76km Woods and Brooks
Overview
This is a very lovely ride around many of the large country estates which proliferated on London’s northern border. The route can be ridden as a ‘gravel’ blast ridding yourself of city blues, or as a ‘take your time and listen to the birdsong, enjoy the peace of the woods and brook’. It’s a ride that allows you to breathe in the plentiful clean and fresh air of the wide spaces of North London and rural Hertfordshire. There are impossibly narrow country lanes, tracks which are sometimes muddy, sometimes bone shaking hard, pretty country villages and a whole new set adventures for the London rider who wishes to go beyond their city boundary.
Ride practicalities
START/FINISH: Hadley Wood DISTANCE: 76km. TOTAL ASCENT: 711m TERRAIN AND SURFACES: Quiet back roads and earthen tracks, which may be muddy after heavy rain. MAINLINE TRAIN SERVICES: Hadley Wood - services to Moorgate and Old Street and beyond RECOMMENDED FOOD AND DRINK STOPS: Brooman’s Park, Tealicious, Aldenham; The Round Bush LINKS TO OTHER RIDES: Hills of the North, Rejoice!
Ride notes
Unless you knew otherwise as you climb up from Hadley Wood station, towards the M25 and London’s northern boundary, you’d be surprised that you were still in Greater London. You are surrounded by the green of trees and fields and you ride along lanes edged with cow parsley and other flowers.
You ride also through the lands of great estates - some like Wrotham Park, a huge Palladian mansion built for Admiral Byng in 1754 are still in the hands of his descendants, whilst others such as Dyrham Park at the end of the ride, have been turned into a country park and golf course.
After a few kilometres of uphill riding, you pass under the M25 through a curious tunnel and arrive at a bank up which you may have to push your bike to reach Wash Lane. Obviously the contractors failed to join two old roads as they passed under the new motorway and no one thought to check up on them and ensure that they were properly linked. No matter, the border between London and Hertfordshire is like a national border; sometimes you have to pass through a no-mans land between the two.
Many of the lanes along this route have evocative names from a long-ago past; Wash Lane and Swanland Road are the first two. However their current setting is much more modern, in that they run between the A1M, and a field full of solar panels. It’s a noisy five kilometres and will encourage you to pump the blood by riding as fast as you are able and prepare for the tracks ahead.
After passing the Queen Mother’s Hospital for Small Animals, the route continues on country roads surrounded by fields until, after crossing the A1M, you are confronted by the pretty rural setting of the 700 year old church of North Mymms. Behind it is the second huge estate of this ride, that of North Mymms Park. Unless you are riding to be part of a wedding, you’ll not be granted access, so ride on, for the off-road fun is about to begin.
Taking a superb 4km track through woods and past fields, you dip down back to the A1M, then climb beside fields and ancient hedges into North Mymms woods. After a couple of hundred metres of road, you cross over the M25, and continue on delightful earthen tracks through fields. On the right of you is Salisbury Hall and the De Haviland Aircraft Museum where the Mosquito plane and the Mallard, the world’s fastest steam train were developed. After the climb, there is superb fast downhill on a lumpy track which takes you to the Watford and Arsenal football clubs’ training grounds. You are unlikely to see much action as both have high hedges to stop prying eyes of scouts who may wish to learn the tactics for next Saturday’s game.
The next section of riding is a relatively flat pedal through quintessential English parkland on earthy tracks as you ride around Napsbury Park, which was until 1998 a Mental Health Institution.
The next track beside the River Ver, leads into Bricket Wood, locally renowned for its bluebells. Using a series of estate roads through Meriden and tracks around Ickenham, you skirt North Watford and arrive back into typical southern English countryside of gently rolling lands of woods and fields. It is hard to understand how anything so timeless and unspoilt can exist between two of Britain’s busiest motorways, the M1 and M25.
The route skirts settlements on a mix of narrow lanes and bridleways as it heads south to Dyrham Park. Soon you are back in North London with its conurbations encroaching on the Green Belt and bleak expanses of playing fields. But the delights of the ride are not yet done, for there is the arboreal feast that is Hadley wood to ride through.
At the top of the climb on Hadley Green, in thick fog on Easter Day day in 1471 a bloody battle raged. On one side was Edward IV, and the future Richard III with nearly 13,000 men and on the other the defending king Henry VI, with around 12,000 men. There being no long range artillery, the fighting had to be hand to hand combat - a vicious affair. In the confusion, many of Edward IV’s men ended up attacking their own side. Between 1,500 - 4,000 men died and the throne passed from the defeated Henry VI to Edward IV. Today of course, it is a peaceful place with a memorial to those who died and the only squabbling is between the mallards and coots in the two duck ponds.
From the Common, back to the start at Hadley Wood station is a fast 2km downhill ride.
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