THE OLD 240 30-31.03.2012
This ride takes its name from a route originally intended to test the ability to ride 240 miles in 24 hours. It has been tweaked somewhat since the original route was devised and is now offered both as a calendar event and a permanent by Chris Crossland of the West Yorkshire DA of the CTC. It’s a colossal 400k loop from Mytholmroyd, near Halifax, north through West Yorkshire and Lancashire to Alston in Westmorland, then east and south-east across the roof of County Durham before swinging south-west through Scotch Corner and Richmond back into Yorkshire. I would be going home to Durham!
There are 6.5 AAA points most of which are earned in long, steady climbs. Unfortunately, these are generally connected by sections of jabby, short hills, so there is not a lot of “let-up”. When I told Chris I had never done a 400 before, he warned me it was to be a baptism of fire. I knew this already, because I had had the entry card since last year, just waiting for me to pluck up the courage. It looked like March’s fabulous spell of weather was going to come to an end and so I decided to give it a try on the last weekend. My approach was just to do the ride and if I got round in time, fine and if I didn’t, fine. I marked the control closing-times (from the Audax website) in my brevet card as a guide to how I was doing. This is something I started on my last “tough” event and I found it encouraging to know from control to control, whether or not I was still on target.
In his ride information, Chris is very clear that there are long stretches where there is no opportunity for getting food, as, necessarily, all but the fastest riders will have to do a great deal of the ride overnight. Also, for my attempt, there would be about ten hours of darkness at this time of year. So, in addition to the usual tubes, tools and lights, I put sandwiches and two substantial pizza-type items in the pannier. But I still got it wrong. In fact, strange things happened later on in the ride, to do with eating and also states of mind.
Early on the Friday morning, after almost five hours sleep, I rode the couple of miles to Smithy Bridge and caught the train to Mytholmroyd.
At 8am, I bought a bottle of water at the Co-op to get a receipt for proof of passage and set off on my great adventure. At Hebden Bridge, I turned north onto the Haworth road for the long but relatively easy climb of Cock Hill. This is about four miles long and had several irritating sets of temporary lights on, where retaining walls were being repaired. I used one of the delays to fit my lights because I had quickly climbed into fog as the earth cooled rapidly after our wonderful warm spell. A grouse blethered through the mirk. By the time I reached the research station at the summit, my gloves and sleeves were covered in condensation. I worried slightly about the coming night, as I had only a light rain-jacket in addition to what I was wearing.
After the nice drop to Keighley, through school-runs and rush-hour traffic, I turned back into the country-side at Crosshills and onto the Elslack road. I mentioned the “connecting links” of short climbs; it’s almost as if The Creator finished grading the long climbs and then threw all the spoil into heaps in between, thinking, “no-one will be stupid enough to put a road over that lot,”. Well, they have. This is called undulation and it’s very hard work, especially if you’ve got a whole day and night’s riding looming in your mind. But there were compensations as I rode in and out of the mist. The daffodils, which were a beautifully uplifting feature of the whole expedition, encouraged me from the verges. Before long, I was through East and West Martons, and heading up the Settle road. I nearly missed the turn to Wigglesworth but that was just lack of concentration; the route-sheet was perfect. Passing the familiar Plough Inn, I rode on to Rathmell, where there was an information control, and then into Settle, where I stopped for about a quarter of an hour, drinking a pint of milk and eating a couple of cheese baps (northern term for cheese bap).
From Settle, I rode through Giggleswick and past the public school, with its beautiful cricket pavilion and square.
I’ve been this way before and tend to think of it as “the road to Bentham” instead of “chevron land” which is what it is. After a mile or so of switchback, a descending cyclist encouraged me with, “nearly at the top!”. They didn’t know the half of it! After this, the road to High Bentham, along the foot of the crossings of the Forest of Bowland is a lovely rolling ribbon, bordered by golden broom and gorse bushes. Three or four weeks earlier, I’d been caught in a vicious hail-storm on this stretch which had rendered it just another of God’s chain of spoil-tips. But now all was calm except for the slight headwind, which was to persist all the way to the turn at Alston.
Passing through Wennington, I reached Melling and turned right onto the main Lancaster to Kirkby Lonsdale road.
Soon, I passed through Tunstall, to which the Bronte sisters had walked to church across the muddy fields in all weathers, from their hell of a school in Cowan Bridge. I’ve done this stretch in poor weather on the North-West Passage 200 and I always shudder at the thought of that school and its privations. Small wonder that so many of the children succumbed to tuberculosis. But today the daffodils were blazing brightly in defiance of the overcast sky.
Just above Kirkby Lonsdale, I jinked across the A65, passing the famed tea-bar on Devil’s Bridge with its encrustation of motorcyclists. Just after the church in Casterton, which was built by the churchman who ran the school at Cowan Bridge, I was taken by surprise by a sudden sharp hill and had to flip onto the smallest chainwheel for a hundred yards or so. Soon, I was leaving the Sedbergh road and going right for Barbon, which is a pretty village with some fey, pastel-painted cottages and a fine church with a lych-gate, all nestled beneath Barbon Low Fell, which although it is quite low, indicates that you are now getting into serious hill country after the lumps and bumps of the first eighty kilometres.
Barbondale itself is breathtaking. It is so remote in feel, with pretty much no habitation or building of any kind. The massive flank of Middleton Fell on the left, which stretches pretty much the whole of the dale, was still bleached and scrubby and almost made me feel I was high up in the African veldt again. The blue Barkin Beck glittered the length of the dale and my heart soared with the road, so that I was nearly unaware that I was actually climbing most of the time. If this isn’t the most uplifting stretch of cycling I’ve ever done, then I can’t recall a better one.
My heart stayed up long after the road had plunged down into Dent, where I took a long break at the Meadowside Café. Mindful of the warnings about scarcity of food possibilities further ahead, I had double-egg and chips and sticky toffee pudding and ice cream, washed down with a pot of tea. The food was excellent and the company of two other cyclists made it a convivial stop. I was there a little longer than I had intended (about 40 minutes) but I was still well within the control limits I had jotted on my card. In fact, having done a leisurely 110k in well under six hours, I was still toying with the possibility that I might get round in 24 hours.
I left the café at about 3.40pm and was pleased to see that the sun had finally come out as I retraced past the antiques shop, which had an amazing collection of railwayana and agricultural machinery on display, and on towards Sedbergh.
Dentdale, of which I had ridden the eastern half earlier in the month, is exquisite, with the River Dee peeping and hiding through the hedgerows, where the leaves on the hawthorn provided an emerald ground for the delicate white flowers of the blackthorn. It is also quite lumpy towards the west, so I needed to work a little. The road from Sedbergh north-east towards Kirkby Stephen was another great pleasure. If you have to ride on a main road, then they don’t get much better than this. The traffic was a little busier than in Dentdale and it was the Friday evening rush-hour (it being after two-o-clock) but the views were stunning. The early miles pass between Brant Fell on the west and Baugh Fell on the east, both of which rise to 676 metres. This is very impressive, as at that point the road, though gradually climbing, is some 500 metres lower, lower in fact than my home in Rochdale.
Particularly striking features of this stretch are Cautley Crags and Cautley Spout waterfall.
The lack of rain so far this year meant that the waterfall was less spectacular than it might otherwise have been but it was still quite noticeable. Soon after passing this, the guardians of Mallerstang Common loom over to the right, High Seat and Wild Boar Fell, where I could see lime-kilns.
The Settle-Carlisle railway runs in the valley between these behemoths and I was soon to re-make its acquaintance. But first I had to cross the A685 from Kendal, which was easy enough, though it provided a nasty contrast to the road I had just left as the cars screamed along it. Safely across, I took the track, and it is little more than that, to Smardale and suddenly all was quiet again. There is a fine view of one of the twenty-odd viaducts on the Settle line here and also a ford. I’d been warned by Chris about the ford and I’m grateful. It looks innocent enough but closer inspection revealed the slime on the road below the surface of the water. I wheeled my bike across the foot-bridge and re-mounted to take a pretty sharp rise up towards Crosby Garrett.
Crosby Garrett is a fascinating place. It seems to have grown up around a T-junction of lanes and reminds me of the kind of village you can see in Eire, or you could when I was last there – forty years ago. A beck runs through the middle and after crossing it I turned right and followed signs for Appleby. This section was quite rolling and I seemed to be gaining height gradually. In Appleby itself I paused at the top of the town to take a picture of the obelisk known as The High Cross, a tall column of white-painted stone with a sundial near the top.
Rolling down to the bottom of the main street, I discovered its twin, which is, unsurprisingly, The Low Cross. These seem to date from Georgian times but the town itself has a long history, much of it associated with the amazingly energetic Lady Anne Clifford, a noble-woman of the 17th century who owned great tracts of the Yorkshire dales and built a grand house in Appleby. I called in at the Spar to buy milk and chocolate. I still had my emergency supplies pretty much intact and was wondering at the decision to lug all that extra weight this far but, by now, I had realised that this was no longer going to be a 24 hour ride and I had no idea whether or not I would be able to get anything to eat in Alston, by the time I got there, which looked like being about nine in the evening. The stops for photographs and snacks were eating into my margins but I still felt good and was within my schedule for simply completing the ride. The jovial Friday night group sat outside the pub next to the Spar was a temptation, but only a mild one, as I set off for Alston, via the famous Hartside Pass.
The dozen or so miles between Appleby and Melmerby, which is where the climb starts, took me along country lanes, through or past villages with solid northern names like Milburn and Blencarn. For a long time I could see a white obelisk on the summit of a fell in the Pennines over to the east and discovered from a resident that it was a radar station on Great Dun Fell. Had I known, I would have combed my hair. Further along, the summit of the mighty Cross Fell on the Pennine Way was wreathed in cloud, a splendid sight.
The sun was dropping in the west and the the pearly quality of the light threw the shapes of trees into filigree relief.
Just beyond Melmerby, I stopped to re-fuel, noting the sign which told of the number of serious accidents there had been on the climb recently. I fitted my lights and set off up what I expected to be the first real test of the day, after all the jabbiness which had preceded it.
I needn’t have worried: Hartside Pass is a beauty if you like climbing. From the west it is a long, steady pull with a gradient that was easily manageable on the middle chain-ring. In fact, I felt that for first time for many years I was climbing with a rhythm. The bends give good changes of view and it’s encouraging how quickly the plain to the west drops away into a milky distance. On newish tarmac, this was superb riding, which even the occasional boy- and executive-racers were unable to spoil. There was only one building on the whole ascent, a white cottage, in beautiful isolation, presumably a gamekeeper’s. It was like riding out of The Shire in a Tolkien book towards a rather fine quest. It would have been wonderful had the Hartside Café been open for mushrooms as I reached the top but that was not to be expected at half-past eight in the evening.
I stopped to take a picture at the obligatory photo-opportunity sign, declaring Hartside Summit to be 1903 feet up. Oddly the sign is not at the summit, or didn’t seem to me to be.
Once I was over the top and with the fading sun beyond the hill behind me, it became dark very quickly. Not dark enough to use my stronger Fenix light but enough to make pothole-watching a necessary consideration. If that sounds like a contradiction, I was aware of how long I was going to be riding through the night and was hoping to leave my “best” light off for as long as possible. I had spare batteries for all my lights but the claimed “run-times” are hit and miss in my experience. The surface on the eastern side of Hartside is not as good as that on the west but I still fairly flew down the long grade to Alston, the orange lights of which could be seen almost all the way down the hill. Two things occurred to me on the descent: the first was that the climb of Hartside would be a much more serious affair from this side; the second was that it was going to be a cold night and that I would have to work hard for most of it to keep warm.
At about 1000 feet, Alston is one of the highest towns in England and is famed among cyclists for its steep cobbled main street. I confess I found this no problem but it was dry and with the amount of food I was carrying I probably wore a groove in it. In fairness to the legend, I think most of it arises from riders on the London-Edinburgh-London ride who will, I guess, have done about 800k by the time they tackle it. I had done about 190. But this meant that I was pretty-much halfway. However, by the time I had phoned home, as arranged, eaten, then put my (thin) rain-top on, I was right up against the stops as far as the audax estimation of control times went. When I left, I had notionally no spare time at all and it was 13 hours after I had set off from Mytholmroyd.
But I was not particularly concerned. I still felt comfortable, had sufficient supplies to see me through to morning and had plenty of adventure to look forward to. As I saw it, I had three more major climbs to overcome: Yad Moss, Kidstones and Oxenhope Moor. I had done the last two before and hoped that the sense of exploration would see me over the first. And, finally, I had the wind with me!
