2009-Jul-05 by Gregory Williams.

Today has been a very eventful day of cycling. Fairly soon after setting off I discovered an unexpected portion of Regional Cycle Route 49. I didn’t want get distracted by it so early in the day, so only surveyed the first few metres of it before continuing on my planned journey.

A few miles further on the route passes through the delightful Wyre Forest. It’s a peaceful setting. The first part of the route follows the path of a former railway that passed through the forest. This is then followed by using some bridleways. Within the forest I encountered the first of many Mercian Way statues that I’d see on my trip today. National Cycle Route 45 is also known as the Mercian Way.

After leaving the forest I reached the village of Upper Arley. The preserved Severn Valley Railway passes through the village. By chance I met another cyclist whilst cycling over a bridge over the railway, adjacent to the station. He explained that nearby Bridgnorth, further up the line, celebrates a ’40s day each year where people dress up in costume. That day happened to be today. There were a number of people in costume on the station platform and in the village.

The cycle route then veered away from the railway for a few miles before running adjacent to it further up the valley. Whistles from the trains could be heard frequently though, even when away from the line. When beside the line I took a photo of the train approaching. I passed some members of the Home Guard patrolling along beside the track before the cycle route left its route.

The next section of route used a number of bridleways. Unfortunately though some of these are quite overgrown, so I had to walk my way through parts. I was confident that I was on the correct route though as there was good signing only metres away.

At Bridgnorth I took a break from following NCR45 and followed a B-road to near Telford. I picked up NCR55 here, the Silkin Way. This passes through the heart of Telford mainly following the path of a former railway. Telford appears to have quite a substantial cycle network. Judging from the data showing on my GPS however we’ve still got quite a bit to be mapped here. It looks like it will be quite an enjoyable place to map. So, if anybody in OpenStreetMap feels like organising a Telford mapping party for some time after I complete my trip then I’ll try to attend it.

This evening I discovered a great Indian restaurant in nearby Newport. Food cooked beside my table, staff who clearly knew their customers by name, and excellent service and food. All in all a great day.

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2009-Jul-03 by Gregory Williams.

I started out following National Cycle Route 41 to Gloucester. NCR45 soon shared the route as well. In Gloucester I left the cycle routes, but then became quite lost. I eventually found my way out and made the journey through Worcester and eventually to Stourport-on-Severn mainly on A- and B-roads.

There was a very slight rain first thing this morning, but the promised “proper” rain never materialised. So today turned out to be quite a hot day once again. Tomorrow’s forecast shows a reasonable chance of rain. I have a fair amount of climbing tomorrow, so I hope that it materialises.

I’ve got the luxury of a WiFi connection again this evening. So I’ve managed to catch up on the data entry backlog a bit more. There’s now about 10½ days of backlog, bearing in mind that I’ve also created another day of data today (but I think most, if not all, of today’s data is already mapped…luckily).

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2009-Jul-03 by Gregory Williams.

Pretty early on in today’s cycling I followed the Strawberry Line cycle route, which follows the path of a former railway. The railway used to run through to Cheddar, but I joined it further north at Winscombe.

In Easter’s training ride from Fishguard to Canterbury I followed National Cycle Route 4 through Bristol. Considering that the city houses Sustrans’s head office I was surprised at how badly signed it was. I lost quite a bit of time to figuring out which way to head. My original plan for this trip was to follow a route through Bristol, but in the light of Easter’s experience I adjusted the route to skirt around to the west of the city using country lanes. This I’m pleased to say is well signposted.w

I’m pleased to say that tonight’s accomodation has got WiFi Internet access. So I’ve been catching up on entering some of my mapping data. Unfortunately the Internet access in Princetown a few days ago wasn’t working. So I’m currently about 12 days behind in entering the data.

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2009-Jul-03 by Gregory Williams.

A large amount of today’s cycling was spent following the National Cycle Network along canal towpaths. Thus much of the riding was pretty flat. At one point I met a couple of cyclists who wondered whether they may borrow an allen key from me to adjust the height of a saddle. In return they added to my sponsorship.

I couldn’t find any evidence of signing for the Burnham-on-sea to Brean cycle route. It looks like it would have been across the sand and I didn’t think my heavily laden bike would cope that well on the surface I saw. So I resorted to my backup plan instead.

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2009-Jun-30 by Gregory Williams.

I continued to enjoy the fantastic scenery of Dartmoor as I left this morning. There were plenty of sheep laying in the road and Dartmoor ponies crossing randomly.

A few miles away from my destination today I stopped for a few minutes, then noticed that a car behind me had stopped in the middle of the road. It turned out that they’d broken down. So, after leaving my bike off of the road and donning a bright yellow jacket I went and helped to push them off of the road. It wouldn’t move and it turned out that a build up of a pressure in the brake hydraulics was forcing the brake on. A friend of the driver resolved that and we pushed the vehicle off to a safe place. I then stopped for lunch in the village ahead.

It was quite obvious that I was going to arrive very early at tonight’s overnight stop (the same place in Silverton that I stayed at on the way down towards Land’s End). I noticed from my OS map that there is apparently a cycle route (regional cycle route 52) nearby (denoted by the green dots along some of the roads), so decided to divert off and investigate it. It’s there, but very thinly signed. Some junctions can only be inferred from the presence of signs a bit further along. I’ve followed it for a few miles; I’ve no idea whether we’ve got any coverage of the cycle route in OSM yet. Certainly the roads showed up in the coverage on my GPS, but I’m not currently using the cycle map variant of the GPS map.

Despite the distraction of following the cycle route I still arrived quite early, so sat around in what is effectively the village square for a bit. The next few days should take longer again as the distance is markedly up again now that I’m heading away from some of the hills. I should also cover some as-yet unmapped portions of the National Cycle Network (that is unless someone has mapped it since I left Canterbury a couple of weeks ago). One bit should prove interesting as it appears to be located on some mudflats, possibly making it only accessible at low tide. I’ve no idea of the tides for tomorrow, but I do have a backup plan in case the route does prove inaccessible.

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2009-Jun-28 by Gregory Williams.

My plan for today had the largest amount of cumulative climbing for any of my days - a little over 1500m - onto Dartmoor. So I was dreading the climbing a bit, but greatful that today’s weather was notably cooler.

I took a wrong turn fairly on in the day, so didn’t quite take my planned route. I adjusted my route accordingly and this will actually mean that I did even more climbing than planned in the end.

Not too long after passing a sign welcoming me to Dartmoor National Park it started to rain. At about the same time a series of cyclists turned onto the road I was following 100m or so ahead of me. It turns out that there was some kind of organised cycle event on Dartmoor today together with marshals at the junctions I encountered. As I climbed into Dartmoor I passed some of the riders, but was slightly slower than the majority of them. One of them commented “I don’t know how you do it with all of that!”, referring to the fact that I was pretty much keeping pace with him on his unladen bike while I was carrying four panniers, a rack bag, and a handlebar bag. I had an advantage on the event riders though in that it looks like they had to go a bit further on the moor whereas I was stopping at Princetown for my accomodation. I also had an OS map in front of me with the contours, which used together with my GPS’s altimeter (even though that’s not entirely accurate) helped me plan my ascent reasonably well. When I’d achieved most of the final climb for today I even had my photo taken by one of the event photographers. I think that having other riders around prove very helpful with giving me a pace to latch onto, the rain was helpful in keeping me cool too. I feel proud that I was keeping up so well, and I hope it bodes well for the other tough climbs I’ve still got in some of the days ahead.

In the end I arrived a little over 3 hours early at today’s accomodation, so I’ve been out to have a snack and found a cafe that claims to have WiFi access. I’ve got a rest day planned tomorrow, so I’ll probably be spending quite some time there catching up on some data entry.

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2009-Jun-27 by Gregory Williams.

I made some major changes to the first part of my route today. From my accomodation out of Grampound for the next couple of miles would have been uphill on the trunk road. I didn’t fancy that, so found a route, albeit longer and hillier, on quieter roads. This had many advantages: Safer away from the fast moving and heavy traffic, the roads aren’t mapped so far, so they’ll get added to the OSM data, and it landed me further south on another braid of NCR3, so I got some more of that mapped as well. Even then I got tempted to cycle a little further south still to the outskirts of Mevagissey on NCR3, simply because I stayed there a few years ago without a bicycle and wondered where the cycle route actually goes. Now I know.

After my diversion to Mevagissey on NCR3 I retraced my steps, got tempted to follow the short cycle route off to the Lost Gardens of Helligan and back, and followed the route towards St. Austell. I then discovered another braid to Pentewan, gave in to temptation again, and followed that there and back as well before continuing as planned to St. Austell.

In St. Austell I followed the NCR3 signing and found that I actually followed it a bit too far. NCR3 and NCR2 join at St. Austell. When complete NCR2 will roughly follow the south coast to Dover. I’ve followed large parts of the existing NCR2 in previous days in this trip. My plan was to follow NCR2 for a bit here. After a little searching I found the route and followed it through the Clay Trails. Unfortunately the signing was a little thin here, but there were just enough signs marked with NCR2 that I’m reasonably confident that I followed the actual route out of the possible permutations here. This route took me past some lakes that filled in some former clay works. The water colour has a green tinge here because of the mica particles in suspension in the water.

Eventually the Clay Trails route arrives at the Eden Project, itself sited in a former clay works. I once again got tempted to follow the cycle route down into the project then back out again, noting the presence of the cycle parking on the way. On my way out I met a young couple that were confused a little by the signing of NCR3 at this point. They were hoping to follow some of the routes to Mevagissey, etc. that I’d cycled a little earlier in the day. The map that they had wasn’t particularly detailed. So, having just cycled that bit myself I tore my own map page covering the area in half, such that they could use that for navigating around the Clay Trails etc. themselves. I also warned them about the thin signing, but gave them some clues as to the landmarks I used to find my way through. Hopefully they didn’t get lost.

NCR3 then follows some extremely quiet roads towards Bodmin and a spur heads off towards Bodmin Parkway station, situated strangely a few miles outside of Bodmin itself.

From the station I followed a small road out to the A38 trunk road, another one that I needed to include a few miles of in order to reach my accomodation. Actually it turned out to be pretty manageable, a good surface and reasonably flat. I then had a climb off of the road towards the A390 again, where tonight’s accomodation is situated.

West Taphouse is a hamlet without a pub, so for tonight’s food I needed to make a 10 mile round trip to the town of Lostwithiel. I cycled there and back mainly using quiet country lanes, taking a slightly different route outbound and for my return. All of the lanes weren’t mapped yet, so that’s another few miles of coverage for OSM. The bike felt quite strange this evening; I’ve obviously got quite used to carrying the extra weight now; I found myself slightly overcompensating on my balance whilst cycling this evening.

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2009-Jun-27 by Gregory Williams.

Much of today I was following another braid of NCR3. In Hayle I stopped at a cycle shop. My chain was squeaking a bit so I purchased some oil and we chatted a little about OpenCycleMap. I gave a brief demonstration of the freely-downloadable OpenStreetMap data that I have on my Garmin GPS after one of the shop assistants mentioned that he had a Garmin unit.

Passing through Cambourne and Redruth it was clear from the numerous abandoned mine buildings that there was once a rich mining industry here.

At Bissoe I stopped at a bike hire centre beside the cycle route to purchase an ice cream. That’ll be on the map relatively soon as well, once I manage to catch up on the data entry.

Once at Truro I headed out on a reasonably quiet road to meet the A390 trunk road a couple of miles outside town. Unfortunately I needed to follow this road in part to get to my accomodation this evening. I reached the junction with the A390, but ended up turning the wrong way onto it. So after perhaps 1.5 miles of thinking that it’s a little hillier than the contours on my map show I realised my mistake, negotiated crossing to the other side of the road, then headed back in the correct direction.

My planned route took me on a brief diversion via the village of Probus, away from the A390, such that I wouldn’t have to climb a fairly steep hill on the trunk road. I took the wrong turning out of Probus, but ended up discovering a paved bridleway running beside it. Judging from the fading road markings on it it may well have been an earlier alignment of the A390. This brought me back to the main road after a little while, but from here on it was essentially downhill to Grampound.

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2009-Jun-25 by Gregory Williams.

If you look at the locations of Marazion and Penzance on a map you’ll see that they’re just a few miles apart from each other. So it’s lucky that today’s trip went via Land’s End to keep the mileage up (although it still wasn’t that many miles).

At Land’s End I had the obligatory photo taken (570 miles so far. 2378 still to go, if going by my original plan). I took a different outward and return journey with only a minimal overlap, to ensure that I gather as much mapping data as possible. I did manage to make one small wrong turn though, but only realised once I’d climbed most of the hill so just adjusted accordingly.

I had strong winds whilst at Land’s End and it was a headwind for the first few miles of my return journey. That calmed as I got away from the west coast though.

The Internet connection at tonight’s accomodation is broken. It connects to the wireless access point fine, but doesn’t route beyond that to the Internet. So, I’m updating my blog postings via a slow mobile connection again in order to not get too far behind with them. The mobile signal strength is pretty weak though, so that’s dropping out a bit as well.

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2009-Jun-25 by Gregory Williams.

Today I followed NCR32 and NCR3, and then took a separate cross-country route over to Marazion. On the NCR3 stretch I took a brief diversion of a few miles to visit the Carnon Viaduct, which crosses a cycle route. The cross-country route later in the day took in plenty of as-yet unmapped roads. I’ve still got a large backlog of unentered data though — I’ve just started entering data from day 5.

Tonight’s stay is in Marazion, famous for being opposite St. Michael’s Mount, which you may recognise from being featured in one of the BBC1 idents a while back.

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