Meshchera Forest Lakes Loop

A lowland wilderness route where quiet roads and lake country matter more than elevation.

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Why this ride

A lowland wilderness route where quiet roads and lake country matter more than elevation. The road: Regional roads through Meshchera. Distance and riding time are estimates from the checkpoints until the road is measured on this page.

Roadbook

1. Ryazan start

   Ryazan lies on the high right bank of the Oka river, a few hours south-east of Moscow, in the broad farming country of central Russia. Its kremlin, with the white-and-gold Assumption Cathedral, a bell tower that was the tallest in Russia in its day and a cluster of old churches, stands on a bluff above the river, and it gives a sense of how the princes of this land lived. The original capital of the principality, now known as Old Ryazan, lay farther to the south-east, and it was destroyed by the Mongols under Batu Khan in 1237, an event that is still recalled as one of the terrible moments of the Russian past.

   A good ride towards Ryazan takes the Oka as its guide. From Kolomna, a pleasant old town with its own kremlin and the famous pastila, a sweet apple confection, the road follows the river valley through meadows, birch woods and villages of wooden houses with carved window frames. The surface is mostly decent on main roads, though often patched, and the traffic is heavy with trucks on the federal highways. Side roads can be rough and dusty in dry weather, and muddy during the spring thaw in April, or in the autumn rains. Summer is warm and light, with evenings that seem endless, while winter is very cold, with snow and ice from November to March.

   Ryazan is also a land of poets and soldiers. The poet Sergei Yesenin was born in the village of Konstantinovo, a short drive from the city, and the house museum and the meadows around it are a place of pilgrimage for lovers of Russian verse, who recite his lines among the birches. The Ryazan region is known too for its airborne troops, trained at the city's famous school. Food here is hearty, from fish pies and mushroom dishes to the creamy soups and rye bread served with sour cream, and in autumn the markets are full of apples, honey and pickled vegetables.

   The city has a population of over half a million, so there are fuel stations, repair shops and hotels in good supply, especially along the main roads and on the approaches. Cash and a mobile connection are both useful, and you should check the latest travel advice and entry conditions well before you plan any journey. A walk along the embankment at dusk, as the sun sinks behind the river and the bells ring, is the best end to the day.

2. Spas-Klepiki stop

   Meshchera is the part of Russia that writers fall in love with. It is a low, sandy, forested plain south of the Oka, full of lakes, peat bogs and pine woods, and the author Konstantin Paustovsky, who wrote lovingly of it in the 1930s, called it a land of quiet beauty with nothing spectacular about it. Spas-Klepiki is a small town of about six thousand people on the edge of this country, and the starting point for one of the oddest railways in Europe.

   The Meshchera narrow-gauge line, which runs from the town into the forest, was built to haul peat and is said to be among the longest of its kind on the continent. Little diesel trains, with a few open carriages, still run along it in summer, carrying passengers through birch and pine, past lakes and clearings. Peat extraction left its mark here, and in 2010 a heatwave set off fires in the dried bogs that sent smoke across Moscow. Today the area is partly protected as the Meshchersky National Park, and the wetlands are an important refuge for birds, beavers and elk.

   For riders, the roads are quiet and flat, with the pace set by the sandy soil and the trees. Surfaces are mixed: stretches of fair asphalt, and sections that crack and sink where the ground is wet. Some tracks into the forest are sand that can trap a heavy bike, so keep to the paved roads unless you know the way. Mosquitoes in summer are determined, and autumn is lovely when the birches turn gold, though rain can set in. To the north-west, the road along the Oka leads to Konstantinovo, the village where the poet Sergei Yesenin was born in 1895, and where his family house is now a museum.

   Spas-Klepiki has fuel, shops and a few places to eat, but beyond it the villages are small, so top up. Foreign riders should check current conditions before planning travel.

3. Kasimov stop

   Kasimov is one of the stranger and more interesting towns on the Oka. For about two hundred years, from the middle of the fifteenth century, it was the capital of a small Tatar khanate created by the grand princes of Moscow as a buffer and a reward for Tatar nobles who entered their service. Muslim rulers governed a town in the heart of Orthodox Russia, and traces of that era remain: a stone minaret attached to an old mosque, and the mausoleum of Khan Shah Ali, a squat stone building that is one of the few such monuments this far west. Both stand within a short walk of the river.

   The rest of the town belongs to the merchant era. Kasimov became wealthy trading along the Oka, and its centre has a broad square, a classical cathedral, trading arcades with columns, and streets of solid brick and timber houses. The setting is lovely, with the town sitting on a high bank above the river, the water wide below and the far shore low and wooded. In the evening the light across the Oka is soft and long, and the whole place feels unhurried.

   Around Kasimov lies Meshchera, a broad lowland of pine and birch forest, bogs and lakes that stretches north toward Vladimir. This is the landscape the writer Konstantin Paustovsky loved and described, and for a rider it means long, quiet roads through the trees, flat but rarely dull, with the smell of pine resin in summer. The surfaces on the minor roads can be poor, and some routes through the forest turn to sand or gravel, so check before heading into the back country. Elk occasionally cross at dusk.

   Kasimov has about thirty-five thousand people, which means fuel, shops, cafes and a few places to sleep. It is a good base for the Meshchera loop, and a natural place for a long lunch, perhaps fish from the river if a menu offers it. Make time to stand at the top of the bank and look across the Oka; it is one of the most generous river views in central Russia.

4. Spas-Klepiki stop
5. Yegoryevsk stop

   Ride into Yegoryevsk from almost any direction and the first thing you see is the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, a huge, ornate church whose domes and towers dominate the low skyline like something dropped in from a much bigger city. It was built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with money from local textile merchants, and it is the kind of building that tells you exactly where the money in this town came from: cotton mills, weaving and trade, run by merchant dynasties who competed in piety as much as in business.

   Yegoryevsk, named for Saint George, sits on the western edge of Meshchera in the southeast of Moscow Oblast. It has around eighty-five thousand people and still feels like a provincial industrial town, with old red brick factory buildings, wide streets and a mix of merchant houses and Soviet apartment blocks. There is a local history museum in a merchant's mansion, and the old trading rows near the centre are worth a slow look. Around the town the land is flat, with pine and birch forest, peat bogs and old phosphorite workings that left lakes and scarred ground.

   The riding here is the gateway kind. From Yegoryevsk the roads head east into the forest country of Meshchera, long and mostly straight, with occasional bends around lakes or villages and a surface that varies from fresh asphalt to rippled, patched tarmac. Logging trucks and slow farm traffic are common. In summer the forest smells wonderful but the mosquitoes and horseflies near the bogs are fierce. In dry years the peat bogs have been known to smoulder, and the haze can drift across the roads.

   As a stop, Yegoryevsk is straightforward and useful. Fuel stations, supermarkets, cafes and canteens are easy to find, and there are a few hotels. If you are heading deeper into Meshchera, this is a good place to fill up and buy water, because the villages ahead are small and the distances between services grow. Stand in front of the cathedral for a minute; it is one of the more surprising buildings in the region.

6. Back to Ryazan finish

Where this sits

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