January 4th, 2007
Stolen Rides
Taking time off work to go ride somehow feels better than a ride at a weekend. Fewer riders out on the trails to start with and when you pick your destination you can be guaranteed solitude, all sugared with the thought of colleagues sitting at desks in the post-Christmas back to work shock.
Avoiding the honeypots of the Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District by heading for the Fells north of Kirkby Lonsdale reveals a network of muddy bridleways.
This is a barren landscape, a place of life and death. It would be above the treeline except for the serried rows of plantation forestry too unexciting for man-made trails. The landscape is studded with the limestone pits and kilns that man also used to bring artificial life to this region. The lime was quarried, burnt in kilns to make fertiliser, and finally used to enrich the peat soil just enough that coarse grass could be grown and sheep raised. There are no alternative crops for the farmers who raise sheep up here. Crops wouldn’t grow. The pits that brought life to the sheep act as their final resting place. Many succumb to the wet and the cold, crawling into the low holes in the ground for shelter before dying. Sodden pelts lie rain bleached in the low holes from which the limestone was dug, skull, spine, pelvis and larger bones picked clean and strewn around the hillside by fox and crow, with that yellowing softness that only comes after a long soaking in interminable rain..
Mind you, those nosey black-faced sheep - Swaledale I would say, but happy to be corrected - that survive up here are perma-rinsed washday white. Rinsed by a horizontal rain driven by a cruel wind that took the easy route, funnelling up the Lune Valley between the high Cumbrian Fells on the East and the edge of the Pennines on the West. Clouds scudded across the sky and to say that the grass rippled at the wind’s passing would not do justice to the speed at which it hurried on it’s mission to remove any vestiges of body heat; seeking it’s way through cracks in clothing layers with Special Forces effectiveness. Thermals and hip-flask alcohol did their best to respectively repel the invader and raise cheer, but only by copying the example of the long-deceased ovines and seeking shelter behind walls, and flocking behind other riders to let them bear it’s brunt was effective.
There are no long climb and descents up here, just rolling drumlins, each one seemingly encircled by either stream or bog. Swollen stream crossings were knee deep over rotten wooden planks that threatened at any moment to give way and dump the rider into the bog underneath. There have been weeks of rain up here and the ground is sodden, unable to take any more, which instead of soaking into the ground immediately drains off. To the West the streams of the early afternoon flow to the Kent Valley and thence to Morecambe Bay. Those on the East, the latter half of the ride, flow down into the River Lune, not quite in flood, but certainly high enough to be treated with respect. Little did we know that as we looked out over the valley, commenting on the height of the river that it was claiming a victim.
Fading daylight forced a road dash back to the cars, left over mince pies, and hot drinks.
Yes, rides in stolen time are the best.
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