Roads to Nowhere

Braving my lingering illness I headed out on Sunday morning to try and have a ride in the Hertfordshire countryside. I could have decided to repeat a ride that I'd done a few weeks ago, where I'd been all turned around and got what some might call “lost”. This had resulted in me riding the same bridleway twice in opposite directions without realising.

Rather than that I elected to add some more new trails to the mix and explore further into Hertfortshire, this time towards Bishops Stortford.

This end of the county is more wide open and the riding tends to be a mix of field-edge battering and wide tracks, with the odd bit of fun singletrack hidden in the woods. However there is nothing wrong with all that for a sunny Sunday morning, and it meant I saw the natural cycle of arable farming as the fields I rode through that were full of green corn a few weeks ago are now golden and being harvested. Otherwise it was all nice villages and two ford crossings, which are always fun.

Overall it was a nice cruise through a very British landscape, marred only by a couple of things. First I got briefly lost in the edge of Ware (allowing me to chuckle to myself in a “Ware am I?” type way). Otherwise the main problem was one that I genuinely don't understand. In two instances bridleways just came to an end in the middle of nowhere. To be more clear there were plenty of places to go, but none strictly legal. Why would this be allowed to happen? I mean you should be able to go somewhere on a bridleway, not just have to turn round and retrace your wheeltracks. In both cases footpaths led for only about 200 metres before meeting up with a legal trail.

I guess you should get off and walk the sections, but in protest I admit I rode on. It seems ludicrous that the paths shouldn't be reclassified to provide some sort of cohesion.

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