Warleggan to Lydford – 31 miles
Leaving the highest campsite in Cornwall (at least it felt that way) the next morning, we turned left and were immediately faced with a steep hill. I had begun to realise that there’s a warm up period at the beginning of every day, when limbs feel stiff and leaden, and everything else feels 30% heavier than usual. It usually lasts about half an hour. So to be presented with a hill within seconds of leaving the campsite was a cruel start to the day. I was soon panting and wiping drops of sweat from my eyebrows.
Cresting the hill we heard a loud twang and Jools called a halt. One of his spokes had gone. Spokes are like the pillars of a temple: knock one out and the whole edifice is liable to crumble. Jools, as usual, was calm and sanguine. ‘It’ll be ok,’ he said. ‘There are plenty more.’
When we reached the village of Warleggan, our navigation app, Komoot, wanted to send us down a damp and muddy bridleway that plunged into the valley. We asked a man who was working outside his house for directions and he said there was a better path about fifty yards down the road, better only because it was marginally shallower, and the mud was marginally less deep. ‘It’s only a couple of hundred yards and then you’ll reach the road below,’ he said.
The path was much longer than we’d been lead to believe and the descent was torture, our arms straining to hold the heavy bikes and guide them over rocks and tree roots whilst trying to avoid slipping down the slope. It was like a heavy half-hour workout in the gym. At the bottom I tried to have a drink but couldn’t lift my water bottle to my lips, so rinsed were my arms muscles by the effort.
We cycled through the nearby village of St Neot, then hit our second major hill. I attacked, Tim attacked, we all attacked. I was soon in my lowest possible gear, which means that my bike was advancing at walking pace. Jools held back on his ebike, out of respect and sympathy. Phil was having trouble with Henry, his hernia. Tim wooshed past me like a slow breeze. My lungs felt like they were about to burst. And that was only hill number two.
Earlier, at breakfast, Jools brought up our trajectory on Komoot and looked at the elevation profile. It resembled the mouth of a shark – jagged and forbidding. And so it proved, with one hill after another coming at us like Sauron’s army.
Recovering on the brow of one of those hills we met a lone cyclist coming the other way. He was riding from his home in Birmingham to his caravan in Padstow, where his wife was waiting for him. ‘She’s already put the beers on ice,’ he said, rolling the syllables around his mouth the Brummie way.
He told us how he’d once ridden 240 miles from Birmingham to Lands End…in one day! He belonged to that incomprehensible species of long distance road pedallers, who exist on another stratum of the cycling hierarchy to us 50-mile-a -day-beer-and-fag types. He’d done LEJOG in little more than a week and had found Scotland ‘a bit dull.’ He spoke about hills in terms of percentages – ‘I did a 23 percenter then a 17 percenter’ etc etc. He advised us to ‘keep our fluids up and eat salted peanuts.’
A little further, we stopped at the car park near the Golitha Falls, where Jenny from the campsite had told us there was a nice little café and smokery. It was time for our morning coffee break and we needed fuel. The place looked inviting but turned out to be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. This kind of disappointment hit us so many times in Cornwall that it lead to a new stream of dark humour, as in ‘there’s a great sandwich shop in X but it’s probably closed on even days in August’ or ‘that place only opens at noon when it’s raining’ etc etc.
On we pedalled, dreaming of coffee and croissants. Or even factory-made blueberry muffin. We scaled the heights of Caradon Hill, near the hamlet of Crows Nest, and that’s what it felt like. The views were epic, widescreen. The sweat and panting almost worth it.
Down in the village of Pensilva a white car, impatient no doubt at our casual pace, veered dangerously close to us as he passed and almost hit a little blue car coming the other way. The woman in the blue car bawled a torrent of expletives and then stopped Jools, who was bringing up the rear of our ‘peloton’ to apologise. ‘That wasn’t meant for you,’ she said. ‘it was meant for that !*&$£! In the car.’
There’s a species of car driver who can’t stand cyclists cramping their style. 90% of them are men. You can just feel them huffing and puffing behind you, and then, when they’re ‘released’, their engines let out a roar of rage and frustration. We’ve come across many of these speed junkies on the trip. But most people are more understanding and give you the space you need.
We’d spent a long session the previous evening re-routing our journey to avoid a monster hill after the village of Horsebridge, yet for some inexplicable reason, we found ourselves in that very place, crossing the old bridge that spans the Tamar, where we were greeted by the heavenly sight of the The Royal Inn. Even the though the kitchen was closed, the landlord rustled up a quartet of weighty ham and cheese sandwiches and we sat there on the terrace eating and drinking with huge relief.
We got chatting to the former landlord, an ex-seaman, who was watering his plants nearby. He had run the establishment for twenty years and told us with a cheeky grin that we were too old to be cycling in this weather. The code for the pub Wifi was GrumpyLandlord20. ‘That’s me,’ he said.
He told us about his times in the South Pacific, how you could buy a lobster in Tonga for nothing at all and, if you were lucky, a 20-stone Tongan woman thrown in for good measure. Then he went into the pub kitchen and showed us a box of lobster freshly delivered from St Ives.
It was 2.30pm, and despite cycling for most of the day and being in state of general exhaustion, we had only covered 21 of the 52 miles we had planned. Dark thoughts began to surface, of hiring a van to drive us up onto Dartmoor, which would give us a straight run to the campsite we’d booked in Clifford Bridge. ‘What does everybody feel about cheating, ‘ asked Jools. ‘Why break the habit of a lifetime,’ Phil responded.
In the end our honour was saved by a phone call to the Fox and Hounds near Lydford, where the landlady told us that she had plenty of space in her campsite and we were very welcome. Lydford was a blessed 12 miles away, so the best laid plans were laid to one side and we decided that flexibility and compromise were called for, both in terms of plans and limbs. When Jools announced the change of plan to Tim, who was talking on his phone to his girlfriend Magdalena, Tim gave him a big thank-you hug.
The climb up from Horsebridge was, as predicted, horrendous, but the thought of an imminent pint drove us upwards and after a more hills and dales we found ourselves on the Granite Way, skirting the edge of Dartmoor with the sun setting on our left. The skies were vast and the softening hills bathed in the special light of the golden hour. These are the moments when cycling is magic, when you feel like you’re flying high over the landscape, silent as a bird. We turned right and rolled up through a grove of tall trees, four abreast on the wide car-less road up to the A389 where the Fox and Hounds stood waiting like a saviour.
We were greeted by a very can-do landlady who soon had us booked in and served with drinks. That wondrous feeling of arrival, of wiping the sweat and frustration of the day clean from our mind, descended. We ate big plates of food, and I topped mine with a Strawberry Pavlova. No guilt. We’d earned it. A couple of old blokes stopped by to talk bikes and trips. One of them told us that he’d been a very keen cyclist until he’d broken his collar bone in a mountain biking accident. ‘I can’t ever ride again, but that’s life,’ he said with a sad, slightly envious expression.
The shortfall in our mileage entailed a reorganisation of the next few days. I calculated we could just about make it to Wellington in Somerset by the following evening, so I spent a frustrating hour trying to find a hotel. As the pub was emptying for the night, I managed to secure a family room in a Travel Lodge and crawled into my tent with the soothing knowledge that all would be well
Andy Morgan.
Komoot classic – there should be a term for it – at least you were cycling down that particular stream bed. Lovely pics.