Newark to Llanelli, cycle routes

[yello]

I'll be riding Newark to Llanelli in the autumn. Around 400km which I'm thinking of doing as 2 x 200km days. I did a Google map thing and it suggested, as part of the journey, a couple of national cycle routes.

My experience of national cycle routes last year (Portsmouth to Windsor) was not the best. The NCR bits of the journey were very hit and miss; signing, route surface, direction. They may have been OK for short bimble hops on MTB but they really didn't seem best suited to tourer mile munching.

So I concluded that I would have preferred to avoid these routes and stay on the road. Would that be a fair assessment do you think? Or am I unfairly judging?

 

[HLaB]

Its a fair assessment unfortunately :-( You can occasionally get an ncn of road route thats well surfaced and direct, part of the Newark one is. Ive only took the NCN once in Newark, its well surfaced and direct in town but out of town its not the best of quality, I don't know how quickly it degrades though, I left the path before I could find out. The visibility is poor on some of the bends too, so I prefer the road.

 

[22camels]

I wouldn't deliberately avoid NCN sections, sometimes they are the best option. A lot of them are on the road anyway, just more quiet roads. In any case you will probably have some sort of pre-planned route, whether through google maps / some other route planner / your own - and will be following that, even if some sections follow an NCN route. I had a quick look and in my opinion the cycle.travel/maps (which is a superior route planner) Newark-Llanelli suggested route looks much better than the first google maps cycling option, in that it's more rural. I cycled the last bit of it yesterday actually - Llanwrtyd Wells to Llanelli - and it was mostly pretty nice. You can print out very useful paper maps from cycle.travel of your route which I've found work well on the road. Avoid going south of the Brecons unless you go all the way down to route 4 (I tried following NCN routes from Hay to Swansea via Merthyr recently and the bit skirting Merthyr was suicidal).

If you're concerned with mile munching and getting there faster then stick to A and B roads whenever you can, more traffic but easier to navigate, fewer hills and better surfaces. I prefer C roads though as less traffic and you get to see more of the country. It requires checking your map more often but this may be fine if you have a bike mounted gps with turn by turn instructions (I don't) or are following an NCN section and don't miss the signs.

 

[yello]

Thanks for that, most useful. I'd not heard of cycle.travel before so that gives me something new to try out