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 291 km round trip from Annan - roughly 4 h 39 in the saddle. It goes by way of Maryport Golf Course tower 22a, The English Lake District, Ravenglass Roman fort bath-house and back through The English Lake District. The line favours views over speed.
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.
A turret on Hadrian's Wall was a small stone tower, about the size of a garden shed, built into the wall itself so that two soldiers could shelter and watch the country. Two turrets stood between each pair of milecastles, spaced about a third of a Roman mile apart, which means a signal could be passed along the wall in minutes by lamp, horn or flag. Turret 3a, near Pasture House on the Solway plain, is one of those tiny posts, and it is a good place to imagine the monotony of the job: a cold, damp night, a wide flat horizon, and the wind in the grass.
Read the complete Pasture House turret 3a write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Pasture House turret 3a is where the day begins. Next is Maryport Golf Course tower 22a.
Hadrian's Wall gets the fame, but the Romans kept watching long after it ended at Bowness. The coast of Cumberland, from the Solway to St Bees, was fitted with a line of forts, fortlets and watchtowers, each numbered in sequence, and Tower 22a is one of them. It stands on the cliff above Maryport, in a place that the golf course has swallowed, and what you will find is a modest earthwork or a marker rather than a standing tower. The Romans built Alauna, a fort at Maryport, on the high ground above the harbour, and the finds from it, a collection of seventeen carved altars buried in a pit, are displayed in the Senhouse Roman Museum in a former naval battery overlooking the sea.
Read the complete Maryport Golf Course tower 22a write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Maryport Golf Course tower 22a comes up about 45 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 111 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 159 km, about halfway. Next is back through Maryport Golf Course tower 22a.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Maryport Golf Course tower 22a write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Maryport Golf Course tower 22a comes up about 245 km into the recorded legs. Next is Pasture House turret 3a.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Pasture House turret 3a write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Pasture House turret 3a closes the day.
Pasture House turret 3a → Maryport Golf Course tower 22a is 45 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Maryport Golf Course tower 22a → The English Lake District is 66 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 Maryport Golf Course tower 22a is 63 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Maryport Golf Course tower 22a → Pasture House turret 3a is 45 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.