my name is mwd

Ever since I got the Ulysses, I’ve been looking for an opportunity to do some first time off road riding, but the part of England I reside in is unfortunately not really an ideal place for this. There’s not really any unallocated land, and since the law regarding the use of “green lanes” changed a few years ago, there’s hardly anywhere around here at all. I thought I was going to have to wait until I could take a trip to Wales or Scotland on the bike.

However, I did some research (yes, apparently that time spent at University was good for something). I went to Borders and ploughed through all the regional OS maps looking for interesting byways – byways are still legal for vehicles. There’s very few, but I found some out at King’s Forest near Thetford that looked like they might provide at least a mile or two of trail riding. And given East Anglia is noted for its lack of being crenelated, I didn’t expect the terrain to be too difficult for a total novice like me.

So today Laura indulged me, and we went out on the Uly in search of some adventure. Unfortunately, although we found some trails accessible, it wasn’t all plain sailing. But before that, here’s some action pictures, taken by Laura:

And more distant, but with dramatic sky:

So, yes, we found trails, but note the ground. It may not be immediately obvious, but the trails here were covered in a few inches of sand, and even though my bike’s designed for off-road use, it’s not cut out for sand. The front of the bike just swims, and as noted before, I’m a novice, so we had to cut short our adventures. Driving through sand is quite difficult! We did see one better equipped person whizz by on a light scrambler with better tyres, so at least my idea that you can ride bikes out there was valid. Unfortunately you need something more dedicated to off roading to cope with the sand. The reason Laura managed to take the above pictures is that she kindly opted to walk out of the sand sections once we’d hit them whilst I nursed the bike out (we hadn’t got very far in to them).

There were some other trails, but they were inaccessible. So it’s back to the OS maps for me. Any location suggestions gratefully received!

However, we had a fun day, and we did manage a nice pub lunch in Icklingham at the Red Lion. We arrived after a large party, so we were urged to order quickly, but this was made a very easy task by pretty much everything on the menu looking great. Certainly our sample bore this out. We also went for a walk at Ickworth, and found some very small country lanes in our efforts to get back avoiding the A14, which was fun.