Spiny Norman has done for the Piranha Brothers

Yes, a combination of violence and sarcasm were not enough to keep the twelve foot (or perhaps eight hundred foot) hedgehog at bay.  As such, much effort has been spent over the last two dark rainy months of this particularly wet English winter making a new home for these tales of biking and travel.  Expecting many more biking and travel stories to follow, you can now find them at bikingpheasant.com.

If you've followed these posts by email, you can subscribe to new posts using the widget on the left of the page. There's still plenty of formatting to do, but as the days are now longer & warmer it's no longer the priority that transferring all the content was (which, while a tedious job, meant that I got to relive the last six years of stories, riding and other adventures).

For those that have read much of the content here - thanks for the comments & feedback, any useful ones about the new site would be appreciated.  After a six week break with not much to say, I've remembered I quite like writing - so looking forward to the upcoming summer.

Whitchurch, Watership Down & Basingstoke loops: Hampshire Off Road Cycle Trails

Looking for somewhere else close to home to string a big off-road loop together, I happened across the Hampshire County Council's page dedicated to off-cycle trails.  Almost two years ago (my last ride before shoulder surgery) I did the Whitchurch loop & so had some idea of the terrain involved & what I would be getting myself in for - nothing horrific.  I also remembered that some of the loops connected to each other.  So with a bit of printing, I was ready to hit the Whitchurch, Watership Down & Basingstoke loops - I hoped that this would give me about eighty to ninety kilometres of mostly off-road riding through some nice villages & with a few more hills than last week's New Forest ride.

Being the least distance to drive to the loop (a shade under forty miles), I parked in the free car park in Whitchurch (Bell St, just west of the main junction in the village). The day was the pick of the weekend's forecast weather, so I was hoping to get around before the late-afternoon rain turned up. After all the recent rain, everything was sodden but it wasn't too hard going to start with. It was odd riding through villages & farms that I bothered to stop to take photos of two years ago. There wasn't the need this time.

The long downhill to cross the A34 was very tricky as it was extremely muddy, rutted & slippery. The trail actually crosses the busy dual-carriageway here - but there is a permissive bridleway along the edge of a field to an underpass. I thought this was a good idea until halfway through the puddle in the underpass. By the time I got off my bike, I realised it wasn't so much a puddle as a pond & I was standing in rather cold water up to my waist. Quickly hoisting my bike (large tyres sure help with buoyancy) out of the water I reassessed & ducked around to the right of the end of the tunnel & clambered up to the edge of the road through too much blackberry. End result was I had to ride the wrong way along the edge of the road, & my shorts were soaked. None of this was a problem - the largest inconvenience being that the maps in my pocket were now soaked; they were still readable, but required a little more care in folding & unfolding. My advice whatever the weather - see if you can cross A34 through the traffic - there is a gap in the median barrier; it'll save a tedious detour & perhaps getting very wet.

Soon I was climbing up to Watership Down & new trails. At marked point 11, I continued straight on Wayfarers Walk (instead of turning left on Meadham Lane) as this provided more bridleway & less road. It was muddy & slow. I was about halfway through the ride a little way into the Basingstoke loop, this is graded as moderate (not strenuous) so there's a bit more road & it was nice to get away from the mud for a while & the path crossed the Test and railway numerous times. Rejoining the Watership Down trail at Ibworth, the next section after Bailey Hall Farm was truly horrendous energy-sapping claggy mud for a mile and a half. Not much fun, but all ridable.

Stopping in the village of Kingsclere I had a few energy sweets (I ate very little on this whole ride, which is rather unusual) before heading off on the road towards Sydmonton & to finish the Watership Down loop & rejoining the Whitchurch one. I turned left before Sydmonton to miss out points three to seven on the map - because I don't like repeating bits if I don't have to & the wind was really picking up & a big black cloud was making its way ominously from the south east. Up on the ridge, the wind was rather extreme - I'm never a big fan of having to pedal downhill. Turning on to the Caesar's Belt of the Portway (part of the old Roman road that used to run from London to Weymouth - so it's dead straight), I turned in to the wind & it was a hard slog. Thankfully the rain that fell was only a light drizzle for a few minutes - not enough to put a jacket on.

There was a few miles of road back in to Whitchurch where I could load up the car & get out of the rather muddy clothes. A good day ride with plenty of mud to burn a bit of extra energy - and at eighty-five kilometres, my estimation proved correct.

New Forest cycle tour

Not so long ago I stumbled across the new Forestry Commission map of cycle routes in the New Forest. I printed a couple of copies & put them to one side, not really thinking too much of it. But over the last few weeks successive people have come into my office & pilfered copies - so I keep printing more. Finally I got around to studying it a bit more closely last week & realised just how extensive the network really is - there's not much coverage in the corner of the Forest I live in, so I've never really investigated before.

With no real plans for the weekend, Sunday looked the better of the two days to be in the sun so I started to loosely plan an all-day ride. As it was, Sunday was a glorious sun-drenched day so I headed out early to make the most of it. The first part getting to the marked trails was ridiculously muddy & proper hard work - just as well it's flat; even so, it wasn't long before I had to shed a layer.

Mostly on the cycle trails, with a small amount on quite roads (except for crossing the very busy dual-carriageway A31 near Rufus Stone), I made steady progress and within a few hours I was pretty much on the other side of the Forest. This was not somewhere I'd ever considered riding before, so that was good going - and at sixty kilometres - about halfway through what I thought would be the day's distance.

There's never a shortage of nice pubs serving food on such rides, so at about one o'clock I happened on the Old Beams Inn & stopped long enough to actually take a photo. This one had the Sunday carvery going, which is quite popular; after only eating half a Clif Bar since setting out a huge plate of roast meat & veges really hit the spot. Pleasingly, I didn't get a stitch as I rode off.

While the first half of the day was mainly off-road, I'd planned the second half predominantly on-road as I was keen to get down to Christchurch or Highcliffe & see the sea. Heading south on the edge of the Avon flood plain, there was still an awful lot of surface water from the last weeks of rain on the lanes to ride through or avoid. I had a quick peak at Highcliffe Castle (didn't think to get the camera out) & enjoyed the miles of cliff top riding from Barton-on-Sea east towards Lymington as the sun slowly sunk. With just quiet country lanes left, the last twenty kilometres wasn't really as much of a struggle as I thought it would be. A great day out, not really rushing & with plenty of general exploring. While 125 km ranks as my longest ride in a day, it was nowhere near the hardest & I haven't suffered since with aching muscles - so that's a bonus.

The Purbecks, again.

With the promise of a whole day of no rain, it made sense to use the money to drive over the Swanage & deliver my front wheel to the bike shop rather than post it. Of course, this gave the opportunity to ride more hills than there are at home. Scrabbling all the Swanage trails I could find together on my GPS, I was hoping I could get about 80 km done in six hours.

It was sunny, chilly in the northerly, proper muddy and all good fun. The cake & pasty stops in Corfe Castle were as good as always. Strangely on the Coast Path I bumped in to a couple of riders coming the opposite direction - I recognised them as I rode past, I rode most of my first MTB Marathon with them in Shropshire last summer. Fifteen minutes of catching up ensued before I did another loop & ended up back at the bikeshop for much talk about bikes (what else?).

Spam, egg, sausage & spam

With a name such as the SPAM Winter Challenge, I could hardly miss this for the obvious Python connection.

Now that that's out of the way, I may continue with a brief summary of what was clearly the last bike event of 2013 for me (I've managed seven this year, significantly more than any other year since I left NZ). Just over an hour's drive north up on Salisbury Plain, a few of the Combe Raiders were coming across from Somerset for this event that tries to deal with the Christmas excesses. With all the storms & rain that we've had over the last week, it was just as well this was supposed to be a course that deals with all sorts of weather well.

It's been a very mild winter so far, so it was with some surprise that I had to scrape a frost off my car as I set off this morning. This did mean that it was a wonderfully clear day - ideal for a ride. Driving up the A360 it was clear that the event was in the middle of the largest MOD training area in the country - there were signs for tanks crossing & signs warning of unexploded ordnance frequently. Unusually, the race briefing warned us to ensure we didn't ride into any tanks or stray off the trail and do a commendable impression of jumping high into the sky & scattering in thousands of pieces. Eventually the others made it from Somerset - some not quite in the knick of time for the 10 am start.

The first quarter of the fifty kilometre circuit was definitely the best. I really should learn to get a reasonable position mid-field at the start of such events - battling through a surprisingly large field up a long & slow climb is tedious. After that climb there were a few dives down off the ridge & back up again - mostly on rough muddy doubletrack through fields, with a bit of singletrack. The mud was pretty gloopy & horrendous for sticking to everything, but not too difficult to ride through (it did end up taking over an hour to clean my bike properly once home). We then found ourselves on the road for about twenty kilometres as we rode through the army land - boring, but preferable to being blown sky-high. It was a perfect day for riding: extensive views over the beautiful Wiltshire countryside, still, and not too hot or cold (about 5 ºC).

The strangest part of the day was riding through the middle of a fake-village.  There were dozens of house-shells - they seem to have walls, roofs, floors, fences and little else.  Clearly these are used for urban warfare training. The only real thing in the village was the church, which had parishioners walking to it; there were a lot of people around.  [A little research shows that this was the village of Imber - it was evacuated in 1943 for the war effort & the villagers have never been allowed to return as the MOD continues to use the land - a lot like Tyneham which I happened across during another biking weekend in May.  The church is no longer in use, but the roads that we were riding along are open occasionally so the public can have a look around.]

As this was the last event of a year of much biking, I was pretty keen to see how quickly I could get around the course.  So I only stopped for forty seconds on the whole ride to get some food out of my pack; also, this meant I didn't even carry my camera - so I only have my memory of how splendid the countryside was.  After passing plenty of birdwatchers, derelict tanks, garrisons & barracks we finally got off the road. More short steep ups & downs later we were back along the ridge looking north for a while - I'm a little disturbed at my ability to recognise a cement works from a long distance.  I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was to ride past a huge hole in the ground shortly after - the limestone had to come from somewhere after all.

We rejoined the two shorter courses for a while before diving off the ridge for one last really steep nasty climb.  With a nice bit of singletrack in some woods, the car park & therefore finish line was tantalisingly close for much too long.  But it was worth getting to the finish line for the cake alone - a local hospice was fundraising and there was a plethora of cakes on offer, there was so much choice it was overwhelming.  So not the most interesting course, but a great day out on the bike to end a pretty big year of riding for me - & a good chance to catch up with mates too.  I was happy with finishing in 2:40, without really pushing myself just not stopping for chats, photos or much food.