That's Another One Off The List Until August.

That’s Another Trail Off The List Until August

Monday 3rd February 2020.

Square Corner

The Ginger One.

In contrast to La Mujerita and her sister who need four or five twenty minute phone calls to organise to meet up at the shops round the corner - to have a chat, here is a transcript of me and The Ginger One arranging a day's mountain biking.

"Pedaling tomorrow?"

"Yes. Any ideas?"

"Hawnby cafe from Square Corner?"

"Okay, see you there." Four brief texts and the next day, perfectly coordinated, we are offloading bikes in the bitter wind of the Square Corner microclimate. An old standard route,  planned merely so The Ginger One could indulge in the Hawnby Cafe daily special, which has been the daily special for several years. Rare breed pork and apple burger with homemade chips, an epicurean delicacy to someone from Darlington. We haven't visited Hawnby for quite a while, nothing to do with the food and everything to do with the only way out of the village being up and steeply up at that. Today we also had wind to consider, gusting up to forty odd miles per hour; working on the old, tailwind high, headwind low theory, we began by riding up the Mad Mile, wondering if the next laborious turn of the cranks will be the one which induces sudden death from exploding heart syndrome, post mortem report, “probably caused by excessive anal respiration”. Four hundred and twenty five feet of ascent in the first mile, our lungs were well and truly opened up by the time the cairn at the top swam into vision. 

The pedal along the Drove Road, flatter and wind-assisted went briskly, we even squeezed in a quick extra loop down to Boltby Forest, climbing back up on fire road to rejoin the Drove Road. Mud and slop are the prevailing conditions away from the main tracks, making the path through the fields to the quaintly named Noddle End a different proposition from the summer cruise on sun-baked earth. The steep descent to Peak Scar woods is still steep, chunks of limestone scattered about the path like droppings from a mythical stone-eating beast, moist and slippery, trying to take control of the front wheel and plunge us down the hillside in a blur of arms, legs and emergency ambulances. One of the benefits of riding this route in an anticlockwise direction is we don’t have to ride up Murton Bank with a belly full of daily special, instead we were able to hurtle down into Hawnby as fast as our almost middle-aged bodies would allow. In a few short years, my elderly scrotum will be skimming the water when I sit down to drop the kids off at the pool. Is this what they mean by big balls? And how much faster will it make me go downhill? 

It turns out there is no longer a daily special at Hawnby Cafe, however, the pork and apple burger is still on the menu, so The Ginger One was not denied his gastronomic gratification. Replete, we hoisted ourselves back onto our bikes and began to climb out of Hawnby, not that easy when the least steep option is a two hundred foot climb, and that only takes you to the upper road in Hawnby, leaving us with about six or seven miles back to Square Corner. Predominantly road miles, into a headwind but we had the off-road delight of the Dale Head singletrack to finish the ride, so it was heads down until we could leave the road. 

Our last treat of the day turned out to be like a beautifully packaged parcel, eagerly unwrapped, only to find within, the contents of a well used cat litter tray. The small stretches of firm singletrack were outweighed by the lengthy sections of ankle-deep mud and pedal-catching ruts, the joy added to by the buffeting wind pushing us off course on the narrow trail and the rocks hidden in the overgrown heather. We reached the ruin of Dale Head Farm, decrepit and dilapidated, the farm is not looking too clever either, (boom boom) thankful we only had a short pedal back to the cars. One of those routes that turned out a lot harder than it needed to be and the Dale Head singletrack will be shelved until the next drought.