel Union
On 4 February 2021
It’s human nature to always try and push back a little against bureaucracy and petty rules. But with the world in its current state, breaking rules relating to travel and exercise seems pretty irresponsible. We set out to see what happened if we followed the rules on a gravel bike, but pushed them to to the very edge of their boundaries.
“Blimey” said my wife, returning home after her daily lunchtime walk. “There’s floods in places I’ve never seen water before”. That’s the kind of sentence that drives fear into the heart of even the staunchest winter gravel riding fan, let alone one who was planning to imminently set out to ride around the circumference of their chosen city.
In the UK in January 2021, the rules governing where, when and how we could exercise were woolly to say the least. They offered very little clarity or prescriptive guidance on what was and wasn’t legal, but the phrasing suggested you should essentially stick to riding in your local area. Everyone interpreted this guidance slightly differently, but I figured that if I stuck to riding within the city limits, then I would be compliant with the rules and might find some interesting winter gravel riding inspiration.
Desk research of new routes is a pretty slow job and it ended up taking up a lot of my free time. “Are you looking at bl**dy maps again” said my slightly exasperated wife, one evening. I was trying to figure out exactly where the city boundary was as a starting point for my route planning. This wasn’t as simple to do as I had hoped (and in fact once I was out on the ride, the signage for the city boundary didn’t quite fit with what my map research had identified as the boundary anyway), but eventually I came up with a map that I was reasonably sure was accurate:
Next, I dug out a small pile of paper Ordnance Survey maps and my trusty on-line companion and started to plan my ride. I had a few key aims for my route – it had to be as gravelly as I could make it (so not too many paved road sections), it had to run as close to the boundary line as I could get, it had to be rideable from my home and it had to be fun. When I was planning the route, I initially considered riding it clockwise – there wasn’t any science behind this, it was habit as much as anything, but when I looked at the weather forecast for the day I had scheduled in to do the ride, there was a howling wind coming from the west. I knew from bitter experience that the section which ran along the River Tyne was very exposed to winds, so I changed the route direction around to make sure I rode with the wind behind me along the river. The route was going to be energy-sapping enough anyway, so with hindsight, an easy ride down the river was a wise plan.
My actual route looked like this:
I planned in as much off-road riding as I could, but also wanted to make it fun to ride. Fun, on a gravel bike for me, means that the trails need to have that goldilocks balance of being challenging enough to keep me on-my-toes, but not so hard (or so energy sapping) that it ends up being a battle of wills to get through the route. On the morning of my ride I woke in high spirits – the forecast was for wall-to-wall sunshine all day. OK, so it was the end of January in the north-east of England which meant the temperature would barely get above freezing and the windspeed was forecast to be 20-40kph, but sunshine is sunshine, right?
What I had forgotten about of course was my wife’s warning about the biblical levels of flooding. We had suffered from days and days (and days) of basically non-stop rain in the run up to my ride, so when I got the first section of gravel trail it was slightly damper than I had hoped for.
This section of trail is nearly 1km long and I know it pretty well – there are numerous small dips (made by heavy agricultural vehicles using the track) all the way along it. I couldn’t remember (or see) precisely where they were though, which meant the risk of suddenly going into a hub-depth dip filled with sludgy semi-frozen flood water was pretty high – this didn’t exactly fill me with a sense of joy. I’d been riding for less than 15minutes at this point and was barely warmed up, but still had dry feet. I did the only sensible thing and retreated back to the nearest road junction, dug out my smartphone and plotted a by-pass route. Without realising it, this actually meant I discovered a completely new trail – it was legal, hardpacked, fast-rolling and miraculously dry. My new route did add in around 10 minutes extra of road riding, but I figured it was a worthwhile trade-off to still have dry feet.
I live at pretty much the highest part of the city (at a “vertiginous” 100m above sea level). While that’s not exactly going to induce altitude-related sickness, it does mean that a lot of my rides start off with a downhill. This is generally a good thing, as downhills on a gravel bike are fun, but in mid-winter when you’re not really warmed up, heading straight downhill isn’t an ideal recipe for generating heat. Luckily my first section of downhill trail was south facing (so the air temperature climbed noticeably) and was significantly more technically challenging than is captured by the photo:
The trail is a shared-use one and to make it accessible to cyclists, horse-riders and pedestrians it comprises a long flight of steps. These start off at about 10cm in height at the top and finish with some 60cm high ones at the bottom. The landing from each step (assuming you jump off them anyway) is pretty good, but the amount of concentration it needs to ride them smoothly and competently on a gravel bike actually generates quite a bit of heat. Winner.
After the challenge of the stepped descent, I had a long section (nearly 20kms) of very gently downhill shared -use bike path to tackle. The combination of tailwind and sunshine made this a very pleasant task, but as I got closer to the heart of the city the number of pedestrians out on the route meant my speed dropped significantly and the amount of avoiding manoeuvres I had to make to leave sufficient space between me and them increased dramatically.
Once I was through the picturesque (and rightly famous) bridges section of the route and heading on to the former industrial heart of the city, the number of other trail users dropped to basically zero. It would be fair to say the route east of the city centre isn’t exactly beautiful, although it is really interesting historically - this was where the old shipyards were (once the part of the world’s biggest shipbuilding region). Although I was out on a ‘gravel’ ride, the riverside section didn’t include any proper gravel riding – it was a real hotch-potch of surfaces, including a few bits of cobbles if you looked carefully! As I got to Wallsend and the far-eastern limit of the City of Newcastle I began to pick up some realgravelTM. My route now took in short sections of urban trail, bits of ancient railway line and some cheeky sections of woodland singletrack (root-strewn, cambered and just greasy enough to be entertaining, just as they should be.)
Although some of the sections around Wallsend had fallen off the edge of my mental trail map, as my route started to head north and west, following the very convoluted outline of the city limits, I was back on ‘home’ turf again. Up to the 50km point, I’d miraculously managed to keep dry – the surface up to this point, although slightly puddle-strewn in places, was designed to cope with a high volume of mixed-use traffic and was all plain sailing. Unfortunately, as I eased past the 50km mental-milepost, this is what awaited me:
My plain sailing went out of the window and suddenly a boat would have been more use than a gravel bike. I’d ridden this section in the past, so had been expecting it to be wet, but hadn’t envisaged it being this wet. With no easy way to get around it, I pedalled cautiously though. The water got up to about hub depth, which even with waterproof winter boots on meant every pedal stroke involved getting the lower part of my legs wet. From this point onwards, I knew that getting wet would be a constant problem. Add to that the fact that my route was slowly turning north-west and then due-west (straight into the 20-40kph headwind). I needed to draw on reserves of willpower (not to mention numerous energy bars) and ignore the hideous crunching noise starting to be emitted from my hubs and drivetrain.
The northern part of the city limits have historically been quarried for sand&gravel and mined for coal. This gave me a legacy of old railway routes, now converted to trails, to use, but also gave some quite interesting warning signs in places:
As my energy levels started to drop, I actually cheated in a couple of places and took the road option rather than the bridleway-across-a-freshly-ploughed-field option, which I figured would have finished me off. I also knew my biggest challenge lay ahead – the infamous Prestwick Carr – a section of former narrow road across a low-lying wetland area where ground movements have smashed the road surface to smithereens and made it pretty unpleasant to ride on anything less than 50mm wide tyres. The particular section I was worried about was 1.5kms long and even in the driest of winters, would commonly be under a small volume of water. When I got there this time it looked like this:
The afternoon light was beautiful and the reflections in the water were quite mesmerising, but it wasn’t exactly ideal gravel riding terrain. I nearly bailed out and took to the nearby A-road, but I knew from bitter experience that the local drivers seemed to assume the vast cost of their 4x4s meant they ‘owned’ the road rather than shared it. Luckily, a couple of MTBers were a minute or so ahead of me on the route and I figured if they could ride through the flood, so could I. My feet were already wet anyway, so what did another soaking matter? Some of the higher sections were fine, but there was one stretch where the water was above my bottom bracket.
No exactly ideal. Good job the sun was still shining!
From the end of the Newcastle-upon-sea section of my route, I was edging ever closer to home, a hot shower and a LOT of post-ride calories. Unfortunately, ahead of me also lay one more swampy bit (which actually wasn’t as wet as I feared), but which was significantly muddier than I had anticipated.
I knew the final section of route would be tough. It wasn’t super-steep, it’s not at all technically demanding, but it alternated muddy, with gravel-plus-strong-headwind, with sections of lumpy tarmac. It was one of the bits of the ride where stopping to take a photo was as much an excuse for a rest as it was to capture something artistic.
As I rolled up to my home, my bike computer registered 81.8kms and a total of 728m of climbing. I’d been pedalling for just over 4 hours. In no way was my ride epic, ground breaking, revolutionary or epoch defining. But the combination of the cold, wet, mud and headwind had taken more out of me than I had anticipated. On a more positive note, I’d also discovered a whole bunch of new trails, been incredibly fortunate to have an entire day of sunshine in the middle of winter and I’d proved that I could stay within my local area, yet have a decent adventure on my gravel bike.
The whole thing from planning to execution made me realise that I didn’t need to travel far from home to have a really good day on my gravel bike. Yes, I could have found more beautiful trails, probably with less people on them and definitely a lot less wet, if I had travelled further afield. But it showed that actually, even being somewhat restricted in where I could go and ride, my gravel bike was still the perfect tool for the job and it opened up so much more potential riding that I wouldn’t have attempted otherwise.