Ben Connolly and his riding comrade Jack Denison took advantage of the easing of restrictions in the summer of 2020, to take to the hills and valleys of Shropshire. Ben describes the sense of freedom felt from throwing off the Covid shackles… BACK IN JULY 2020, when the pubs opened again, Jack and I decided restrictions had eased enough that riding bikes together all day, and sleeping in adjacent ditches would be as acceptable as it had ever been. We had months of catching up to do…and a long, easy bike ride was just the way to do it. We set off from sleepy Shrewsbury in the early morning. In less than half an hour we were surrounded by wilderness where we remained for most of the journey. We were both on 1990s mountain bikes – Jack on a specialised Rockhopper he’d saved from becoming scrap metal, and me on the Orange Clockwork passed down from my grandad. These were bikes with the character to compensate for any competency modern engineering could provide. After clocking up so many solo hours it was so good to ride with another person. We were able to share those random musings about how long it can take to settle into a ride and the liberation of cycling without a bedtime. Inconvenient gates become amusing when you get to watch someone else struggle with their bike on one shoulder and the front wheel plotting mischief by threatening to swing into the way. That joke did get old in due time. Beyond being a fantastic riding partner, incredible friend, and all-round top bloke, Jack has intricate knowledge of the Shropshire Hills. He could name each peak on the rotating horizon around our loop. Consistently green, the landscape bubbled
around us in luscious rolls and folds. These are the kind of hills which tempt you in with a cuddle – then squeeze all the air out of you. Being a natural introvert, the side to side, rather than face to face, conversations that stem from doing a low intensity activity such as cycling fit with me. This is in stark contrast to video calls, where silence can either mean connection issues, or worse, social awkwardness. We wore our anti-consumerism badges on our sleeves, claiming to be on the ideal adventure bikes, and liberated from all that marketing nonsense. We felt a phantom nostalgia on these bikes – as the only bikes we’d ridden in the nineties had had stabilisers. Their short evolutionary path from road bikes meant that they jumped into action uphill – that is until my non-existent gears or Jack’s small range of gears ran out. They felt most defiant on the downhills as we carefully had to pick out lines in their aggressive head down-bum up body position. One of the beauties of planning a multi-day route close to home is discovering new tracks, and we found some absolute corkers. Grass path cut into the land by the hooves of hundreds of sheep before us, at that fantastic gradient where you can just about risk not touching the brakes. That was until the relentless rattling got the better of my seat pack strap.
Thousands of miles of abrasion as well as saddlewagging and careless packing on commutes had worn it down. It has served me excellently and I should note that I had ignored the manufacturer’s fitting instructions. Forever the resourceful bike-packer, I bodged a replacement out of the guy line for my tarp and we were back on our way. Between our cake-filled brunch at Nipstone Rock, below the Stiperstones, and lunch in Bishops Castle was a single-track so single that it had a place on Top of the Pops. I took my eyes off the path and disaster struck. My front wheel slowly rolled up a rock, stopped, then rolled back and I fell off at negative speed. As I tried to put my foot down the true nature of the singleness hit me with a vengeance. The ground fell away into depths of bracken and my foot kept going into an unprompted cartwheel – perfectly timed for Jack, with a massive grin on his face, to snap me. Our trip was punctuated with food stops. Ludlow came at dinner time. We guzzled massive portions of chips and were hit with that full belly glow of laziness. There is a time and a place for this glow – Sunday afternoon, curled up on your sofa. We were at neither of those. A long queue in and out of Tesco for pudding and snacks allowed us to digest our way out of the food coma. In attempts at making my bike more off-road I’d fitted the widest tyre possible. Turns out it was actually wider than possible. Considerately. It waited until a climb after a speedy descent to make its move. It bulged, then flopped right out, leaving me beached on my rim. It struck again on the bouncy grass descent from Titterstone Clee, but the bulging was gradual enough
Arrivée152Summer2021
Fantastic gradient… Ben cautious in descent as ever
In the tight
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Dynamic duo… Jack, left, and Ben
