We then came to a long stretch of freshly gravelled tarmac. Put it this way, 50% of what was on the new tarmac was not attached to it! It was simply
horrid - noisy and skid-worthy. We had our fingers crossed that this would not go all the way to the Cross o'Greet itself. Fortunately, it didn't!
Unfortunately, the last stretches of the work had only just had gravel chucked onto hot tarmac so it was unrideable. Within seconds our bikes had gravel chips stuck all over them and our wheels were jamming. We dismounted and walked on the grass verge towards the crew who were laying the new surface. They pointed out that the road was closed, but we said that we couldn't do the extreme diversion that would have been required and had decided to ride what we could, and walk what we couldn't. We were lucky because that section happened to be one of the few places where there actually is a grass verge to walk on! In a lot of other places it would have been very difficult to pass off-road. If we hadn't stopped at Slaidburn, we would have encountered a long stretch of road covered in ungravelled tar.
Once we had got past the nastiness we stopped to de-tar/gravel our bikes. Fortunately,
@Littgull had a pack of wet-wipes with him and we managed to get the worst of the tarry crap off us and the bikes with them.
