The Only Bog In North Yorkshire

Mountain Bike Ride

The Youth, The Breadlad, Rod.

21st August route

Idly leafing through the latest edition of one of the more upmarket mountain biking magazines available, my eye was caught by a familiar map, a route centred around Danby, mapped out by the lads from The Yorkshire Cycling Hub, featuring two tracks I have never managed to deface with my tyres in twenty or so years of riding. Today was as good a day as any to rectify this situation. The summer is continuing in half-hearted fashion, the temperature has cooled from the excesses of July and rain has not been a stranger either. Today began unpromising, dull and slightly moist but warm and humid, too warm for coats, despite this, we managed to get a team out today - a whole four of us, assembling bikes in Danby Village Hall car park. Time constraints meant we truncated the magazine route a little, beginning by riding through Danby Park to Castleton, then up through the High Street, not as easy as it sounds because Castleton sits high above the river Esk, which we had just crossed. Even the High Street is on a slope. We found our way onto the bridleway to Danby Dale, one of the previously unridden tracks and followed it through fields and gates, farm tracks and gates, tarmac roads and gates, more gates than the Microsoft founder’s family tree. 

Eventually, we reached Botton Farm and eyed the track climbing up the hillside to Danby Rigg with some trepidation, steep, narrow and overgrown, with a sprinkling of slippery rocks to make matters a bit more difficult. I could pretend we battled up until conditions forced us to push but in reality we capitulated within feet, wet bracken, wet grass and (only slightly less flies than a mass grave before the diggers move in)more flies round us than the cow pats in the fields we had just rode through. Plodding upward in the sunshine, the weather took a turn for the better, we left The Youth trailing, three blokes with over 150 years between them, just saying like. And then we found a damp patch, probably the only damp patch left in the whole of North Yorkshire, the damp patch progressed to a full-blown bog and we squelched upward, wet feet in the driest August for years, it could only happen to us, our heads still orbited by legions of flies until higher ground brought a slight breeze to send them back to the depths of whatever hell they came from. 

At the road The Breadlad departed to fulfil conjugal obligations, taking the speedy way back to Danby. We pedalled up to the Trough House track, or The Cut Road as it is called on the OS map. Just like last week it was dry and fast but without the grumpy walker to shout at us. The magazine riders took The Glaisdale Corkscrew back into Fryupdale, although they call it The Waterfall Trail, we have done this trouser-filler quite a few times, with varying degrees of dabbiness (dabbiness, like happiness but you put your feet down more). However, the bridleway at the end of the Trough House track, almost where it joins the road, the magazine’s chicken run alternative to the corkscrew, is another of those we’ve managed to overlook. I think The Pensioner might have had a lone venture down it many years ago and his account was, in common with most of his utterances, somewhat negative. 

I’m not saying we were swayed by the opinions of a perpetually grumpy, partially-sighted, sexagenarian but it has taken twenty years for us to give it a try.The top section is a perfect moorland singletrack, squiggling through the heather, just on the pleasurable side of horizontal. A gate leads to a sparsely wooded hillside where the track takes on a different character, steeper and more enclosed, shoulder height bracken with the odd boulder here and there to give dilettantes like us pause for thought. All part of the fun, as the old saying goes. Reaching the road in the dale bottom, we could see the roof of the magnificent Yorkshire Cycle Hub in the near distance, beckoning us onward, with only some brutally steep tarmac between us and the cafe’s calorific comestibles. 

Hydrated and satiated, we felt ready for one last hill before home, an old favourite Ainthorpe Rigg, a ride/push/carry up the steep side leads to a rock splattered track down the other side, a lot less technical since it was sanitised a few years ago but a speedy blast down to the road at Ainthorpe. From here we were soon back at the cars, all agreeing it had been a good ride, the ascent from Botton wiped from our minds by the restorative power of a fast downhill.