a hard road ahead

Although we didn’t set out with the intention of doing a tough bike ride, that’s what happened. When Paula and I did the route that I described in A Grand Day Out, British Style recently, we took the first turn to the left after leaving Croglin, but there are more villages further north that I’d never visited before, and because that has become a major motivation when planning routes over the past two summers, it seemed appropriate that we include these villages in a future ride at some point. It also seemed appropriate that we reach Croglin via a different route to that of our earlier ride.

However, there are only four places where it’s possible to cross the River Eden between Carlisle, the only city in Cumbria, and Appleby, the routes to and from which I described in Appleby Sauce. We crossed the bridges at Temple Sowerby and Armathwaite on our longest ride last summer—the first time we’d ever ventured east of Eden—and we used the bridge at Langwathby to cross the river on our ‘grand day out’. That left the bridge between the villages of Lazonby and Kirkoswald, and the B6413 passed through these villages before continuing to Croglin and beyond. It seemed like an obvious choice.

The route that we followed, like all our routes northwest of Penrith, started by passing through Newton Reigny and proceeded to the crossroads two miles further on. From here, other routes either continue straight on or turn left, but on this occasion, we turned right and followed the road to Unthank, where we turned right onto the B5305. We turned left after about a mile onto another unclassified road, which led to Plumpton:

If you drove through Plumpton on the A6, you might wonder why this village even has a name, but almost all the village’s houses are located along this side road, starting where we stopped for our first rest of the ride. And it does have a school.

The B6413 starts here, and within a short distance it starts to climb over a sandstone ridge that runs north–south roughly parallel to the A6. The climb is quite long but not unduly severe, and this is a view of the road ahead, just before reaching the high point on this section, with the Pennines in the distance:

…while this is a view from the same point, looking back:

It is a long descent into Lazonby, and the main street in the village continues downhill until the road reaches the River Eden. Lazonby is a very large village, with a school, a village hall and two pubs, one of which you can see in this photo:

The bridge in this photo carries the former Midland Railway’s line from London St Pancras to Carlisle, although the line between Settle and Carlisle had been threatened with closure until recently. This pub, which adjoins the village’s station, reflects the origin of the line in its name. Lazonby also has at least two churches, an outdoor swimming pool, at least two churches, and a bakery with a dedicated retail outlet in Penrith. Also, perhaps uniquely in this area, Lazonby also has a fire station, which, judging by its external appearance, houses just one appliance. This is the village’s main church:

And this is the bridge over the River Eden that we crossed to continue our ride:

The river level was deceptively low.

The first thing you will see after crossing the river is Kirkoswald church:

This church is dedicated to St Oswald, a seventh-century king of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria who converted the area to Christianity. There are several other interesting historical buildings along the main street, but the road climbs steadily through the village, and stopping to take a few photos didn’t seem like a priority. This photo was taken from a T-junction looking back down the hill:

This junction is one where the major road comes in along one arm of the T and leaves via the leg of the T. And although it doesn’t look it from this photo, the continuation is even steeper, necessitating a drop to the small chainwheel for the only time on this ride:

In fact, this hill turned into a major problem. I hadn’t realized that Paula was having difficulty changing gear and had dropped back some distance. She had also misheard me when I told her that our next destination was Croglin. Consequently, having reached the top of the hill and continued a short distance, I looked around and discovered to my dismay that she was nowhere in sight. I waited a few minutes, because I really didn’t want to go back down the hill, but eventually I decided that I would have to backtrack to see what had happened. To my relief, she was waiting patiently at the T-junction, even though it was signposted to Croglin. And I therefore had to climb this hill twice. Ouch! The last two photos were taken when I came back down the hill to look for Paula.

The ride to Croglin was uneventful, although I couldn’t help but notice that we continued to gain quite a lot of height. This photo was taken from the point where we joined the B6413 as described in A Grand Day Out, British Style, looking back west down yet another hill:

In my earlier post, I reported that there was nothing of interest in Croglin, because by the time I came to write about the village, I’d forgotten about the pub, which is right in front of your eyes on the left as you ride north:

It appears to have been converted from an ordinary dwelling, and given the remoteness, I can’t imagine that it attracts many customers.

There is also the local legend of the Croglin vampire, which dates back to the 1870s, although there are no contemporaneous accounts, so I will say nothing more about it.

There is a signposted hill out of Croglin to the north (12%), and I took this photo of the panorama to the west when we had reached the top of the hill:

Part of the motivation for continuing stems from the observation that there are no fewer than three villages within a 12-mile radius of Penrith named Newbiggin (Anglo-Saxon: ‘new building’). We cycle through the Newbiggin three miles west of Penrith quite often, and we visited the Newbiggin near Temple Sowerby for the first time last summer. On this occasion, the third Newbiggin, also never previously visited, would be our next destination:

Most of this village is located down the side road that you can see in the photo, but given that we weren’t yet halfway through the planned ride, I thought that it would be prudent to leave further exploration here to another day. This is the road ahead out of the village:

Cumrew, the next village on our itinerary, is unusual in that the entire village is located on a loop away from the main road. The moment that we reached the village, Paula was struck by “the biggest monkey puzzle [Chilean pine] I’ve ever seen”:

In fact, I’m not sure that it is a ‘monkey puzzle’, but I was struck instead by how neatly the hedge on the left had been trimmed. Notice too the neat formal topiary behind the hedge. And there is an interesting house:

It may not have any significant architectural features, but it’s certainly big. I wonder who lives here.

After taking the previous photo, I turned back towards where I’d left my bike and was surprised to see a church down what I’d assumed as I cycled past was merely the entrance to a farmyard:

The villagers appear intent on preserving an air of quaintness here. In this photo, there is an example of the iconic red telephone box designed by renowned architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, which hasn’t been produced since 1985:

And the streetlights are modelled on the old gas lights that were fast disappearing from urban streets when I was growing up, although these use energy-saving light bulbs.

The next destination on our itinerary would be Cumwhitton, and we would be relying on signposts to get there. The prefix Cum– is probably cognate with Welsh cwm (‘hanging valley’), which would make it Cumbric in origin, although the suffix –ton (‘farm’) is Anglo-Saxon, which I find puzzling because I would not expect two different languages to occur in the same name.

We stopped briefly at a convenient bench in Cumwhitton, from where I took the next photo:

This is a view of the church from a different angle:

…and this a closer look at the feature in the foreground of the first photo here:

It appears to have been some kind of well and may have been the village’s original source of water.

Next on our itinerary was Hornsby, and after a couple of miles we spotted a side road to the right that was signposted to this village. However, although we did reach a village, the road, which isn’t marked on my map, ended abruptly. So we turned back.

Just before reaching Armathwaite, we passed through a ‘tunnel’ of trees, and I simply had to stop and take a photo, looking back the way we’d just come:

The River Eden is located at the bottom of a short slope down to the left.

On the last two occasions that we’d passed through Armathwaite, we’d headed, by the shortest route, for Calthwaite, but I wanted to extend the ride, so after the climb out of the village, we took the first available turn to the right (north), which was signposted to Low Hesket. When we reached the A6, we crossed it and continued to Southwaite, which we had already visited once this summer.

Immediately after passing under the railway here (the old London and North Western Railway line, now the ‘west coast main line’), we turned north once again. After about two miles, we reached a crossroads and turned left (west). The objective was to take the second turn to the left (south) and follow what is known locally as the ‘back Carlisle road’, which was, in pre-motorway days, the fastest route between Penrith and Carlisle, especially on summer weekends, even though it’s an unclassified road.

The next stop on our tour would be Ivegill, where we took a break at the bench next to Wharton Bridge (Bridge over Untroubled Water). When I wrote about this eighteenth-century packhorse bridge, I reported that the gate onto the bridge was padlocked, but it isn’t. I managed to open it and walk up steps, which I hadn’t noticed previously, to the crest of the bridge:

I took these two photos from the bridge:

Notice that the bridge parapets are very low, little more than knee-high, in order not to impede the loads carried by packhorses. The continuation path from the far side of the bridge is currently heavily overgrown, so I didn’t try to see where it led to.

After a short climb out of the valley of the River Ive, the next four miles are almost flat, although on this occasion the road seemed almost endless. We stopped briefly at our usual bench in Skelton, from where we couldn’t see either the sun or the horizon, but I had a feeling that we were running out of daylight. Fortunately, the six miles back into Penrith are either downhill or flat, apart from a short but steep hill through Newton Reigny, so although we were casting ever-lengthening shadows ahead, the sun was still hitting the rooftops of the houses in our street when we reached home.

To say that we were happy with the day’s ride would be an understatement. For a start, we recorded our longest ever bike ride (about 52 miles—not bad for an old man), and we added four more villages (Newbiggin, Cumrew, Cumwhitton, Hornsby) to our never previously visited list. I think I deserved a cold beer, although of course I had two.

You can follow the details of our ride on this map (as a guide to scale, it is 18 miles from Penrith to Carlisle):