My Ride: The Pennine Bridleway in DerbyshireDistance: 92 miles off-roadChallenge: To ride the bridleway in under 12 hours

Scrambling past the decrepit farmhouse at Bleak Hey Nook

A tough boulder-strewn climb

Nick Craig’s Pennine

Bridleway ChallengeThe promise of a free dinner was all it took for Hugh Gladstone to tempt former mountain bike and cross champ Nick Craig to try and ride the Pennine Bridleway in a single day

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RIDING | Pennine Bridleway Challenge

THE scene is nothing short of sleepy in the deserted visitor centre car park at Middleton Top. It’s approaching 8am on a late summer

morning and a light mist still hangs in the air. The hills of the surrounding Derbyshire Dales are only just waking from their slumber but Nick Craig is already raring to go.

“Right, let’s do it,” the off-roader asserts as he pulls his gaze away from a map-board depicting the route of the Pennine Bridleway. The sign recommends cyclists should consider taking three to five days to ride the trail, but Nick’s time-frame is rather less generous. I’ve just bet him dinner that he can’t get to the most northerly point on the main section of this bridleway before sundown. As a sucker for any kind of challenge, he’s risen to the bait. If successful, we reckon he’ll have set the fastest time for riding the trail.

Nick resets his GPS and, dead on the hour, rolls off along the opening miles of this newest of National Trails. The former national cyclo-cross and mountain bike champion averages around 19mph on the flat and relatively well-surfaced path of the first section. This used to be the High Peak railway, along which they transported goods across the Pennines. Now, with the industrial era behind us, it’s a pleasant recreational route that serves families and leisure riders with flat, enjoyable, traffic-free biking. But as far as mountain trails go, it’s about as tame as you can get.

“I’m not going to get lulled into a false sense of security here,” says Nick 15 miles in. “I’ve ridden other parts of the Pennine Bridleway and I know what’s to come.”

Ten minutes later, he’s off the old railway line and heading down a stony little track.

The Pennine what way?While Nick delves deeper into the Pennines, I jump into my car and shoot on through Buxton towards Nick’s home village of Hayfield. The plan is to meet him back on the trail, so I ride out of the village towards him. However, either the signposting or my eyesight is poor, and it doesn’t take long for me to go off track on the myriad of other trails, farm routes and paths that litter this corner of the High Peak.

I ask some walkers which way the Pennine Bridleway is but none of them have heard of it. One

of them tells me that “the Pennine Way is just up there,” but that’s not the same thing.

I find another rambler who has a large scale OS map — not to mention carbon-fibre walking poles and a rather natty headband. I take a look but there’s no trace of the Pennine Bridleway on the map either. “It’s only four years old,” he says in defence of his cartographic document. Despite incorporating some ancient routes, the Pennine Bridleway is even younger. In fact, much of the trail still remains unopened. When finished it will stretch for 347 miles right up to Byrness in Northumberland.

“I’ve just bet him dinner that he can’t do the route before sundown”

Currently, though, it stops near Burnley.

Eventually a little blue waymark confirms that I’ve landed back on track and I meet Nick as he grinds up out of the depths of Roych Clough. Continuing upwards toward the highest point of the route (465m) beneath the peak of South Head, Nick explains that the going has been much slower than the early miles and he’s already suffered two punctures. “One minute you’re on a disused railway and the next minute you’re zig-zagging down descents with your arse hanging

off the back seat,” he says. “Once you get to

Rushup Edge you’re into proper mountainous Derbyshire

and the trails get much tougher.” The surface we’re on now is

rock strewn but he expertly picks his line and deftly hops his triple chain-ringed Scott cyclo-cross bike over boulders. Despite the record-breaking intentions, this is very much an effort rooted in the real world. Although he will pop home for lunch, he’s carrying his own food, drink and spares. Repeatedly he’s had to stop to open gates and, earlier in the morning, he also took an important phone call.

On the descent from South Head, Nick halts just short of a sharp corner flanked by a drystone wall. “I helped redesign this section of the bridleway,” he explains. “A couple of mountain bikers have had nasty crashes here and the National Parks people approached me about a solution.

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Bridleway Challenge

465meters

Highest point of the route beneath the peak of

South head

RIDING | Pennine Bridleway Challenge

What we have done is made the path more technical so riders slow down before the corner. Previously, riders were just bombing straight down the hill and braking too late.”

Summit to aim forCruising through Hayfield, we chance across Nick’s wife Sarah and their two boys, Thomas and Charlie, returning home from a bike ride. We accompany them back to the house — a stone’s throw off the bridleway — and Sarah prepares tea and bagels while Nick changes tyres in his

garage. After his third puncture on the descent into the village he’s decided there’s only one thing for it: swapping his lighter racing rubber for heavy-duty Schwalbe Land Cruisers.

With the punctures and the lunch stop, time’s been ticking away, and it’s gone 1pm when Nick sets off on his way again. Because much of the route is unknown to either of us, his initial target destination is the settlement dubiously named Summit, where the 73-mile-long linear leg of the trail merges into the bottom end of the circular 47-mile Mary Towneley loop. Mind, body and conditions allowing, he’ll then take aim for Widdop, 92 miles from the start.

Over the top of the climb of Lantern Pike, the view opens up to reveal Greater Manchester spread out like a picnic rug below. “It’s a

shame,” Nick states, “half the people down there don’t seem to know these hills are here. Look at them, they’re right on Manchester’s doorstep and they’re absolutely spectacular.”

Onwards and repeatedly upwards, the trail undulates through League of Gentleman country and then the hills above

the Manchester satellite towns of Stalybridge, Mossley and

Uppermill. At Diggle, Nick briefly goes off course and ends up by the canal in the bottom of the valley. Although this means a climb to get back on route, he appreciates the

extended road interlude. “There’s been lots of

climbing but my legs are fine,” he notes, “It’s my arms

and hands that ache most.”Soon he’s back on the dirt

again and the trail clambers up to near Bleak Hey Nook, a fitting place name if ever there was one. The sky’s briefly clouded over, an abandoned farmhouse sits on the hillside and the treeless, heather-carpeted moors stretch for miles in front of us. Nick presses on around the reservoirs that litter the next section before dropping under the high viaduct of the M62 trans-Pennine motorway. Down at the side of Hollingworth Lake, the trail briefly touches base with civilisation while pleasure boaters mess around in the sun on its waters.

Going loopyBy the time we meet again high above the ribbon development along Calderdale, we are on the Mary Towneley loop — named after an aristocratic equestrian who campaigned for the establishment of the Pennine Bridleway. Sections of this are old packhorse trails, which are steep and surfaced with a chain of foot-square slabs of rock. Although they offer a hard surface over often-boggy ground, they’re like monster cobbles. The bumps and gaps kill your rhythm, and without the luxury of mountain bike suspension make going downhill less preferable than climbing.

“I’ve been descending at 4mph in places,” complains Nick.

Although he won’t admit as much, I sense Nick is tired and considering jacking in it. He’s

“Onwards and upwards, the trail undulates through League of Gentleman country”

WE were originally inspired to put Nick up to this challenge after recalling a record attempt on the Pennine Way by Barry Davies in 1974. Heading from south to north, the Ron Kitching-sponsored cyclo-cross professional covered the full 267 miles in a time of three days, three hours and 33 minutes.

Davies’s record-setting ride on the Pennine Way was inspiration for others at the time. As John Rawnsley — now better known as organiser of the Three Peaks cyclo-cross — remembers: “It really caught my imagination and I looked into all the details of it.“

Rawnsley successfully set a new record of two days, 23 hours and 27 minutes for the trail in 1976 having recce’d the route in full beforehand. “I was the first rider to do it inside three days,” he says. “I was riding from 4am to 11pm and just sleeping for a few hours each night in a car.”

Although Rawnsley went down in the Guinness Book of Records for his new figure, it was bettered two years later by fell runner turned cyclist John North. Clocking a time inside of two-and-a-half days, he only made a couple of overnight stops compared to Rawnsley and Davies’s

three. “He did it with a couple of riders helping him in relay,” explains Rawnsley. “They’d do the navigating and sprint ahead to open the gates for him.”

Since the popularisation of mountain biking, a modern day attempt on the Pennine Way itself would likely be very much frowned upon. Access issues have become a very sensitive subject in the hills and a high-profile ride on what is largely a walkers-only route could considerably damage relations between walkers and cyclists. Now that there is a bridleway open, maybe there will be a new phase of cyclists making Pennine record attempts...

ENDURANCE STARS OF THE SEVENTIES

The original Pennine record breakers

What’s my line? Craig improvises a route through the rocky trail

No stonewalling in this race against the clock

Widdop reservoir means the end is in sight

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92miles longstarting from Middleton Top

and ending at Widdop reservoir

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Which way?Start at the summit of Middleton Top and follow the blue Pennine Bridleway (PBW) signs. Route should take you along the High Peak trail passing close to Parsley Hay and Pomeroy, then north near Blackwell, Wormhill and Peak Forest. Hayfield is the first real village on the trail and from here the route skirts Manchester via Hadfield, Uppermill and Denshaw. Join the Mary Towneley circuit in an anti-clockwise direction to pass through Walsden and Mankinholes to finish at Widdop Reservoir. See: www.national nationaltrail.co.uk/penninebridleway.

RIDING | Pennine Bridleway Challenge

done 80-odd miles, and although that might not sound like too much on tarmac, it’s a very considerable distance when nearly all of it is off-road, continually up and down the strength-sapping rocky tracks of the ‘backbone of England’. Now on this top circuit of the trail, the procrastinating trajectory doesn’t help his motivation.

“They could have just brought it down the canal path in the valley, but instead they took us up there,” complains Nicks as he traces out a zig-zag line cut in the hillside across the valley behind him. “If it’s like this all the way to Widdop, I won’t get there ’til midnight.”

Still, Nick soldiers on and after obstructions from a cow, wayward sheep and a collapsed drystone wall on the trail, the bridleway opens up onto a fast road descent. A smooth, grit-surfaced path then leads him beneath a ridge topped with the Crimean War memorial of Stoodley Pike. Given enough time, it is well worth clambering up to for its spectacular panoramas. But Nick has to push on. The evening sun that has bathed the area in

gorgeous light is inching ever closer towards the horizon.

A mile or two later, the bridle-way drops down into the valley on a dirt track that hairpins back and forth, Alp d’Huez style. Here it is met by the walker’s Pennine Way, which cuts out the switch-backs by plummeting straight down the hillside. Across the canal at the bottom to where my car is parked, Nick briefly ponders his options. He’s tired, time’s pushing on, he’s got a busy week ahead of him and it’s essentially uphill all the way to Widdop. “Well, I can’t stop now can I?” he concludes as he rolls away for the very final leg of the never-ending journey.

Last leg(s)Once parked up outside the Packhouse Inn high on the moors, I again ride back towards Nick along the bridleway. The fading light makes for a decidedly creepy feel on this barren, windswept plateau. Hepstonstall Moor does not look like the sort of place you want to be stranded in the dark. There’s no sign of Nick and my mobile phone has no reception. The opening scenes of naff Werewolf movies come to

mind and I seriously consider if I’ve pushed him too far all for the sake of a magazine article.

Suddenly he emerges in a cloud of dust, with a big grin opening across his face. Of course he hasn’t flaked out; he’s Nick Craig, the evergreen endurance specialist whose legs can last longer than the battery in his GPS unit. He went off track, he explains, but everything is fine. Now, there are only three miles to go to Widdop and the only question is whether he can stay inside 12 hours. At the mere mention of this approaching threshold, Nick presses harder on the pedals.

Although Nick is teased into premature celebration as we ride across the dam wall at Gorple Reservoir, he reaches the true finish of the ride just a handful of minutes later when we arrive at the eastern corner of another reservoir at Widdop. This is as far north as you can currently ride on the Pennine Bridleway.

The time is just before 8pm when I stop the clock. All breaks, punctures, photo-ops and diversions included, he’s been out on the trail for 11 hours 58 minutes and seven seconds. What’s more, there’s still daylight in the sky. It must be dinnertime.

“The fading light makes for a decidedly creepy feel on this barren, windswept plateau”

Stubborn as a mule: Nick refuses to be defeated by the jarring packhorse trails

Skimming over a boundary path

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Pennine Bridleway Challenge

Pennine Bridleway Challenge92 MILES (148KM)

Which way?Start at the summit of Middleton Top and follow the blue Pennine

take you along the High Peak trail

Wormhill and Peak Forest. Hayfield is the first

skirts Manchester via Hadfield, Uppermill and

anti-clockwise direction to pass through Walsden and Mankinholes to finish at Widdop Reservoir. See: www.national

Next weekI6-page sportive special: mass-participation

rides are cycling’s fastest growing sector — get prepared with our invaluable guide.

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MapDISTANCE 92 miles (148km)

MAIN CLIMB South Head, Lantern Pike, Widdop Moor

TOTAL CLIMB 3,348m

ACHTUNG! The trail traverses remote moorland not always serviced by mobile phone reception. Carry plenty of spares, food and warm clothing. Let someone else know your plans.

SKILL LEVEL GOOD BETTER BEST

AVE TIMES 3 days 2 days 12hrsCW have teamed up with digital mapping specialist Memory-Map so now all our routes are planned using Memory-Map software and Ordnance Survey maps. With Memory-Map software you can program your own routes into a GPS to keep you on the right track and then review where you’ve actually been on your return. It will also give you your performance statistics such as distance covered, speed profile, total ascent and descent etc. For more information and to download a FREE 30 day trial, visit www.memory-map.co.uk or phone 0870 743 0130.

THE RIDE YOUR POCKET ROUTEFINDER

START

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FINISH

3,348metres of climbing