Aysgarth; 3rd Time Lucky?

My two previous attempts of leading rides from Aysgarth had been seriously affected by the weather and with all the rain we had during the week, my confidence for a successful third attempt was rock bottom. On arrival at the start the weather looked grim but it wasn't actually raining. Key our latest recruit was there waiting, as was Derek except he was waiting in the pub car park instead of the one at the top cafe. Gary, just to be different, had gone to the visitor's centre car park but eventually found us. The arrival of Barbara and James made a total of six, a few less than on my last ride, for this I blame myself for being honest for once and describing the ride as toughish.

Twenty minutes late we eventually got underway. We turned left at the main road followed by a right turn towards West Burton. At the bottom of the hill (see my rides do go downhill sometimes), we turned right just before Eshington Bridge onto Eastfield Lane. Before completing the first mile, my rear tyre sprung a leak. After then breaking my pump, we eventually got going again heading into the village of Thoralby. Here we turned right to start the climb up onto Haw Lane. This is where the fun started. This is a nasty climb at the best of times and the damp slippery conditions we faced didn't help. It took a while but we all finally made it with not one cyclist complaining (all five of them were). It started to brighten up a little at the top so at least we could admire the scenery while we stopped to take on oxygen.

With the climbing over for the time being, we headed across the grassy/muddy moorland to Stake Allotments. Even though we were now cycling along the flat, the damp conditions made it quite hard going especially when you have a flat tyre, yes my spare tube had now deflated. We can't have been going that slowly as further along we passed a group of motorcyclists (Ok, we passed them whilst heading in opposite directions).

At Stake Allotments we turned left to head south to join High Lane. Here we turned right towards Semerwater. I thought we might have seen the Skiing Section out on the lake but there was no sign of them. The original plan was to ride across to Marsett then use the roman road to head down to Bainbridge but the cafe stop beckoned so we headed along the road straight to Bainbridge.

Being the courteous mountain bikers that we are we removed our shoes before entering the cafe. A bit of a waste of time really as the rest of our clothing was also caked in mud, including our socks. Although the cafe was quite busy we managed to find a table in the corner out of harms way. Within about ten minutes we had the cafe to ourselves. I'm sure this must have been a coincidence, mind you it has happened once or twice before on our rides.

One of the traditions we have in the mountain biking section is that after feeding our faces with tea and cakes we then have a hill to climb. Not wanting to break with tradition, we set off for Askrigg where we climbed the steep hill to the start of the popular track to Castle Bolton. It was now Key's turn to get a puncture. As we have used this track on a number of rides in the past, we've all just about worked out how to tackle the infamous ford but unfortunately the floods we've had this summer have made the ford unrecognisable with more rocks and deep bits where it used to be shallow, that's my excuse anyway. Only Barbara and I were brave/foolish enough to try riding through it but we both failed. Another mile or so along the track we turned off to drop down through Carperby and on to the falls. Our last climb of the day took us up from the falls back to the cafe car park.

There were a few whinges early on in the ride regarding the long climb and the weather wasn't brilliant, although probably better than we all feared, but I don't think anyone regretted turning up.

	Search this site powered by FreeFind
	Swaledale Outdoor Club

Aysgarth; 3rd Time Lucky?

Dave Neesam