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):

appleby sauce

Appleby, the nearest town to Penrith, is located 13 miles to the southeast on the River Eden:

This milestone is located on an old section of the A66, which links the two towns. This road used to terminate at the A6 in Penrith, but when the M6 was extended north of Lancaster in the late 1960s, the section that bypassed Penrith was the first to be built, because the town had become a notorious bottleneck, with traffic backed up for miles to the north, south and east on the A6 and A66. As part of the improvements, the A66 was diverted to bypass Penrith to the south, and the road on which the milestone is located was blocked by the new road, so only cyclists and pedestrians can now continue, via a bumpy path and a short underpass.

I’d never cycled to Appleby before, but on Thursday last week, Paula and I did just that. However, I should emphasize that we had no intention of following the A66. Having been extended through the Lake District to the west coast more than 50 years ago, this road is now a major highway carrying a lot of heavy goods vehicles and is no place for cyclists.

In fact, getting there while avoiding the A66 is straightforward, although we did encounter a minor problem before we’d even left Penrith. Carleton Road, which was part of the old A66, was closed for much-needed resurfacing, but we were able to avoid this obstruction by diverting through Pategill, a public housing estate built in the 1960s, to the A686, from which we were able to join the section of the old A66 that passed the milestone. Incidentally, the milestone bears the maker’s name, Bowerbank, a one-time iron foundry in Penrith, from which I deduce that it is painted cast iron.

After passing under the new A66, we continued along the old road, which crosses the River Eamont via this bridge:

Notice the ‘weak bridge’ notification. It clearly wasn’t built at a time when heavy wagons were on the roads, but these behemoths must have inflicted some damage when this was still the main road.

This is a view of the river taken before crossing the bridge:

The photo also shows Brougham Castle, construction of which began in the early thirteenth century on the site of a Roman fort, Brocavum. This and the two previous photos were taken on an earlier walk through the area, but all the other photos in this report were taken during the ride being described.

Our intended route would be on known territory: a sequence of unclassified roads that pass through the villages of Cliburn, Bolton and Colby. Cliburn is the only village in the Penrith area that I’ve stayed in overnight—my grandmother’s sister Mabel and her married daughter once lived here—but I visited Bolton and Colby for the first time ever with Paula last year. On that occasion, we turned off in Colby towards King’s Meaburn, but this time we would be going straight on.

First, though, we had to contend with an inordinate amount of traffic on the road to Cliburn, from which I conjectured that there must have been some kind of temporary obstruction, such as an accident, on the A66. Cliburn would be our first stop:

Most of this village is located along this side road. I was particularly struck by the rather grand architecture of the double-fronted sandstone house on the right: bay windows on the ground floor, and mullioned windows with architraves on the first floor. The building left of centre is a Wesleyan chapel, although it may no longer function as such.

The road between Cliburn and Bolton crosses the River Lyvennet, and the climb away from the river is quite awkward, not because of the gradient but because the road surface here is in poor condition.

This is the crossroads in Bolton (The suffix –ton is Anglo-Saxon for ‘farm’):

Our route comes in from the left before turning towards the camera. You may notice that the straight-on option is signposted to Appleby, but it isn’t a viable alternative, because this road joins the A66 almost three miles northwest of the town. I’ve no idea who the stuffed figure on the right is meant to represent. Surely it’s too early for Guy Fawkes!

And this is the way ahead:

I took this photo because of what I would describe as an ‘unusual’ house next to the road. I didn’t notice it at the time, but the stone plaque above the window on the gable end bears the date 1856.

Colby is a long, straggling place that is more of a farming hamlet than a village sensu stricto. The suffix –by is Danish for ‘village’ and is very common in this area (the Vikings had established a kingdom in northeast England, and settlers came over Stainmoor, the only significant easy way across the Pennines south of the River Tyne, in large numbers).

But at least Colby has a useful resting place:

…while this is the way we’d just come:

…and this is the way ahead:

Shortly after leaving Colby behind us, I spotted what looked like quite a tough hill ahead. It was tough—at least for a short distance—but the gradient soon eased appreciably, although the road continued uphill for quite some distance. I took this photo shortly after reaching the top of the hill to show the general area for the return journey:

The mountains forming the skyline are the Pennines, and our intended return journey would be through the terrain immediately in front of the mountains.

We reached Appleby without further incident and stopped next to the River Eden, where there was a line of benches alongside the riverbank. This is the bridge we used to cross the river, on which there were a large number of ducks:

…and this a view of the river looking downstream:

What I assume is the local parish church could be glimpsed directly across the river from our vantage point:

Finally, this is a view of the road ahead, taken from the same place:

It did appear rather daunting! However, you will notice what appears to be a road junction leading off to the right near the bottom of the hill, and I knew that we would need to turn right at some point and had been wondering whether our next objective, Brampton, would be signposted. On the spur of the moment, I decided to follow this road, which leads to the town’s station, despite the absence of a signpost.

After a short distance, there was a turn-off to the station on the right, but there was also a signpost on the left that read ‘local traffic’ for vehicles continuing straight ahead and ‘all other traffic’ for the station road. I assumed that ‘local traffic’ was addressed to those who wished to reach nearby villages, and fortunately I was right.

By the way, don’t assume that we dodged the hill by turning right. In fact, the apparent detour continued uphill for a considerable distance past the turn-off to the station and turned out to be the only hill on this ride on which I needed to drop to the small chainwheel in order to keep going. Finally, after passing under the A66 Appleby bypass, we reached a T-junction with a signpost to the left to Brampton.

However, shortly before reaching Brampton, we passed a junction to the left that was signposted to Long Marton, our next objective after Brampton, which was signposted straight on. We continued to Brampton, where we found a convenient place for our next rest:

When we reached Long Marton, we noticed quite an imposing church as we entered the village, but there was nowhere convenient to stop. In the centre of the village, however, I noticed what appeared to be quite an imposing public building, so I stopped to take a photo while Paula circled around the lamp-post:

Although I didn’t notice it at the time, there is a stone plaque on the gable end that seems to bear a date and some identifying historical information, although I can’t read it even if I enlarge the photo.

The road to Milburn is long and straight, with a lot of ups and downs:

I took this photo looking northeast from the same location:

At one point on this road, we saw a dead badger by the side of the road. I didn’t stop to photograph it only because Paula was some distance ahead at the time, and I would have been unable to let her know I was stopping. But this was no roadkill. The carcass had been laid carefully next to the road, and we’d seen two other dead badgers quite close to each other, similarly arranged, on the road to Askham earlier this month. I believe that all three had been shot by local farmers on the spurious grounds that badgers transmit tuberculosis to cattle, and the carcasses were displayed by the side of the road as some kind of ‘warning’.

Milburn is an attractive village, which, judging by its Anglo-Saxon name (‘mill stream’), once contained a watermill. It is arranged around a rectangular green:

I took this photo from a convenient shelter. There is a primary school at the far end of the green, and I believe that the mountain behind the houses on the left is Crossfell, the highest peak in the Pennines.

This is the road around to the right, up which we came to the green:

…while this is where we would continue around to the left:

We didn’t stop in Blencarn, an uninteresting farming hamlet, but we did stop in the next village: Skirwith. Both Blencarn and Skirwith are Cumbric names (Cumbric is a Brythonic language, related to Welsh, Cornish and Breton, that was spoken in the area before the Roman conquest but became extinct in the eleventh century).

Here are two photos taken from a convenient bench in the centre of Skirwith:

The first looks back the way we’ve just come, while the second shows the way ahead, up the hill towards Ousby.

The only interesting thing about Ousby is the sign that you will see when entering the village. It is standard practice to have an identifying sign by the side of each road that enters a village. Most have some additional words below the village name, either ‘please drive slowly’ or ‘please drive carefully’, sometimes with ‘children and animals’ appended, but underneath the identifier on the Ousby sign is added a strange comment: ‘a village that is doubly thankful’. I’ve no idea what it’s thankful for; perhaps it escaped the ravages of the bubonic plague in earlier centuries.

Incidentally, I had never previously visited any of the villages that we cycled through after leaving Appleby in my entire life! I had two more unvisited villages on my planned itinerary after leaving Ousby, both located on the other side of the A686. Both were signposted as being just half a mile from this road, and we stopped at a convenient bench before a fork in the road:

The left-hand fork leads to Winskill, while the right-hand option leads to Hunsonby. The granite pillar on the left appears to be a village war memorial. We opted to turn left here with the intention of turning right at the first opportunity and doubling back through Hunsonby. I did spot a narrow lane on the right, but it wasn’t signposted, so we continued. In retrospect, why would it be? Anyone coming in the opposite direction who wanted to reach Hunsonby could simply continue through Winskill and turn left at the junction shown in the previous photo.

Anyway, we eventually reached a T-junction, where we turned left towards Langwathby. A visit to Hunsonby could wait until another day. We relaxed on a bench on the side of the village green for ten minutes before heading back to Penrith. It looked as though the work on Langwathby bridge had almost been completed (I’ve since learned that it has been reopened, three weeks ahead of schedule), and because there was nobody on the footbridge, we rode across instead of getting off and pushing our bikes. I couldn’t help but notice the rattle of the wooden planking under my wheels (I hadn’t noticed that there were wooden planks here when pushing my bike across the footbridge earlier this month).

The last five miles back into Penrith were uneventful, but I was glad to get back home for a cold beer after one of our longest bike rides so far this summer (40 miles). And I was certainly cream-crackered at the end. A grand day out? Certainly! You can trace the route we took on this map: