Singletrack Magazine Issue 121 : Editorial

Longer shortcuts. 

Words Chipps

Out in the car, running errands on a Saturday lunchtime… the Council tip, the shops, the cheese stall on the market… The usual. Wondering why it takes half an hour to go eight miles – and that’s even before the temporary traffic lights, house-moving lorries and overladen tractors slow things down.

I got to thinking that there was probably a more direct route between the places I needed to get to. Actually I know that there are more direct routes – the hills are full of trails, and I’ve probably ridden all of them. While the road takes the path of least resistance through the valleys, the packhorses, coaches and travellers of old had no such need (or time) to take the long and dull way, they went over the tops.

Everywhere you go in your car, or on the train, you can glimpse those tracks in the trees or briefly running next to the railway line, or dipping under the road and into the fields beyond. The knowledge of these back roads and nearly forgotten tracks is something we probably take for granted as mountain bikers. If we look at a road atlas, we can see in the blank bits of that map those other ways between the towns and behind the houses lining the roads. 

For instance, I know that you can go out the back of that pallet yard in the industrial estate to get to the canal, then you can cross a bridge and take a gravel track up to the top of the hill. From there, there’s a traffic (and walker, and usually even bike) free route over the tops to get to the next town, popping out beside the Co-op. Once you’re there, you can nip down a side street or two and take a cobbled climb and you’re into the woods, or up on to the moor, where a medieval trade route takes you over the tops to the towns beyond our valley, or back to where you started. 

It’s the same wherever you go. There is a maze formed of the back streets, snickets, parks and gravel that aren’t clear on any map. They are the routes that the young version of you grew up always knowing. There was no learning needed; those back alleys seemed hardwired into your schoolkid brain. Every day after school, or all day, every day of the holidays, you’d be out on your bike and subconsciously surveying every residential street, town park and cul-de-sac for riding potential and just to see where it went. 

As we age, that constant exploring takes more of a back seat and new roads and tracks take longer to reveal themselves unless we take time to see where a new track leads, but once another gap is filled in on our mental maps, our local knowledge is permanently improved.

These routes, far from the noise and stress of tarmac and cars, make up our own mental web of where we live, as we overlay our off-road knowledge onto the limited roadmaps that our more-inactive or less-adventurous friends and neighbours keep to. Ours is not a world of straight lines and steady gradients, but it is one of shortcuts that take a long time to do. They go to the same place, but the experience is never the same.  

Go on, take a new way home tonight and see where you end up.