King Alfred's Way

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Cathryn

Cathryn

Legendary Member
Day 3. Farnham to Sheet. 32 miles of sunny bliss. Some amazing sandy trails across heathland covered in heather with some brutal hills. A murderous climb up to Devil’s Punchbowl followed by a cracking lunch at the NT cafe. Loads of lovely off-road all day. We are having so much fun. Son is an absolute machine!!
 
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Cathryn

Cathryn

Legendary Member
Day 4. Sheet to Winchester. Aka South Downs Way day! We nearly destroyed the son, he found the relentless ups and downs quite leg and soul destroying but we fed him copious amounts of food and he reverted to his parent-beating ways in the pm. Beautiful views and amazing weather but brutal climbs and descents today. Safe in our Winchester hotel and went out for a cheeky pizza with the lovely @jay clock!
 
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Cathryn

Cathryn

Legendary Member
Day 5: Winchester to Durrington. Met up with Jay for the first few miles - lovely to have a guide and an official photographer 😁 Lovely rolling hills all day through harvesting fields. Some surprisingly gnarly gravel climbs which were hard on tired legs but beautiful villages and views all day. Now resting at my parents’ before tomorrow’s final push!
 

jay clock

Massive member
Location
Hampshire UK
Day 5: Winchester to Durrington. Met up with Jay for the first few miles - lovely to have a guide and an official photographer 😁 Lovely rolling hills all day through harvesting fields. Some surprisingly gnarly gravel climbs which were hard on tired legs but beautiful villages and views all day. Now resting at my parents’ before tomorrow’s final push!
Great to see you. I suspect that you have the youngest KAWer so far in your team. Impressive lad
 
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Cathryn

Cathryn

Legendary Member
Day 6: Durrington to home. We made it. Our least favourite section - the desolate, empty, endless Salisbury plain but we made it home and are now reunited with the cats, the kettle and (for my son) the Xbox :smile:

Thanks everyone for following along. We had the most fantastic week. We were utterly blown away by the strength and endurance of our 11 year old son, who could have done it much faster without us. So very proud of him. I've also learned that whilst I absolutely love a bit of off-roading, I'm definitely a roadie at heart!!!

Feet up for a bit! Cats to snuggle.
 

jay clock

Massive member
Location
Hampshire UK
Well done to the young lad. He is seriously impressive..

I am also a roadie but I did 15 miles of the KAW today and it always strikes me how peaceful and remote it feels for southern England.

I want to do it again and also got my eye on the West Kernow Way being launched next week
 

Yellow Fang

Legendary Member
Location
Reading
The Winchester-Salisbury section is the Clarendon Way, which I hiked this summer. Parts of it are definitely do-able, other sections would be harder on a tourer. I think I may need a new bike.
I missed that bit as I lost a few hours with a broken bike and had to go a more direct route to the hostel. I did run the Clarendon Way marathon many years ago, in a pretty good time since so much of it was off road. I remember running across some ploughed fields. Presumably KAW follows a slightly different route.
 
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Cathryn

Cathryn

Legendary Member
I missed that bit as I lost a few hours with a broken bike and had to go a more direct route to the hostel. I did run the Clarendon Way marathon many years ago, in a pretty good time since so much of it was off road. I remember running across some ploughed fields. Presumably KAW follows a slightly different route.

I did the HM last year in the mud :smile:

Yes, I thought it would head from Winchester to Farley Mount and then over the hill to Kings Somborne but it took a much direct approach with more road and rideable gravel trails than the Clarendon Way. I was half relieved and half disappointed.
 
I feel slightly sheepish about doing so, as pretty much every other cyclist we saw was faster than we were and seemed to be finding it much easier than we did
pffft. Don't worry about that - it's good to have write-ups from a range of peeps; I don't think I've seen a family write-up anywhere else, so it seems a worthy addition to the canon ;-)
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Meanwhile, locally, a very strong (mainly roadie) friend got about 2/3rds round and his seatpost cantilever luggage support thingy broke!
(it looked very loaded up, I think this failure is bound to happen from time-to-time)
 

HelenD123

Guru
Location
York
If you're not tired of me banging on about the KAW, I wrote a Crazy Guy journal about our trip. I feel slightly sheepish about doing so, as pretty much every other cyclist we saw was faster than we were and seemed to be finding it much easier than we did...but what's a tour without a journal, eh?

https://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/?o=1mr&doc_id=23829&v=5k
Smiles rather than miles. The more I tour, the more I think about the experience rather than the distance.
 
Location
London
Will read fully when I have a mo - read the first bit and looked like a really nice write up and trip - and you are fast becoming famous @Cathryn have already seen it referenced in another cycling place.
 

theclaud

Openly Marxist
Location
Swansea
I rode KAW recently, as part of a group of seven (eight for a day while we were joined by another, of whom more later…). Been watching @Cathryn's posts with interest as she and her family were just a day or so behind us on the route. I was something of a passive consumer of the ride, at least at the planning stage – it was essentially occasioned by two of my closest cycling pals at the Swansea end having their heads turned by the Gravel Bike vogue. One, in a better paid profession than mine, treated herself to a handsome Enigma which we all went round to ‘Ooooooh!’ at (although the envy proper didn’t kick in until much later when she seemingly floated like a bubble up some forbidding grind on Salisbury Plain with us plodding mtb-istes winching ourselves at a glacial pace across the growing gap from her back wheel). The other, a café owner, had squirrelled away enough for a deposit on a custom stainless steel Hallett, thanks to the lockdown boom in ice-cream and takeaway coffee sales, and felt obliged to pay homage to the bountiful gelato gods by rounding off the expenditure with a full wardrobe of Parentini clobber.

The Enigma purchase was already a done deal by the time I learned about my friend Sam’s broken dream. The grim knowledge gnawed away in my consciousness, and when the beautiful machine arrived and we went out for a few test spins round the gnarlier bits of Gower coast, I found myself sneaking anxious glances at my future KAW ride-leader’s bottom bracket. I decided not to tell her about Sam, and to put all thoughts of cracking aside during waking hours.


View: https://youtu.be/U-9IlaLqAU4?t=131


One more pre-ride setback was to assail us, as the build date for the Hallett slipped further towards the horizon, and it became increasingly apparent that my pal @cwrwcwrw was going to be All Dressed Up and Nothing to Go On. To the rescue - another friend with the timely loan of a mid-noughties Kona Caldera with a flamboyant gold paint job. Not quite the ride of @cwrwcwrw’s dreams, but Kona bikes have a certain irrepressible charm, and its combination of bling and backwoods felt right over the course of a ride that greets you with the sun glinting across amber waves of grain before dumping you arse-over-tit with your front wheel in a two-foot-deep rut.

It wasn’t the only Kona on the ride. A Fridays friend who does a good line in one-way bicycle logistics had acquired an old Hahanna for peanuts. It would’ve been a bargain had its seatpost not been seized beyond all hope of freeing. An incongruous and mahoosively boingy Brooks brought the seat position to a workable height for general riding purposes (we won’t dwell, for now, on the rocky descents), and a bespoke KAW ride was born.

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Its creator-rider was one of a small handful of FNRttC peeps I’d invited along – just enough to Fridays up the ride a bit without threatening a takeover. The other two turned me down for one reason or another. I reluctantly concede it was the right call – I don’t like to dwell on the expression I imagine @wanda2010 wearing had her post-lockdown return to touring involved wheels spinning around in soft sand for four gruelling hours before reaching coffee, only to find the worst of the day was still ahead. Twice.

Which brings me to a spot of actual ride guidance. It’s quite tough, as some folk upthread have already said. Not abandon-all-hope-of-completing-it tough, or only-for-proper-nutcases tough, but if you are on holiday and you value enjoyment over challenge, you should take the leisurely, rolling-through-the-countryside vibe of the CTC marketing with a pinch of salt and build much more slack into the schedule than the mileage alone might suggest. Apart from the ludicrous ramp with steps (mentioned by Cathryn) on the path along the Thames from Goring (which we declared Unrideable Unless you are @Skolly) there isn’t much that in itself requires advanced riding skills – however the constant need for concentration on ruts, roots, rocks and other stuff that will have you off the bike if you’re not paying attention and the absence of anything much in the way of reprieve (if it’s not the surface it’s the gradient, and often it’s both) takes a toll as the hours roll by but the mileage remains substantially unmunched.

The rest of our band: Dai, new to the off-road scene, perpetually infuriated by craft beer wankery, and an enthusiastic convert to the joys of falling off, had picked up a nice second-hand Merckx Strasbourg; Tommy, on a Planet X Ti, carried what appeared to be a year’s supply of everything in two mahoosive panniers and was still first, unruffled, to the top of every climb. Jon was our deputy navigator - his bike escapes my memory for the moment, but the frame was big enough for three bottle cages inside the triangle.

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We did it over four and a half days. If I were to do it again, I think I’d make it six – but then I do like to fanny about looking at mushrooms and suchlike. There were Chanterelles on Hazeley Heath, and enough Death Caps in the poshest road in Farnham to wipe out most of the resident billionaires. A smaller group of riders well matched in pace and skills would make much more efficient progress than we did – a sort of amiable shambles of different bikes and abilities, one half holding up climbs and the other descents, every so often collapsing like a pack of dominoes because someone at the front forgot to shout ‘Easy!’ before they hit the sand. Descents don’t give back what climbs take away, and the Gravelistas were substantially quicker overall – an effect exacerbated by the fact that they were simply in much better shape than the mtb-ers. I did, however, have reason every day to be grateful for suspension forks that could be locked out, and for the lower end of my old-skool 3 x 8 gearing when things like this rose ahead…

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That wasn’t the toughest climb on the route - an honour that has been rightfully claimed upthread by Butser Hill, on the South Downs not far outside Petersfield. Every major ride must have a hill – like Ditchling Beacon – that is more about the myth than the gradient, and this is Butser’s role in the story of KAW. It even has some kind of transmission tower at the top, like some Ventoux of the South Downs. On this occasion I have preserved its allure by the simple expedient of not cycling up it. I don’t mean I pushed the bike – I just mean that a few miles before it one of my companions and I sat shaky-legged at the Durleighmarsh Tea Barn after the aforementioned four hours of sandy heath, pondering the rival charms of Butser Hill and the Meon Valley, the impossibility of making up time on the route over the rest of the day, and the delicious restorative properties of flat white and Bakewell cake, and it became clear to us that it was not the optimal route to the scheduled pub lunch stop in Meonstoke. The Bugger Butser variation was born, and despite a second coffee after the others departed, a spot of fettling and faffing, and a double puncture incident in East Meon with an offer of a help from a charming local who wished to reminisce about her long-past riding days, we were a pint, a pizza, and a fully-charged smartphone up on Team Butser by the time they rolled into the The Buck’s Head. It’s just a Greene King boozer, but they kept the kitchen open until we’d all made it, and we sat in the sun on huge wooden tables where there had once been car parking, washing home-made sourdough pizza down with ginger beer and Camden Pale shandy like some demented alcoholic variation on an Enid Blyton novel, and stuffing our pockets with sweets before we set off again with The Black Boy in Winchester in our mental sights, following a tip-off from a friend who mis-spent her youth in and around the town.

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There’s more to say, but I’m in danger of Filling Up the Internet. Highlights for me, apart from catching up with an old friend, meeting new ones, and having new adventures with some of the people that have kept me going over the past 18 months, were the following:

The heather on the Berkshire/Surrey heathland. Vivid bell heather surrounded drifts of the paler ling. I grew up in that neck of the woods and associate that terrain with childhood, but I have never seen it so gloriously purple.

Day 2. Marlborough to Reading, over The Ridgeway. We’d spent the previous evening filled with foreboding, induced by the weather forecast. A miserable, freezing day sliding around on wet chalk and gouging bits out of our legs falling on flint seemed a certainty. But the rain never came to pass, the Ridgeway was glorious (ruts aside) and my friend from Pontypridd had recce’d the pub options for lunch. Hot salt beef rolls with horseradish for four quid, and beer called Chairman Dave. Panelled bar rooms, sliding glass partitions and ebony handpumps. We got wet for half an hour in Goring, dried out in Pangbourne, and wound up at the Jolly Anglers by the Kennet in Reading, where this happened with a bang and a whimper, to the amusement of six of our party and a tableful of locals whose conversation might end up providing the source material for @cwrwcwrw’s debut novel.

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Andy. I mentioned him up-post, and we only spent a day in his company, but it was a window into a whole different KAW story. He set off a day and a half after us carrying full camping gear, got hit by the deluge we’d missed on the Ridgeway, had nine punctures, and caught us up near Winchfield where we’d stopped to help someone out with a mechanical and have a chat to Dotty the pony. At the Frensham Ponds Hotel, in the context of the worst and most expensive meal of the tour, he was served a steak like shoe leather but was too hungry to send it back. Before we reached the hotel, we had stopped at a brewery set in a ramshackle farmyard, and between the brewery and the hotel was the River Wey. Seven of us went over a small bridge. Lightweights.

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Our ride leader did a fine job. It was not only her first tour as leader – it was her first tour full stop. The organisation was meticulous – we had tables booked at lunch and dinner, accommodation arranged, and we were all added to a Splitwise app to tell us who we owed money to and what for. She phoned pubs on the move to revise ETAs, herded cats and almost kept a lid on the inevitable faffing, and after all that was still smiling at the top of every bastard hill. Part of the attraction of the KAW for her was that it touched on her home turf – her parents live near Salisbury. This gave us a sociable start point to converge upon, and a secret weapon – the folks would rock up by car at pre-arranged lunch spots. They carried a track pump and a tool kit in the motor and a huge sack of sweets and energy bars. They relieved Andy of his camping gear for a day and delivered it back to him the next. I had arrived at the start having ridden from Newport on a solo make-it-up-as-you-go-along prologue, with way too much clobber for the KAW (or anything else, really – I’d forgotten how to tour) – I ditched more than half of it at their gaff before the ride and picked it up again at the end.

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The route, if you wish to stick to it and want to keep moving, is only really navigable by GPX track, and a lot of it is counter-intuitive (wiggly, indirect, cavalier about contours) if you like to get about by OS maps and are not in the habit of making everything more difficult for fun. The flip side of this is that if you do decide to break from the route for whatever reason, you’ll find you are not as far away from anything as you thought. I have the OS maps app on my phone, which I was chiefly using to amuse myself and to annoy everyone else with unwelcome detail, but it did come in handy a few times, and is a thing of beauty in its own right.

For some bikes, one shot at the KAW was enough.

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