Gravel Culture: Changing allegiance
Posted By Gravel Union
On 18 June 2020
Olly trades his treaded tyres for slicks and goes riding on normally closed military roads on the English/Scottish border. Will he be tempted to cross over permanently or will he come back to the gravelly way afterwards?
For more than 3 months during the Covid19 lockdown of Spring 2020, UK-based cyclists were only allowed to ride close to home – you weren’t allowed to drive to get to the start of a ride, you weren’t supposed to ride for more than a few hours and you were advised to keep your rides gnar-free so as to reduce your risk of being involved in an accident (and so putting additional unnecessary pressure on an already struggling public health service). Like the model citizens that we are, most gravel riders obeyed these rules and explored local trails - riding from home and keeping our rides relatively short and safe.
If you were to take 100 gravel riders at random and ask them why they chose to ride gravel rather than paved roads, apart from the fact that gravel riding is obviously more fun, I suspect part of the reason would be feelings of insecurity around road riding relating to traffic. Even in the far north of England (where the Gravel Union UK office is based and where the population density and hence traffic is some of the lowest in Europe), unpleasant/negative interaction with vehicle drivers is a fairly regular occurrence and although the risk is low, it does definitely make road route choice (or even the decision to ride away from the road altogether) a critical one.
So, what if as a gravel rider, you were given the chance to go and ride some of the finest roads in northern Europe, on tarmac so smooth that a ball bearing would gently roll down it for hours and you knew the chances of meeting any traffic was basically zero. Would you trade your gravel tyres for slicks for the day and go and hit the tarmac instead?
Once a month, anyone lucky enough to live in the far north of England get exactly this opportunity as the Ministry of Defence, who own/manage/oversee vast stretches of essentially wilderness areas along the English/Scottish border, close the land to the camouflaged troops, tracked vehicles and heavily-armed attack helicopters that normally call it home and open it to civilians to enjoy instead.
After the incredible weather the north of England had enjoyed in March, April and May, the start of June was proving to be quite a shock to the system – days and days of torrential rain, strong winds and temperatures low enough to warrant putting the central heating back on. So, when we spotted a decent weather forecast and then also realised the weather window fortuitously coincided with the Otterburn Ranges being open to the public, plans were made. Despite having been fully paid-up road riders for the last decade, during the last few months, the combination of needing to ‘ride local’ and the beautiful weather drying out the gravel trails to the point of utter perfection, had meant we’d avoided road riding entirely. My road bike literally had cobwebs on it.
But now the chance to ride through stunning scenery, on roads that are normally inaccessible, and with the promise of dry weather, all sounded too good to miss. The drive to the start takes an hour and gets progressively more rural as you head closer to the Scottish border. The road surface becomes steadily more atrocious – a combination of poor winter weather conditions, cash strapped local authorities and regular use by heavy agricultural vehicles helps create seemingly bottomless potholes that run across the whole width of the road in places. As we drove up, we did wonder whether turning up on lightweight, carbon-wheeled road bikes was a good idea, or whether we should have brought our more durable/heavy duty gravel bikes instead.
If you look on the OS map for the area, the normally accurate mapping shows some quite interesting anomalies, the main one of which is that any roads which cross from civilian land onto the military land of the Otterburn Ranges change from being shown as single carriageway paved roads to tracks of an undefined type. As the land is owned and used by the military 99% of the time, this obfuscation of the truth makes perfect sense from a security point of view, but it makes route planning for a road ride somewhat more complicated! Google street view doesn’t help much either, as there is nothing available for roads within the military land (again, not that surprising). Luckily, a bit of insider knowledge meant that I knew most of what was marked as a track was actually tarmac paved. And with military budgets being significantly more generous than civilian ones, I also knew the tarmac was perfect!
The first 10kms of the ride were still firmly in the civilian world and although the road was perfect in most senses – narrow, through great scenery and most importantly, traffic free, the surface was also pretty variable – at one point I hit a series of unavoidable potholes so extensive that my water bottles abandoned ship due to the vibrations and bounced off my bike! Luckily as we reached the border with the military land, the change was dramatic – from potholed, gravel strewn hell to über-smooth tarmac in an instant. The change is so sudden as to be quite shocking. At the border point, the gradient kicks up to a pretty unpleasant 20%, which stops you focussing too heavily on the road surface, but as you arrive at the crest you notice miles of moorland stretch away in front of you and a ribbon of perfect tarmaccy-goodness rolling off towards the horizon – not a phrase I’ve ever considered using about UK roads before!
Being entirely honest, there are of course sections where the tarmac isn’t 100% perfect – regular tank movements put paid to even the finest laid road covering, but the overall feel of riding at Otterburn is of smooth pleasure, rather than the teeth-jarring hideousness which often sums up the local road riding experience. Regular warnings not to stray off the road for fear of unexploded ordnance and signs warning of the likelihood of tanks ahead remind you that you’re not riding on normal roads!
Then there’s the utter silence. We stopped for a mid-ride snack stop and the lack of noise from the outside world was almost deafening. The only audible sounds were that of nature – skylarks and curlews tweeting, spring lambs shouting hungrily for their mothers, the occasional call of a cuckoo and that was it. No traffic noise. No mechanical noise. Not even the noise of fellow cyclists. In the course of our ride, we did about 40kms within the boundaries of the military land and during that time we met a total of 4 cyclists, 3 farm workers herding sheep and one car. OK, the fact that we were then when Covid19 is still raging and a lot of ‘normal’ visitors have stayed away (or can’t access the area due to the current ban in the UK on using overnight accommodation), but it was as close to paradise as I’ve ever found on a road bike in the UK.
The scenery isn’t a patch on that found in the high mountains of mainland Europe, you can’t get a perfectly poured espresso in every village and there isn’t a public transport network which runs like clockwork and is adapted to carry you and your bike to the start of the ride. But other than that, this was road riding heaven.
If you could only guarantee that ‘traffic-free’ and ‘perfectly-paved’ were the descriptors of road riding in the future, cyclists would take to it in their thousands. Sadly, as we left the military area and returned to civilian world, reality came back with a bang – I hit a pothole so huge it was all I could do to avoid crashing. We’d had a glimpse of heaven, but in reality, I’m not going to be hanging up my gravel wheels any time soon. Gravel riding might not be as smooth as the MOD’s finest miltary roads, but at least you expect to be shaken about rather than it being a nasty shock waiting around every corner.
We promise not to change our name to “Tarmac Union” anytime soon, or to fall out of love with the gravelly path to enlightenment, but sometimes a bit of road riding is fun. If you fancy trying out the road riding at the Otterburn Ranges for yourself, check out the opening times here. If you want to use Olly’s route you can find it here