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 338 km round trip from Lyme Regis - roughly 5 h 34 in the saddle. The stops in between: Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point, Stonehenge and Associated Monuments and back through Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point. 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 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.
Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point comes up about 78 km into the recorded legs. 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.
about 169 km into the recorded legs you reach Stonehenge and Associated Monuments. 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.
back through Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point, 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.
Back at River Axe. That is the ride.
River Axe → Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point is 78 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
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 → back through Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point is 92 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Bowleaze Cove to Peveril Point → River Axe is 77 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.