Tasting the landscape
Wild cherry-plum blossom in the wild woods of West London
Sometimes it’s not enough just to ride. Sometimes you need to fill your soul and eat the land. It’s a raw February day and a louring sky warns of another impending storm. Dampness chills the bones. We ride till we’re warm, then stopping for a moment, we chew on a few exotic tasting violets which we’ve picked from a vast bank of them deep in the lands of West London’s wilderness. boundary. As we stand, we hear a great tit’s shrill two note call pouring from the lower branches of an ash tree. On the black still waters where a river has overspilled, two coots are having a noisy spat. In their fury they spirograph arabesque patterns onto the glass-water. A heavy mist cuts off the tops of trees and a clattering north-west wind silences the rooks. One rogue daffodil blooms brightly in a border of litter. The land smells of wet mud and the greening of early spring.
Where should a city-locked adventurer go on the dullest and most frigid of late winter days for exhilaration and riding serendipity? Not for us, the long trudge through a damp suburbia on busy roads for a brief spin on country lanes. For us, our fiery hearts are fanned by the thought of that liminal space between the urban and the rural which most people drive through and look upon with contempt, or visit because they have to; the council tip, the car repair yard, the out-of-town hypermarket. For us these nature-endowed lands, free from the petty signs and image hunting cameras are our deserts, our wild mountain ranges, our prairies, our badlands.
After a barely a warm up on a segregated cycle path through the dull urban order of new mid-sized blocks of steel and glass, we ride under a bridge, and around a canal bend, to join a track which is lumpy, puddle strewn and muddy. Behind the uncut hedges bordering the canal, smells of raw aggregate mix with the smell of baking of biscuits. Deflated footballs float in the still waters. Mallards swim in pairs like old pensioners out for a stroll. A lone jogger slurps along the watery path.
The ride settles into a rhythm of muddy puddles; juddery lumps of hardcore and slippery wet grooves in which the back wheel spins. Industrial chimneys and grey blank walls of sheds are exchanged for the filigree of bare-branched trees which dance under a cinereous sky. Lines of canal boats are a moored to the banks like lorries stuck in a motorway jam. They exude bitter and delicious wafts of coal smoke through thin metal pipes. Old chairs randomly abandoned beside the canal path are painted with fluorescent algae, their stuffing suppurating through the fabric tears.
Signs of spring emerge as we ride; weeping willows are greening, the goat willows are displaying their furry buds. A few primroses shine on the canalside banks, an early dandelion. There are more waves of violets, (which are very edible unlike the totally poisonous daffodil). New dicots emerge from the dark winter-cleaned mud.
The riding is thrilling; mixing banality with grit, adventure with discovery. Tidiness and order are absent. There are no lawns, no deer parks. We push hard over the rough cobbled sections, and shimmy between barriers. There are chicanes, and on-the-bike challenges such as ducking under the steep arches of a canal bridges. There are blind corners which we tackle tentatively, hoping that we’ll not be surprised by a jogger or a dog rushing headlong into us. We ride past canvases of concrete walls, some of which are daubed mindlessly, sometimes vividly in curious shapes and jagged letters whose messages are as impenetrable as the Canticles of Leibowitz.
The Colne Valley is real badlands country; scarred and nature-rich; we ride over black circles where stolen cars have been burnt and past fly-tipped mattresses which quietly grow an array of exotic flora, which will be the study of ecologists in years to come. Vegetation is jungle-like, the paths alternating between tendon jerking rubble with smooth passages of liquid mud. We skid, jump and spin, we weave through trees, race into puddles and go where the mood takes us. We ride on water. Our teeth are lined with grit as ferrous water splashes into open, air grasping mouths. We stop to manoeuvre bikes through barriers, and haul our frames over smashed up but still locked gates. We ride over broken ground, over course pasture where wild horses roam. Planes howl above us with exertion, whilst below their wings, buzzards and red kites swirl silently and effortlessly in the air roads. Under the flight path, we ride through a wild Mediterranean garden, filled with mulleins, fennel, chicory and genesta. Should we return in the fecund months of summer, we’ll see over 300 species of plants, many rare. There’s more nature here than in the nature-depleted National Parks.
In time we arrive at Windsor. The route bypasses the tourist trails and heads for the back streets where we stop for a leek and stilton soup and a pint served by a New Yorker in an un-modernised pub. Full and warm again, we head up to Windsor Great Park. The wide expanses of meadowlands dotted with fine trees are, after the wild lands, tame and dull. We ride through it without a glance, yearning for something more edgy and real.
Planners and money have taken the edge off the wastelands of the return journey. Overly grand houses sit smuggly behind locked gates, and litter bins are provided for the excrement of dogs, but tendrils of nature curl around the tidy holloways of paths. We bounce along the horse-less bridleways, jet across the commons and greens on slippery paths. Holly and ivy cling to banks, rivers bulge, ditches overspill, traffic grumbles and growls on roads along which we do not ride.
The light fades into dusk. The Thames gurgles over weirs and swells over the banks onto the paths. We ride past mankind’s attempts to beautify the river’s banks; Regency Richmond, Ham House, and Kew Palace, but they seem mere forlorn blocks of stone in this grey drizzle, whilst we are mud-covered, tired but exhilarated. We speed with the last of our strength past these monuments and ride back into the urban order of west London like adventurers returning from a foreign land. Gulls circle above us, squawking farewell, we fist pump each other as the end appears and arrange for a re-ride on the weekend. Edgelands are addictive. Once ridden, once the mud has been tasted, you’re hooked. Grim February has never been so thrilling.
To access the full ride details, including a free download of the route, click here