Cycling day 49: Haswell Plough to Osmotherley

As you’ll have gathered from the number of times I’ve mentioned it, I’ve got GPS on my bike. It can tell me my current location in a number of co-ordinate systems and also display a map (I’ve got freely-downloadable OpenStreetMap loaded onto it). My GPS attempts to display my current altitude, and to help it achieve that it has a built-in barometer (the GPS signal alone isn’t that good for vertical precision). Usually it’s within a few metres accuracy, which is fine for me judging roughly how far through a climb I am. However today I found that it was either temporarily highly inaccurate, that we have an inland area in the British Isles that’s substantially below sea level, or that I’d unexpectedly grown some gills. I suspect the former. Apparently I managed to dive to 61 metres below sea level.

Today’s route took me along pretty lengthy sections of former railway and into Stockton-on-Tees. There I followed a large number of cycle paths to the Tees Barage, and then following the Tees to the Transporter Bridge. At this point I started to follow National Cycle Route 65 southward. This is the first of two major diversions from NCR1 that I’ll be taking. I followed NCR65 for the rest of the day, leaving the urban area through Middlebrough, then through the countryside and eventually climbed into the North York Moors National Park.