I can only imagine that those who built the great industrial infrastructure of The North, now look down upon us and cringe.
Co Durham has some great bike paths now, but once - someone looked at all those freakin hills and thought - "Yeah, great place for a railway." I was a lily-livered southerner when all this got dismantled. What a crime to perpetrate on our industrial legacy; to pull it all apart so we could build roads instead. But hey, we get some awesome off-road cycling as a result.
We rode down the incline from Stanley Crook, through Waterhouses to Langley Park - and it was a beautiful ride through woods, beside waterfalls, through parks to a gert big road climb to Langley Park, that had me beyond the limit my doctors have told me not to go. From LP, we took the Lanchester Valley Way (another ripped up railway) to the Cafe at Bearpark for some welcome scran (I *think* that's the term), before then taking the NCN 70 back toward Bish Aukland.
The van was parked at the top at Stanley Crook, so it was a world of pain (for those of us with "Issues" at least) to get back up the hill, but I made it without dying at least, though puking was a narrowly avoided possibility.
We're going to be living around there soon. I need to up my game and down my weight before I can consider a push-bike as any kind of sensible option.