A Peak District Tour

After a week of beautiful sunshine it seems only natural to want to celebrate with a big ride.

In terms of landscape the Peak District offers some distinct big-ness. After much debate I woke up early, and hit the M1 for 3 hours to go and get some time on some real hills. This was how I found myself in the carpark in Castleton at 9:30 with a plan and even some lunch. It was raining.

The rain gave way quickly to a muggy morning to start the climbing, out of the town and up towards Mam Tor on a road that famously has fallen off the hill and so now makes a nice traffic-free and slightly off-road start to the day. From there proper tarmac took me up to the first pass at Rushup Edge. This track hit the headlines a while ago as it was the focus of some less-than sensitive repair work, but the bedrock remains with loose rocks on other sections and it still stands up as a good warm up for Peak District descending. More of the same on the Pennine Bridleway dropped me into a steep valley and onto my first pushed climbing section. The climbs here are tough and often loose and the heat and my lingering cold were not working in my favour. I pushed a little, then remounted and rode on. I was doing this section in the opposite direction from usual and it seems to work as well either way, with each brutal climb I remembered becoming a clattering downhill.

Soon I was approaching the long loose climb up to Kinder Scout which was dealt with in short bursts, and fully ridden up to the seriously steep, loose and challenging top section, where I was on foot again. Halfway up I passed a pair of e-bikes with riders fixing a puncture and I wonder which way they were addressing it, and what the legal position of powered bikes on bridleways is. Finally reaching the top of the climb, with sweat pouring off me, it was time for the point of doing this “backwards”, which was a descent of Jacobs Ladder. This starts with steep rock sections where the pack road has fallen apart and then drops into a loose switchback across the hill on rocks big enough to move considerably under your wheels. Crossing the stream at the bottom led to a recovery cruise down the valley to the road again.

Another tough climb, that I’d be lying if I suggested I rode all of, followed to take me up to Rushup Edge again and then off on a couple of road sections before a wide steady climbing track into the wind to put me above Castleton again, with the highly technical Cave Dale to drop through to get back to the car. It felt like I dealt with this tough descent better than ever before, but any comparison was lost as I somehow managed to mess up the GPX file for Strava.

Even without analysis of my performance this was a brilliant day out in the hills, well worth the 6 hours’ driving and leaving me with videos and sunburn to show for a day of real, proper mountain biking.

A