[Closed] Return of the Macc-Fest. Sun Dec 16th. Pootle Content

*rasises eyebrows* this sounds interesting? I missed the magazine and so didn't see the route in the mag. Where is this ride that is better than charity lane? I would be most interested in cycling it.
thanks.

Well, I didn't pay too much attention to the mag route as it's my back yard but I remember a pic of someone on Cumberland Clough, we're meeting at the bottom of Cumberland Clough and NBT's first post talks about "[i]... finish with the best downhill[/i]".

well if it ends there and is offroad, just checking a map it can only be a sidetrack off to the right from danebower hollow, that track that runs away over the moor directly opposite the cat n fiddle. Looking on an OS map that sidetrack has small dashes and not big ones. OOh cheeky!

If you guys are going up to charity lane from the leathersmithy [i]AND[/i] going up to the cat n fiddle you will need your climbing legs on and then some. lol.

I'd really like to come but I'm not going to.

Jekkyl - that's certainly an option but I doubt it's the mag route.
They prob continued all the way on the track from the Cat until the road, did a right and went the 'legal' way into Cumberland Clough.

Either is good riding - preference depends on conditions.

we'll be staying mostly legal, and will be doing the full length of cimberland clough to finish - depending how the weather holds, we'll consider whether Three Shires Head is on the agenda.

Charity Lane is great but I think Cumberland Clough edges it 🙂

I agree that Cumberland edges charity lane.

Still not impressed. Been watching these pootle threads, mainly Pooks and have been working for every single one for a year. Then alast one comes that I am not working, it is fairley local to me and is infact my most regular route. Happy days I think. Then I check the calendar to find out I have been commandeered for a kids christmas party.....bugger.
Maybe next time, have fun everyone and enjoy what is a fantastic route.

We'll most likely be there.

Maybe next time,

There will be more thorlz, there will be more 😀

Been looking forward to this but I've been poorly all week so it looks like me and Onzadog won't be able to make it afterall 🙁

Boooooo! 😥

Now then Julian - i'm setting my stall out to go for this, early night and an early start to get there in time. I've never been there before and have often heard it's quite good.
Car parking may be interesting, will just have to trust the sat nav.
Look forward to seeing you & Jane, can't bring cakes but will bring Haribo.
- Marcus

can someone confirm that the area highlighted in red is the car park we are meeting at?

thanks

[IMG] [/IMG]

Yes.

Healthy meal, no booze, early night.
So...
Have I woken up in the peak of physical fitness ready to pootle hard?
Or am I full of snot with achey knees?

You're going to have to try to have fun without me, people.

Have a good one. Weather looks good. 🙂

Expecting to start +1 plus mince pie flapjacks...

Wonderful ride today Jules -thanks for guiding us around. Really nice trails up there, and I think we even saw the sun at one point!

What route did you do? I wanted to do this but am just getting over man flu, I did go out on my own but didn't see any of you.

100
Also, will there be a video pook?

Thanks for today Julian. Great ride and company as always!! Nice to do some new trails. Thanks for the lend of the Flat pedals Mr Orange rider! 😀

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Next time I will set my alarm, we weren't going to make it in time so we went and did something rad instead.

[url= http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8504/8278214940_225b7a7c1f_z.jp g" target="_blank">http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8504/8278214940_225b7a7c1f_z.jp g"/> [/img][/url]
[url= http://www.flickr.com/photos/richseipp/8278214940/ ]Wyedale[/url] by [url= http://www.flickr.com/people/richseipp/ ]RichSeipp[/url], on Flickr

Great manageable size. Popa did you forget your shoes this time? 😆

Many many thanks for the Pootle today everyone, esp. from the tortoise 🙂

The route rode very well considering amount of rain we've been having.

Cheers and Merry Xmas!!
Paul

[url= http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8355/8277390713_a44c7f081b_b.jp g" target="_blank">http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8355/8277390713_a44c7f081b_b.jp g"/> [/img][/url]
[url= http://www.flickr.com/photos/clarkpm4242/8277390713/ ]Pootlers[/url] by [url= http://www.flickr.com/people/clarkpm4242/ ]clarkpm4242[/url], on Flickr

well, I had a great day out, cheers all for coming. am currently enjoying the Rocky Horror Picture Show while Mrs NBT gets showered

Nice photo Paul. That's us just before we bumped into some mxers, who were in for a surprise, as a ranger was on the same track and they were illegally riding!

Great fun everyone. No rain, plenty of steep climbs, rocky descents and banter 🙂

Glad you all had fun round here. Its nice to ride it from the front door and a few great pubs on the return leg home too

What was the actual route you took then?

marsdenman - there won't be a video as I forgot my camera! I also refused to take any photos because once (just once) I wanted to just ride; it didn't help me like, as instead of stopping to film I stopped to either fall off or have a rest!

We bumped into mx'ers yesterday. It made me rerealise that the Peaks should also be theirs (ot) but they were on legal stuff.

Thanks Jules for the ride today. It was good to catch up/meet everyone. I can tell it was a good one as I've sat in front of the telly all night nodding off. Happy tired is the best tired.

Happy Days!

What was your route in the end, just to be nosey

13.6 miles, 2300ft climbed.

At a guess - Right out of Clough House carpark - Left up steep tarmac to Standing stone carpark - follow fire road on the left to the bottom - left through the gate and round the bottom of the Res to The Leather Smithy - keep left up the hill and take the metal gate on the left - fire road climb to tarmac - right up steep climb to track on the right, climb and then descend Charity Lane, left at the bottom, left at the bottom again, left at junction and follow to T junction, Turn right and climb to main road, keep right at junction and follow to Cat & Fiddle pub, follow track across Danebower Low to road, right and follow tarmac looking for a 'no car/motorbike' sign on the right, take that track and descend to gate, straight through and follow to another, straight on, through ford to gate and the back into carpark.

Could have and might well have done the additional Quarry > 3 Shires loop and hen climbed back to the no vehicle sign

Thats a pretty good night ride, but we start from a pub and finish with some nice forest ST in place of the first fire road descent

are you including that mental rock strewn downhill in front of the chapel there carlos. always gives me the fear.

that's the route carlos,

we did the drop to 3 shires head as well..

Really enjoyed it, I've not done the climb to the cat and fiddle for years, and its always nice to sometimes do stuff you know in reverse!
Not sure we'd have managed it as a night ride.. there were 19 of us and it took about 4 hours!!

As ever, nice to see some familiar faces and I hope the lads from Lancashire got back through border control/quarantine ok.

hora - Member

We bumped into mx'ers yesterday. It made me rerealise that the Peaks should also be theirs (ot) but they were on legal stuff.

Perhaps it's time for you to join their ranks? Wouldn't it combine your love of exhaust fumes and your penchant for buying and selling things with two wheels into one cataclysmic cluster duck of a hobby? 😉

as carlos says - thats a cracking route at night 😉

i was out too, i did see you guys as i was just descending bottom o oven as you all came down chairty.....but ive had serious serious man flu and just wanted to stay warm and blast on

i did a very similar route to be honest but went further afield when i got up the c&f (for some cheekiness excellent cheekyness, as always ;))

mx'ers on 3 shires head too when i got there 🙁 proper messed up the start of it after coming in from the field side, but its all rocky and good after that as always, ive never actually heard/nor seen them go in from this side before, but clearly they have found it now and are using it in the worst weather going, its un-rideable the very fist section due to bog, which has never really been there before in the years ive done it

all in all it wasnt actually to boggy and wet neither

Ah yes, the mxers where given a 'red card' from the ranger and were made to turn back, so they didn't make it to the field (thank goodness), which was slippery as a slippery thing.

I've ridden around that area for over 13 years and it's the first time I've seem motor crossers around - shame.

bunnyhop - do you mean you've never seen them on the field side of 3 shires in 13 years or any of the descents/climbs into 3 shires? cos if so i see them mostly eveytime i go there on a sunday if im in that area, ive never seen them on that field descent one before, but they are ALWAYS on the 2 long mains climbs/descents

i would say this was about 1pm ish or something like that and i think there were 3 of them, i'd hazard a guess to say they climbed up to the gate from the bridge and instead of going up through the field they just section that bit and turn around and descend what they have just rode up and back down to the bridge (so not climbing out into the field)...

what time did they get done by the ranger then? they have knackered the bit by the gate near the fields, bit gutting, its only a little section, but its still got another 5 months of mud and wet to go, i;ve not seen any damage like that in any previous winter, so they must have only started using that section just recently

i crossed a few walkers and they had to skim around the bog, didnt look happy at all, i even got off to go round it to (first time ever!)

we saw them at about 1. I had a little 'chat' with them

well in that case id say that i got there just before you guys then, they were ( as they always are) going up and down, up and down, up and down the sections (so they had done it at least once before you even got there), when i saw them descending it , there certainly were no rangers about, nor did they look like they had been told off to get off the area....dont think ive ever seen a ranger down there mind, glad he give em a telling off though, motorised engines on that sort of terrain do it no good at all, i bet the farmer would be fuming if they went through his field too (hes a reet grumpy barsteward even with walkers/cyclists)

[quote=Oscillate Wildly ]well in that case id say that i got there just before you guys then

You must have been the random who went through our group at the quarry at the end of danebower hollow then?

[quote=Oscillate Wildly ]
i crossed a few walkers and they had to skim around the bog, didnt look happy at all, i even got off to go round it to (first time ever!)

One of our lads tried to ride it - was it Graham? Whoever it was went hub deep and straight over the bars 😆

Sound like my regular route

My only differance are that I take the singletrack through the forest, and at 3 shires head I do a loop, going over the bridge and climbing up the right/east side. Before looping around Knotbury farm and come back to 3 shires down the cheeky path from the west (directly inline with the bridge). Then continue up Cut thorn as you did.

Fantastic area and a great route.

I was under the impression that both track across the river were entirely legal for all users

we saw them at about 1. I had a little 'chat' with them

[i]Listen here, I am the Assistant-Keeper of The Peaks and I know when I am right. A footpath is mine to ride when I like but no one else can discuss its general location even if it is indicated on a OS map. [/i]

😆 8)

nob

Nbt,

I know that the track up to around Cut Thorn is legal, as is the track round Turn edge is.

The one I am unsure of, is the path that comes from East, from the T junction down the rocky path to the metal gate at 3 shires. GR SK012686 to SK009685.

I can't tell if the map marks it as a "path" or a "footpath"

If anyone knows, please do tell

OS map shows it as a footpath along a walled lane. Legally then it's a footpath, but as the OS maps says, what shows in the map is not definitive. I know I've followed a published route down it before now, albeit several years ago. Personally speaking, the fact that it's a walled lane tells me it should be a bridleway as it use to be used by carts

nob

My recollection is that it depends where you join it. I think it is all 'legal' from SK014683 but part fp from SK015688.

The latter is the better riding.

Cheers Nbt,

and Higgo

podge loves you too hora :op

Podge loves NO ONE. Hes a killer Cyborg created in a Sheffield factory just before they were closed down.

AFAIK - all those descents/climbs to the bridge are all legal for mtber's? ive done them for years, i cant see how one would be and not the other, but i could be wrong of course! theres a bit around the back of the quarry thats a FP so im told, that eventually leads to the descent parallel to the bridge, whether or not theres a legal way to get to that descent i dont know, but the descent itself is legal.

NBT - ahhhhh yeah! there was only a group of 5 or so of you? i assumed it wasnt the pootle as id seen loads of you before?? i would have stopped but i just thought it was a random group of guys out lol, i did say hi mind! where were the rest of the pootlers then? cos they werent down 3 shires and thats where i went next?

and NBT yep sounds like the same little section, i could well imagine going otb there, it full of rocks pointing upwards hidden in the bog now lol

infact thorlz i know where ya mean - if its any consolation i didnt know it was a f/p if it is, ive done that lots of times, not at this time of year mind as that little section is horrible in the winter getting to the descent parellel to the bridge

cleaning that section that runs down to the bridge (the parallel) is pretty good, its by far the techiest of the descents in 3 shires! great rocky steep droppy fun!

higgo - Member
My recollection is that it depends where you join it. I think it is all 'legal' from SK014683 but part fp from SK015688.

The latter is the better riding.

forget everything ive just said - higgo is right, it is legal from his first SK014683 and the second one SK015688 IS some footpath, remember seeing a lad up there once on the SK015688 who'd had a bollocking off some walkers for being on it lol, i missed them that time though....i wouldnt worry about that, its a pretty safe route, its not overly cheeky i dont find, and the ground/terrain isnt the sort that would get demolished by bikes anyways, ie its quite open widish tracks not muddy as such

Oscillate Wildly - Member

bunnyhop - do you mean you've never seen them on the field side of 3 shires in 13 years or any of the descents/climbs into 3 shires?

Was saying to pook, that the farmer wouldn't be too pleased with the mxers, as he had young cattle in the field.

They did squeeze past all of us when we were climbing out, up the sandy rocky path, which was unnerving because of the steep drop onto the left hand side. I don't suppose they understand how difficult riding up stuff like that is without horse power.

that farmer is a reet grumpy barsteward, make no mistake if he'd have seen them he would have gone MENTAL

yeah they do that all the time, often just blast up past me on the way up flicking big **** off rocks into your shins/bikes....

though i must say sometimes ive stopped and chatted and they've let me nail the climb to stop me losing momentum, and being quite nice/friendly.. you get used to it, i do genuinely see them most times i go so thats nothing new, just doing that other bit IS new though so maybe they will be told to stay off that from now on (though i doubt they will)

if walkers think mtb'ers have no respect for land/weather/erosion/trashing the countryside then god knows what they must think of these mx'ers, seriously they have chewed up parts of 3 shires so badly in the last 4-5 years they have had to resurface it in places (i must say though some times the erosion they caused was beneficial on the rocky stuff though lol, just not on the muddy/boggy bits, cant have it all ways though i guess)

I feel I should elaborate on my 'chat'. It was quite interesting really and went some way to explain their motivation.

It was, firstly, all very amicable.

I rode alongside them and they were all quite friendly - they'd stopped to let us all through so fair play to them. I figured that as they'd done us a favour, I'd do the same and warned them that the walker up the field ahead was a ranger and he'd probably turn them round as I thought they were on a bridleway. For the record, I wasn't having a go - just advising them that if they didn't want grief they'd probably best not go up the way they were going.

Rider one turned to his mate and asked quite honestly if it was a legal trail they were on, and he looked at his map and (unconvincingly) said it was. His justification being that there were no signs at the bottom saying otherwise.

I didn't know, so said as much - just saying I was letting them know there was a ranger ahead and from what I knew, it was a bridleway.

He checked his map again and said "yeah it is legal on this map" so fair play to him; if he wasn't playing dumb, the information he had showed that it was a legal right of way. As I say, I think he knew he was taking the michael - but there you go.

As bunnyhop says, the field was full of cattle and was just a grassy bog, so I don't see how much fun they'd have had going up it anyway. I don't think they made it that far though.

After that we all had a brief chat about how the rights of MXers were being entirely stripped and how they will soon have nowhere to go. One of them quite fairly suggested they "they'll be after you next". My worry is that he is right, and they will. He then suggested that back in the day all the paths round that way were dug in for carts and that that had been forgotten when the walkers became the big players in countryside access. Fair comment. We all agreed that Scotland has it right.

As I say, all very amicable. They wished us all a good ride, and waved us on our way.

They did come through our group a bit later looking rather hacked off "Did he get you?" I asked. "Yep" came the reply.

NBT is correct. The rocky section from the east effectively parallel with the bridge is marked as footpath on the OS maps. The track from Brook Farm (SK014683 I assume - don't have an OS map with me at the moment) is bridleway I think (certainly legal for bikes) until it crosses the stream and reaches the rocky parallel track. In effect there is a dead-end legal route from Brook Farm until it reaches the footpath (rocky track).

The only explanation for this can be the vagaries of the rights of way mapping exercise that highway authorities were required to carry out under the National Parks and Access of the Countryside Act 1949.

The rocky track and its continuation to SK015688 is in Derbyshire whereas the track down from Brook Farm is in Staffordshire (I think). Basically the Staffordshire ROW team recorded their track as bridleway whereas Derbyshire recorded the full length of the track/path from the bridge to SK015688 as footpath. The section from the junction with the Brook Farm bridleway to SK015688 may genuinely be footpath and Derbyshire probably just recorded the full linear route as footpath.

However, I think the rocky track almost certainly was a bridleway and has been incorrectly recorded by Derbyshire. There would have been absolutely no reason to have a dead-end bridleway from Brook House. There would have been no need to build a bridge over the river at 3 shires for pedestrians and I assume it is a packhorse bridge. Historically the horse route would most likely have been down the sandy descent, across the bridge and along the rocky track.

In any event it's a cracking piece of trail. The descent from Brook House wasnt't too bad yesterday even after some MXers had been up it.

We must have left 3 Shires just before you arrived as we met 4 MXers as we rode the track south from the bridge to do the Brook House loop. We waved them through and they seemed friendly. I guess we were watching the trials riders/riding the extra loop when you came through.

Oh and cheers Jules for not saving me some cake. 🙂 I was absolutely spent by the time we met you from trying to keep up with my younger, ex-Marine, firefighter, xc racing champion brother in law on his super lightweight 29er. I had to walk all the way up Quiet Lane. 🙁

that farmer is a reet grumpy barsteward

But.... his wife is lovely.
I was on a group ride once and she was trying (and failing) to move some particularly awkward cattle about. We stopped and helped her by stopping where she asked us too and sort of funnelling the cattle in the right direction. She was a pleasure to help; very polite, thankful and cheery.

Thought you were going to say that you would hit it, lol

Pook - they do seem nice guys It's the same guys I see every week, I see themway further over on the buxton route, It's part of their white peak loop, same guys every Sunday...you were right they are telling you porkys, they know they are not suppose be on there, as you climb back out the long sandy climb towards a54 when you get to the gate to get to the road, there's a big red and white lollipop sign saying no motorized vehicles.......they smoothed it out a few years back to try and stop mxers having any need to go down it, as I said it was a brilliant descent about 3 years back and wayyyyyyyyyyyy more rocky, with nice drops on it to, but it became inaccessible to walkers due to the amount of damage the mxers had done....I understand they are just like us and want to ride where they enjoy, but the fact is motorized vehicles like that will damage it alot more than a push bike and walkers...

I don't think a lot of them ride with number plates on show anyways , so not sure how theyd get done...they will be back next week I'm.sure

Interesting paulmc

It does seem strange that all 4 descents arent the same class in terms of accessx I certainly use them as the same, the techy rocky one is the best one for sure, I love the others personally.as climbs but It's,all good you can link in loads of riding from 3 shires, great place!