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.
427 km from Lyme Regis to Lyme Regis, about 7 h 37 of riding. The stops in between: Chesil, Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point, Stonehenge and Associated Monuments and Avebury and Associated Monuments. Rivers set the line for much of the day.
The Axe is a modest river by most standards, rising in the hills of Dorset and winding down through east Devon to the English Channel at Axmouth, but it has a long history for something so unassuming. The Romans came up this valley, and the town of Axminster, about nine kilometres from this point, was a nodal point on the Fosse Way, the great diagonal road that ran from Exeter up to Lincoln. The river gave Axminster its name and the town gave carpets to the world: the first Axminster carpet was woven there in the mid eighteenth century, and the name has been on floors ever since.
Read the complete River Axe write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
River Axe is where the day begins. Next is Chesil.
Twenty-nine kilometres of shingle, piled high and steep and running almost dead straight from West Bay to the Isle of Portland: Chesil Beach is one of the great natural oddities of the English coast. Behind it lies the Fleet, a long, shallow, brackish lagoon full of eelgrass and birds, and the whole system is part of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site. The pebbles grade in size along the beach, small as peas at the western end and as big as potatoes towards Portland, so precisely that smugglers landing on dark nights were said to know where they were by the feel of the stones.
Read the complete Chesil write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Chesil comes up about 44 km into the recorded legs. Next is Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point.
This is where the geology lesson becomes a spectacle: Lulworth Cove, an almost perfect circle bitten out of soft clays behind a narrow gap in the harder limestone, and Durdle Door just to the west, an arch of Portland stone standing in clear green water. The Lulworth Crumple, where the rock layers have been bent nearly vertical by the same forces that raised the Alps, is visible at Stair Hole.
Read the complete Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 86 km into the recorded legs you reach Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point. Next is Stonehenge and Associated Monuments.
Stonehenge looks smaller than people expect and stranger than the photographs, a ring of grey stones standing alone on a swell of chalk grassland with the sky pressing down. It sits on Salisbury Plain, a high, open expanse of downland that was a holy landscape long before the stones. The monument went through phases from about 3000 BC, with the great sarsen blocks raised around 2500 BC, hauled, it seems, from the Marlborough Downs some thirty kilometres to the north. The smaller bluestones came from the Preseli Hills in west Wales, about two hundred kilometres away, which remains one of the most astonishing facts in European prehistory.
Read the complete Stonehenge and Associated Monuments write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Stonehenge and Associated Monuments, about halfway. Next is Avebury and Associated Monuments.
Avebury is the place where a village grew up inside a stone circle. The henge, a huge circular bank and ditch enclosing the largest stone circle in Britain, was built around four and a half thousand years ago, and the village, with its church, its manor house and its pub, sits partly within it, with a road running right through the middle. You can walk among the stones, touch them, sit beside them, and watch the sheep grazing around them, which is a very different experience from the controlled visits at Stonehenge, its more famous partner on the World Heritage list.
Read the complete Avebury and Associated Monuments write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Avebury and Associated Monuments sits at 208 km, about halfway. Next is back through Stonehenge and Associated Monuments.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Stonehenge and Associated Monuments write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Stonehenge and Associated Monuments comes up about 253 km into the recorded legs. Next is back through Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 343 km into the recorded legs you reach back through Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point. Next is back through Chesil.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Chesil write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Chesil, late in the day. Next is River Axe.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete River Axe write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The route ends here after 427 km.
River Axe → Chesil is 44 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Chesil → Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point is 42 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point → Stonehenge and Associated Monuments is 91 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Stonehenge and Associated Monuments → Avebury and Associated Monuments is 36 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Avebury and Associated Monuments → back through Stonehenge and Associated Monuments is 40 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Stonehenge and Associated Monuments → back through Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point is 90 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point → back through Chesil is 41 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Chesil → River Axe is 44 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.