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.
373 km from Amesbury to Amesbury, about 6 h 53 of riding. It goes by way of Avebury and Associated Monuments, City of Bath, Lyme Regis to West Bay and back through City of Bath. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
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 is where the day begins. 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 comes up about 36 km into the recorded legs. Next is City of Bath.
Bath is one of the few whole cities on the UNESCO list, and it earns it twice over. Underneath lie the Roman baths of Aquae Sulis, built around the only natural hot springs in Britain, where water still comes up at around forty-six degrees and the great pool, with its later colonnade above, steams in the cold. On top sits the Georgian city that eighteenth-century society built when Bath became the place to see and be seen, in honey-coloured local limestone: the Circus, the sweep of the Royal Crescent, the shops on Pulteney Bridge over the Avon and the long elegant terraces climbing the hills.
Read the complete City of Bath write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 83 km into the recorded legs you reach City of Bath. Next is Lyme Regis to West Bay.
The cliffs between Lyme Regis and West Bay are falling into the sea, and that is precisely why people come. This stretch of the Dorset coast is part of the Jurassic Coast, England's first natural World Heritage Site, and its soft clay and limestone cliffs constantly release fossils from the Jurassic seas of around two hundred million years ago. Ammonites, belemnites and the bones of marine reptiles wash out onto the beaches after every storm, and at Charmouth you will see families combing the shingle with hammers and bags at low tide.
Read the complete Lyme Regis to West Bay write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Lyme Regis to West Bay, about halfway. Next is back through City of Bath.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete City of Bath write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through City of Bath sits at 259 km, about halfway. Next is back through Avebury and Associated Monuments.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Avebury and Associated Monuments write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Avebury and Associated Monuments comes up about 333 km into the recorded legs. Next is 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.
Stonehenge and Associated Monuments closes the day.
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 → City of Bath is 47 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
City of Bath → Lyme Regis to West Bay is 103 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Lyme Regis to West Bay → back through City of Bath is 103 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through City of Bath → back through Avebury and Associated Monuments is 44 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Avebury and Associated Monuments → Stonehenge and Associated Monuments is 40 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.