8 minute read
In the tight embrace of Salopian slopes
by Audax UK
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…
In the tight
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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
Fantastic gradient… Ben cautious in descent as ever
WORDS & PICTURES BEN CONNOLLY
embrace
OF SALOPIAN SLOPES
that I could safely slow down to see what was up. By some mystical magic the inner tube remained intact both times.
Throwing caution to the strong winds I rolled away from my pit stop and popped off the first mound of earth, only for my bodged seat pack to slip and slam the handbrake on for a massive skid. Fortunately, it was only my pride that took a beating as I wobbled to a stop. I threaded the string through some more loops until it was right tight and proceeded with my tail and seatpack between my legs.
Unfortunately, our hopes of camping right on the hilltop were shattered by the howling hoolie and hilly slope to lie on. We used this vantage point to scope out where would be a better place. For some reason both of us saw and ignored the massive barn clearly used for storing grain, therefore ideal shelter, and decided just off the path the other side of those trees would do.
Our day felt complete as the sun faded away. A company of bats provided the evening entertainment, swooping and gliding feet away from our socially distant tarp set-ups. Their species may have triggered all this muddle, but humans made it bad and can’t do nearly as cool tricks.
We both “remembered” what it was like to sleep outside. The wind through the trees was loud and disruptive. The ground was bumpy. It was not dark for long enough. Some time before six the gaps in our naps overlapped enough and we decided to call it a day.
A symbol of our go-slow and enjoy it attitudes was the meths stove and kit for proper coffee. It took several lighting failures to eventually erect a windshield out of my groundsheet to brew up. It is a well-known fact that things taste better outdoors.
However, caffeine highs are not literal and we were still left with the problem of getting up a hill. As the gradient flicked up, my thumbs would instinctively twitch to shift down a gear before I remembered that this bike didn’t have any. I was riding single speed. My options were to mash at an unsustainable effort exploding my lungs, carve wiggles to ease the gradient, grind a ridiculously low cadence which effectively reduced it to hundreds of mini hill starts and a battle to balance at low speed, or walk. All these methods were used to exhaustion on the 3,800m of climbing. Nearing that tired point I would roar with frustration to kick some fire into the flagging legs as I grabbed the bike by the horns and wrestled it up. My lips morphed into the shapes of all the vowels as if I was warming up for public speaking, just with more of a gurn. Riding single speed with people who are geared can lead to an unbalance in pacing, but I always needed rest after these intense efforts which levelled us. This was a ride to enjoy being out rather than smash any speed records after all. The catchphrase of the Rough Stuff Fellowship is: “Never go for a walk without your bike” but the less iconic “Never go for a ride without your walk” is equally true of single speed or under-geared bikes. I enjoy the occasional hike-a-bike. Walking makes the ride feel wilder and justifiably difficult. In contradiction to that, the attitude of walking removes any notion of urgency so keeps everything more about the experience.
One of the things I didn’t realise I’d missed was the opportunity to be able to just talk rubbish. For me anyway, most virtual communication is to the point, discussing a specific subject matter. I think the face-focus of video calls insist they be direct. Equally the notification nature of electronic messaging makes talking nonsense feel like a waste of time. Lots of conversation between Jack and I was simply mindless chatter, and that is valid, never daft.
As we took a path from the final summit, the terrain cliff faced. Jack exclaimed: “That’s brave,” as I edged down the near vertical rocks at the bite point of my brakes, somehow avoiding the ungracious leapfrog which would have resulted in an untimely greeting with the man on the bench at a corner who was completely unphased by the precarious situation.
It was early afternoon when we rolled back to Jack’s. Going on trips like this is similar to blue sky thinking. You set out with little purpose but an open mind, then end up with answers you couldn’t have imagined. I’d set out to get my fix of the hills but gained so much in openness and human connection. It reinforced the messages I hear, then the masculinity in me tries to ignore. Talk about my feelings. Discuss mental health. Dismantle the stigma. Friends listen.
