Windle
Über Member
- Location
- Burnthouses
A sort of straight out & back ride from Sunday on the gravel bike. I took one of my regular routes westward along Scotland Lane than along the track past Gibsneese Farm and down to the road near Copley Chimney, instead of turning back and doing a series of varying loops this time I kept going past the few houses and along the farm lane that runs south of, but sort of parallel with Hindon Beck with the thin strip of woodland in the Gaunless valley to the south . Climbing all the way up past a couple of farms (where a normal road surface resumes)
and upwards into a raging headwind until I got to the summit,
then after a brief photo pause dropped down to the B6282 and decided to get my own back on the headwind by turning northeast, dropping down over Hindon Beck and climbing, wind assisted up to and through Woodland
then down the steep, partly walled descent (slower than usual due to a lot of wind buffeting) back down to where the road crosses the Gaunless near Copley Chimney. From here it was back up the stony & often muddy track
to just past Gibsneese whence I turned northeast along the old railway path and out onto the road briefly before skirting across the corner of Cockfield Fell, back down through the village, past the football ground (with a cheeky go over the skatepark hump) then home via the muddy farm track / footpath and Burnthouses Lane. A decent (for me) 14 miler with about 1,200 feet of climbing in mostly glorious sunshine.
. I've done it a couple of times years ago (before it was famous) and I recall one of the steeper sections near the bottom just went diagonally across a field, so you didn't have any walls or hedges hiding the gradient. It was also prone to having cows wandering about on it too, just what you want when you're grunting up a ruddy great hill. It was either: which end's the safest to pass on or should I try and go underneath, risking a face full of udder 
. (Only joking about the last one).
