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Windmolen Achtervlogen
Sailing around Sussex with friends searching out windmills. All eight listed on the brevet card found and logged. At the almost the exact midpoint between the starts of meteorological and astronomical spring, it was the first ride in what felt like spring. Gloves off and jerseys unzipped. Riding with shadows and laughter. It didn’t start…
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M+1
In 1990 I went off to Canterbury School of Art in Kent as a fresh faced scrawny twenty year old taking my Raleigh Scirocco racing bike with me. Not only would the bike let me explore my new environs but as I lived ten miles from college on the coast at Whitstable the bike was…
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You Are Here
You are here. Yeah I know, the little animated arrow following the blue line on the screen tells me that much, but not a lot more. It’s zeroes and ones, information without knowledge. Satellites pinpointing my coordinates, nothing more. It’ll get me from A to B but won’t tell me anything about the journey. GPS…
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The Lanes – Gorham’s Lane
Starting in the Ouse Valley Gorham’s Lane is essentially a dead end, you’re unlikely to ride up it unless you live in the tiny village of Telscombe hiding in a scooped out hollow in the downs or are looking for the Youth Hostel. For me it’s one of the nice ways to and from work.…
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It was just one day
There was a girl I never met. She rode bikes and lived in the same town as me, but it was before I returned to cycling. By the time I became friends with her friends she had moved away. We had the occasional interaction online but we didn’t really know each other. People that knew us…
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The Lanes – Bo Peep Bostal
You won’t find yourself here by accident, you seek this place out. Maybe when you set off from home you didn’t plan to come here but somewhere along the way you make a decision to ride up here. When I first started riding again a few years ago I saw an photo on Instagram that…
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The Lanes – Along the Cuckmere Valley
It has three names – Litlington Road, Chapel Hill and The Street (either side of Chapel Hill) – but is one continuous strip of tarmac. Running along the Cuckmere River valley from the Seven Sister visitor centre at Exceat to Wilmington, it transfers your ride from where the South Downs meet the sea inland to…
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The Lanes – Spithandle Lane
On a late summers evening I’ve chased my shadow home along here. In the depths of winter I’ve entered one end of the lane in drizzle with a bunch of riders only to emerge from the other end, two and a half miles later, in snow and having lost one of our mini-peleton somewhere along…
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The Lanes – New Bridge Road
Within the Hundred of Pevensey Lowey within in the Rape of Pevensey, and containing yet smaller divisions – Horse Eye Level, Down Level, Manxey Level, Whelpley Level, Hooe Level – Pevensey Levels are a strange land. Reclaimed flatlands of soft clay sediments between the chalk hills of the South Downs to the south-east, and the…
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The Lanes – Spronketts Lane
This is less about a single lane than a network of lanes that transport you from the chalk downland hills to the clay lands of the weald, quiet narrow lanes bookended between the A23 and A281 and bisected by the A272. There are many of them, running north-south or east-west, no diagonals – Foxhole, Cross…
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