CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A 240 km round trip from Silloth - roughly 4 h 01 in the saddle. The stops in between: Rise How tower 25a, The English Lake District, Ravenglass Roman fort bath-house and back through The English Lake District. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Slow enough to look. The surface follows the shoreline, so the corners arrive where the water decided, not where an engineer did. Water arrives beside the road and stays for 34 km. The line follows the shore because there is nowhere else for it to go.
Check the pass is open before you commit to it.
Silloth sits on a flat spit of land on the Solway Firth, and from the shore you look across the water to the hills of Dumfriesshire, blue in clear weather and smudged away in rain. This was once a Roman frontier too. The line of Hadrian's Wall did not stop at the western end of the stone wall but continued down the Cumbrian coast as a chain of milefortlets and towers, small posts built to watch for raiders crossing by sea or by the tidal flats, and some of their sites lie on this shore. Blitterlees is a marsh and farm on the coast close to Silloth, and traces of those posts are found in the area, mostly as faint bumps and records rather than visible walls.
Read the complete Blitterlees write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Blitterlees is where the day begins. Next is Rise How tower 25a.
Hadrian's Wall does not simply stop at the Solway. Beyond Bowness, the Romans extended their frontier down the Cumbrian coast with a chain of milefortlets and towers, watching the shore against raiders crossing from what is now south-west Scotland. Rise How tower 25a is one of them, on the low cliffs just south of Maryport near Flimby, part of the Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage site. Little is visible above ground, but standing here and looking out over the water, you can see why they bothered.
Read the complete Rise How tower 25a write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Rise How tower 25a comes up about 21 km into the recorded legs. Next is The English Lake District.
Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud round here, and anybody who has ridden the Lake District on a wet bank holiday will understand the appeal of being lonely. The English Lake District, listed by UNESCO in 2017 as a cultural landscape, is a compact knot of mountains, lakes and valleys in Cumbria, shaped by glaciers and then by centuries of sheep farming, slate quarrying and, from the late eighteenth century, by poets, painters and tourists who came looking for the sublime.
Read the complete The English Lake District write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 85 km into the recorded legs you reach The English Lake District. Next is Ravenglass Roman fort bath-house.
Walls Castle is the odd name for a Roman bath house, and the building still stands to a height of about four metres, one of the tallest Roman structures in northern England. It stood outside the fort of Glannoventa at Ravenglass, a harbour station at the meeting of three rivers, the Irt, the Mite and the Esk, and in the dry shelter of the dunes it has survived because its walls were thick and well built. You can walk around it on a short path from the village, and see niches and a doorway in the thick walls. The fort itself lies mostly under farmland and the railway.
Read the complete Ravenglass Roman fort bath-house write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Ravenglass Roman fort bath-house, about halfway. Next is back through The English Lake District.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete The English Lake District write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through The English Lake District sits at 147 km, about halfway. Next is back through Rise How tower 25a.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Rise How tower 25a write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Rise How tower 25a comes up about 219 km into the recorded legs. Next is Blitterlees.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Blitterlees write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Blitterlees closes the day.
Blitterlees → Rise How tower 25a is 21 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Rise How tower 25a → The English Lake District is 64 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
The English Lake District → Ravenglass Roman fort bath-house is 35 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Ravenglass Roman fort bath-house → back through The English Lake District is 36 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through The English Lake District → back through Rise How tower 25a is 63 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Rise How tower 25a → Blitterlees is 21 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.