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 286 km round trip from Bardon Mill - roughly 4 h 10 in the saddle. The stops in between: Hadrian's Wall between Fulwood House at Bu, The English Lake District and back through Hadrian's Wall between Fulwood House at Bu. It strings together lakeside roads.
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 67 km. The line follows the shore because there is nowhere else for it to go.
Vindolanda is the place where the Romans on the northern frontier start to sound like people. The fort stood on the Stanegate road, just south of the wall, and for several centuries it was rebuilt again and again, each new fort laid on top of the last. The damp, airless soil preserved wood and leather, and in 1973 archaeologists found thin wooden writing tablets covered in ink, letters written by soldiers, officers and their families in about AD 100. They are the oldest handwritten documents found in Britain.
Read the complete Vindolanda write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Vindolanda is where the day begins. Next is Hadrian's Wall between Fulwood House at Bu.
Drumburgh is a few farms and a ruined-looking castle at the edge of the Solway marsh, and it is easy to miss, but it sits on the line of Hadrian's Wall where it slides down to the shore at Bowness. The castle was built from the stones of a Roman fort, called Congavata, and that gives a picture of how much of the frontier went into later buildings. The label places us on a stretch of Wall between Fulwood House and the next landmark, with Parton Roman fort on the far side of Cumbria, a reminder that Hadrian's frontier carried on around the coast.
Read the complete Hadrian's Wall between Fulwood House at Bu write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Hadrian's Wall between Fulwood House at Bu comes up about 54 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 143 km into the recorded legs you reach The English Lake District. Next is back through Hadrian's Wall between Fulwood House at Bu.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Hadrian's Wall between Fulwood House at Bu write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Hadrian's Wall between Fulwood House at Bu, late in the day. Next is Vindolanda.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Vindolanda write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Vindolanda. That is the ride.
Vindolanda → Hadrian's Wall between Fulwood House at Bu is 54 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Hadrian's Wall between Fulwood House at Bu → The English Lake District is 89 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
The English Lake District → back through Hadrian's Wall between Fulwood House at Bu is 88 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Hadrian's Wall between Fulwood House at Bu → Vindolanda is 54 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.