The Cycle Path
Cycle Log
Day 2 - Sunday 20 June 2004
Winchester to Uffington
Leaving the Old Mill still creaking but passing up the valley on a riverside cycle path to St Swithun's Church - request for rain free here - then the 'Good Life' watercress farm and Barton Stacey where, sitting outside the PO shop, I had my bike blessed by a passing vicar. The valley road is gentle with both parochial watercress beds and industrial scale protected by chain-link and barbed wire in case the Brinks Mat team turn vegetarian. Thatch is much in evidence architecturally especially at St Mary Bourne. On and up goes the road as the chalk stream diminishes then finally expires dry to await winter's rain. Hurstbourne Tarrant has a St George and Dragon pub flying the flag of England as I gear up for the climb to Dragon Hill. The road, however, is a pleasant gentle slope through ancient field systems in the Faccombe Estate. Ahead towers the bulk of Walbury Hill the highest chalk hill in Britain and the Combe Gibbet. Time to get off and walk/push the bike and get a better appreciation of the local orchid population. Black clouds counterpoint the soft green chalk downland as I reach the top. Then with a glorious 2 mile freewheel at 30mph I zip to the Swan Inn, Inkpen for organic beef sausages and mash with a pint of Butts beer. Talk in the pub turns to Honey Buzzard and woodlark sightings and excitement as a red kite pokes its beak over. Hungerford with majestic commonland, pollarded lime tree avenues and Kennet and Avon Canal is surmounted by a long steady climb along the Round Berkshire Cycle Route (a route I created years ago but still good!) to the M4 overbridge. A swift buzz to Lambourn, tea and a chat with the Shuttleworth family then the long slow uphill to the Ridgeway through classic Berkshire Downs countryside of race gallops, tree clumps and mangers, remnant patches of downland and vast acres of green rippling wheat. The ridgeway suddenly gives a massive vista, Chilterns to the East, North Wessex Downs AONB to the West - a string of hillforts and tree clumps. Then white horse hill itself, a convenient bridleway to the White Horse, Dragon Hill, the Combe of the Manger a rendezvous with Tim Baker and Common Ground's very own Sue Clifford as skeins of rain fell and the picnic was abandoned.
