Not Quaking At The Causeway

Not Quaking At The Causeway.

Mountain Bike Ride

The Fireman

6th August route

Two men on the verge of middle age, a deserted rural car park with a seedy toilet block, lube, rubber and Lycra, it can only mean one thing - another bike ride. Me and The Fireman taking advantage of the continuing summer to stretch our legs in the time honoured fashion and my first venture into the wilds of North Yorkshire for quite a while. Our start was harsh, through Little Kildale and up to Warren Farm using, what The Breadlad named Three Sting Hill because just when you think you’ve cracked it, a steeper bit of tarmac rears up in front of you. From the farm, we rode down through a field, to Leven Vale, past the chimney, a remnant of the ironstone mining days, built in 1866 as a vent for steam from the boilers, we were soon steaming as we plodded up The Field of Heavy Gravity, quite dry today and nothing like it’s usual squelchy self. 

The continuation of the ascent, on to Kildale Moor is not rideable, not by us anyway and we shouldered our bikes for a short carry to the top of the moor before the technical descent down to the Baysdale Valley. The three barns where the track comes out are looking rather dilapidated these days, long past the stage of “fixer upper”. We followed the bridleway eastwards, the dry weather has left in fine condition and it was not long before we reached the road at Sloethorne Park, above Hob Hole. Keeping our height we stayed on tarmac all the way to the oddly named Foul Green on the outskirts of Commondale, before returning to off road riding on the Box Hall bridleway, again flowing dry and fast. Back on tarmac, we slogged up some more road, passing the Shaun The Sheep bus shelter and continued to The Quaker’s Causeway. 

The Quaker’s Causeway - lesser men tremble at the very name; lily-buttocked youths refuse to consider turning a pedal on any of it’s countless blocks, laid down hundreds of years ago so pilgrims could reach the burger van at Birk Brow without being hindered by a boggy moor, or maybe it was Guisborough Priory, history is not my strong point. The Fireman and me are made of sterner stuff, suspension on full bounce and buttocks of steel clenched tighter than the new boy on D wing, we set off across the causeway, paralleling the busy A177 a mile or so away, in contrast to the Whitby bound traffic, we were alone on the ancient stone thoroughfare, nothing around us but heather and sky.

 At a bifurcation, a trail leads to Westworth Woods, an outlier of Guisborough Woods, initially boggy, the trail descends to some pleasant singletrack leading to the woods. Generally, experiencing the initial bog deters most people from riding this trail  a second time, in the hallowed words of The Pensioner, “I told you it would be shite.”. However, the unprecedented dry spell may have made things a bit more amenable -  that was my theory anyway. And, up to a point, it worked out until we met a JCB digging out a drainage ditch and dumping bucket loads of wet slurry across our path, an unavoidable paddle later and we were back on track, the driest summer in years and here we were with wet feet. The swooping singletrack from my memory was actually pretty overgrown with heather and vicious gorse bushes which pounced on our bare arms and legs like fat blokes at a free pie stall. Oh well, experience is never wasted and all that. 

Back on the more familiar territory of Guisborough Woods, we took in a couple of off-piste trails before hunger kicked in and sent us scurrying back over Codhill Heights to Kildale and the epicurean delights of Glebe Cottage.