Kendo Rides Again.

Cross Bike Ride

Oz, The Breadlad, Kendo

5th January 2017 route (to follow)

After almost a dozen years in the wilderness, well, Norton Working Men’s Club, Kendo has entrusted his delicate parts to a bicycle seat and once again joined The Terra Trailblazers for a bit of pedalling. He enjoyed his first ride (TTB 036) in December 2004 so much, he rushed back fourteen months later (TTB 067), for another go and then nothing for the thick end of twelve years. He requested a gentle re-introduction. 

2006

2018

Times have moved on since those early days and most of us also have cyclocross bikes in addition to our stable of mountain bikes, so a pootle around some of the less well-known areas of Teesside seemed like a fine idea and a good way to let The Breadlad have a bash at the genteel but generally muddy art of CX biking. Consequently, a quartet of seedy looking gentlemen, some on the verge of middle age, gathered on a street corner in deepest, darkest Norton on cool but dry day, the preceding forty eight hours of rain had left the odd icy puddle around, or more realistically, the odd bit of dry land between the icy puddles. We pedalled along Norton High Street, resisting the lure of those fine British institutions, Greggs and Wetherspoons, passing the picturesque duck pond and the church of St. Mary, dating back to Saxon times. Kendo has vague memories of being the apprentice hod carrier when it was built.

We reached the Calf Fallow Lane area, an oasis of rurality, sandwiched between Norton and Billingham split by Thorpe Beck, today in spate, brown water lapping the banks. We crossed the bridge over the beck and came to our first test piece of the day, The Stoney Bank, not too steep but littered with uneven, slippery rock, an ascent relies on weight distribution, body positioning and cautious pedalling rather than purely powering up the beast. It also gets you out of breath and warmed up. We regrouped at the top and made our way along a gravel road with more craters than the Sea Of Tranquility and joined the Wynyard road. 

After a little tarmac riding our ragged peloton passed through The Golden Gates, under the ever-watchful eye of the security camera and onto the silky smooth roads of the Wynyard Estate, nothing as plebeian as potholes here. Continuing into the adjacent housing estate; surely the most soulless community in Britain, dead-eyed mansions overlooking streets deserted except for the occasional huge 4x4 piloted by a Stepford wife; we pedalled past the Disney inspired village green, fringed with expensive dormitories, feeling as though we were riding through a film set. Turning into the woods, a muddy bridleway cuts through to the Castle Eden Walkway, recent tree felling making things more difficult than usual but we battled onward to reach the firmer, flatter walkway; apparently the sort of track Kendo had imagined we’d be riding on. He’ll learn. 

The cafe in the former Thorpe Thewles station refreshed and replenished us for the return leg, which took a more direct route on minor roads back to Norton where we dropped off a suitably exercised Kendo and said goodbye to Oz. I introduced The Breadlad to some singletrack which wouldn’t be out of place in Dalby Forest - except for the perimeter fence and Keep Out signs of Holme House Prison. More singletrack, hidden metres away from the cacophony of the A19 took us home.

We had clocked up almost twenty miles of riding and barely scratched the surface of the hidden world beyond the chemical factories.