high weald
-
Road Closed
Ah fuck it! The road is actually properly closed. Tall metal barriers span the darkened sunken lane. It’s always a risk riding past ROAD CLOSED signs but with a bike you can almost invariably get past somehow. More often than not it’s only closed to cars and pedestrians can get through, but over the years…
-
Reliability
From the regularity of the straight lines between the fields of the flatlands around Ripe into the twisting roller coaster of ancient ways of the High Weald. Rolling over sandstone ridges into river valleys deeply cut into the clay. Following ancient ways scratched and scraped into the soft rock by water and footfall between the…
-
Greenwich Mean Climb 300km [Brevet des Grimpeur du Sud ride #6]
04:29, Dyke Road, Brighton, heading for London. Underworld are played on the radio in the car and two men in their mid-forties reminisce about coming home at this time of the morning rather than going out for a bike ride. 05:47, Blackheath, London. Applying chamois cream behind a bush on the edge of Blackheath. There…
![Greenwich Mean Climb 300km [Brevet des Grimpeur du Sud ride #6]](https://themanfromicon.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/tweaked-colour-14.jpg?w=1024)
-
The Reliable
It’s Wednesday lunchtime and I’m strolling to the Post Office with an envelope full of brevet cards and receipts. It seems a bit anachronistic in these days of gps recording and email but it feels like the proper way to prove that we completed our first permanent audax the previous Sunday. The audax in question…
-
The Return of Mad Jack
Mad Jack’s – John Seviour Memorial Audax Last year Mad Jack’s event was supposed to be my first ever audax. It didn’t quite go to plan. This year’s attempt looked equally doomed as Jo and I drove over to meet Mark in Hailsham in sleeting snow. Neither of us recalled seeing this on the weather…
-
The first (proper) century of the year
Sometime last year a guy called Justin commented on a photo I’d posted to Instagram. Something along the lines of “You ride so much! You need to contribute something to the website.” That statement is partially true. I do ride a fair bit but really I just take an inordinate amount of photographs. The website…
-
Diary of a Novice Randonneur, pt.1
It didn’t go so well… The first audax planned for the year was the “Mad Jack’s – John Seviour Memorial”, a 125km audax with roughly 2500m of climbing in mid February. The ride is in “Mad Jack” country in the High Weald of Sussex around Brightling and Battle. Even though in my home county this…
the man from icon 