Overland to Carlisle

Our liminal ride to the midsummer sunrise was the destination. Ben booked the three days before that to come away. A promising opportunity for a big ride, and some stories to tell!

Ben had recently bought a gravel bike, and I’m always looking to take my trusty Whyte Suffolk further and further from the rough UK roads it was designed for, so I was firmly looking for an off-road route we could take to the start in Carlisle. A double-century for the Ride to the Sun would certainly be fun, but we could do more than that.

We had some time to get ourselves and our bikes there from Edinburgh, so in March, I spent most mornings pouring over the map to find the most interesting three-day pregame ride I could. Until an email announcing the recently-launched Great North Trail landed in my inbox.

Off-roading down the spine of Britain

The whole eight-hundred mile length of the route is thoroughly explained in Cycling UK’s route guide. The route that CUK have designed, and more importantly, campaigned for access to, takes you to some truly beautiful and interesting places, keeping off the road almost the whole time. They advise that the route is best ridden on a hardtail or gravel bike. They’re not wrong.

There’s something enchanting in reading about off-road routes; I found myself studying the guide closely, tracing the route into a planner, and raring to get out of the house and ride it straight away. Parts three and four of the trail cover the North Pennines, Kielder, and the Scottish Borders, in that order – as a whole, it’s written South to North to go with the prevailing wind in the UK. Fortunately for us, we would have the wind behind us even though we were going the other way.

Our Great North

We wanted to keep our rides manageable. Both of us were pretty focused on the Ride to the Sun, a hundred miles with the added unknown of overnight tiredness. We didn’t plan to do big distances on the way there, so aimed for 80-90km per day in the plan. To save riding routes I’m more familiar with, we immediately decided on taking the train to Tweedbank, so we were starting in the Borders, not Edinburgh.

Off to a good start… but we weren’t camping, so we were still hostages to the available hotels, bunkhouses, and hostels that we could find on the route.

This… was more of a problem than I expected. Our original plan had us spending the first night in Kielder, sleeping at the Youth Hostel which was totally marked on Komoot… and was also totally closed down and demolished!

Booking the accommodation was challenging, especially to try and keep it to a budget. Most places were fully booked, even though we were booking in April, and many of those which weren’t had a minimum of two or three nights stay. “Credit card touring” is less straightforward than it sounds!

We did find places though: an inn in Falstone, a community-run bunkhouse in Garrigill, and the old reliable, Premier Inn in Carlisle. Now, we could firm up our route.

What we thought we were doing

• Day 1: 108km, 60km unpaved, a big scary-looking gravel hill at the end.
• Day 2: 70km, 35km unpaved, a lumpy start out of Kielder, followed by steady gentle climbing for the second half of the ride.
• Day 3: 74km, only 10km unpaved, but crossing the moor to the highest paved road in Britain, Great Dun Fell, at 835m. Flat or downhill after that.

The first day was always going to be long, and with that big hill towards the end, pretty tiring. But we had two shorter riding days, and a rest day, to recover. “It’ll be fine!“

The second day was fully on the Great North Trail, with Hadrian’s Wall marking the transition from the national park, to a long climb out of Haltwhistle to Alston on an old branch railway line.

Finally, we would summit the highest paved road in Britain, and then coast downhill pretty much all the way to Carlisle. That’s definitely how English roads work. For sure.

What we were actually doing

As the ride came closer, we worked on our bikes, our fitness, and getting the food and drink we needed sorted. Our friends kindly agreed to take care of my usual school-run duties, and everything was ready.

The train strikes loomed, threatening Ben’s ability to get to Edinburgh, but a change of plans to a long drive from Gloucester saw him right. The day came to go and jump on a train, or to enact our backup plan of adding another 60km to that first day route, and we set off.

We were soon glad that we didn’t add 60km to the ride… but after the first 10km, we had a cake and coffee stop anyway: we weren’t racing, after all!

As we wove our way through the Borders towards the GNT route, we found some pretty difficult terrain. Grass tracks were certainly not all ridable, and my chain replacement the night before revealed a derailleur issue that needed repeated bodging with zip ties.

Lunch in Hawick was a delicious, if non-traditional bagel: seeded, filled with pulled bbq pork and macaroni cheese, with a side of superhero chat with a local six-year-old, who seemed to know everyone but we weren’t totally sure who or where his parents were.

Progress was slow. Sunglasses were lost. Hills were re-ridden in a fruitless search, and the day started to get away from us. Some time in the late afternoon, we realised that we weren’t actually half way yet, and even though there was lots of daylight, we did actually need to get a bit of a wiggle on. Some of the off-road was replaced with road, especially when we found the old railway was blocked and not ridable. Eventually, we got to the big hill which we worried about from the beginning… and just rode up it.

It was fine. A little tough, but nothing like as bad as we’d thought, just a steady pace in a low gear, and we got there when we got there. The curlews kept us company, and the Borders opened up behind us as we climbed, with a fantastic view from the top.

We crossed the border with England at the Bloody Bush, and the standing stone there, and started a fun single track descent to Kielder Water. It seemed like it would be really difficult to actually pedal this on a gravel bike, if you were going uphill: the track was so narrow and deep that you’d have had constant pedal strikes, but on the way down, it was plenty of fun.

It was getting late, so we made another route alteration, going around the south of Kielder Water rather than the north. I’d ridden these trails before and knew they’d be fun, but we were thinking about the time, and getting to the inn at a reasonable hour, and that I’d told them we’d arrive at 4… so it was fairly rapid fun!

We arrived at the inn just after eight o’clock… which was when they stopped serving food! Fortunately, they made us each a great big burger, which felt well earned, along with our pints.