Drove roads – those ancient tracks once used to move livestock herds across the country to market – can make excellent mountain biking opportunities for people like me who don’t really like mountain biking. Mastiles Lane, running over the limestone hills of the Yorkshire Dales between Malham Tarn and Wharfedale, is a prime example. I finally rode it today.
I say I don’t like mountain biking; what I mean is I like mountains, and I like biking, but I don’t like speed and I don’t like bumps – neither the ones you clatter over, nor the ones that appear on your knees and elbows when you fall off.
But of course I have a mountain bike; what else are garages for? My MTB is a Carrera Vulcan, which Halfords were flogging off super-cheap in a stock-purging flash sale last autumn. However, I use it more as an offroad tourer: mudguards, pannier rack, kickstand. Going downhill fast is not for me. It reminds me too much of my career progression.
To get to Malham Tarn, I rode eastwards from Settle train station. This involves the notorious 20% climb out of town that’s part of the Way of the Roses, which I did in April on a 1979 bike. It was a bit easier with nice low mountain bike gears this time.
But instead of carrying on along the WoR, I came off left up the Pennine Bridleway, heading towards Malham Tarn. The PBW is a thrilling back-way through grand farms-and-peaks scenery, and I found myself running out of words to express the experience. Words such as bump, judder, shake, rock, boulder, etc.
All thrilling stuff, though, and on this gloriously sunny day there were several other walkers and bikers enjoying it all. It’s the sort of route cyclists come back and do again. Perhaps to look for lost items juddered out of their rucksack, or tooth implants shaken free.
But it really was worth tackling the often very rough surface – I often had to push – for the view at the top, of Malham Tarn shimmering down there. The descent wasn’t bad: mostly grassy or rumbly, and I could freewheel happily down enjoying the wide view of the vale below.
I rejoined the tarmac road network and passed the infant Aire, between the point where it leaves Malham Tarn and the place it disappears into the ground, only to re-emerge a mile and a half away in Malham village below. I often wish I could disappear and reappear elsewhere as easily.
Just southeast of Malham Tarn, Mastiles Lane starts from a tarmac corner. It runs east-north-east about four and a half miles from here to Kilnsey, over the sheepy hilltops and plateaus.
Until the railways, this was one of a network of tracks used by drovers to walk livestock to market. They would spend days on the road, sleeping rough or perhaps in cheap lodgings, eating basically if at all, and earning very little for their privations and efforts. As a travel writer I know the feeling.
The surface on Mastiles Lane is pretty good, and I could comfortably cycle just about all of it. There are few ups and downs: it ain’t flat, but neither is it strenuously hilly.
West to east is the easier way to do it, because you start high up and finish with the last mile or so downhill into Kilnsey.
There’s something appealing about the shape of drove roads: they had to be wide to accommodate those herds of cows, and stretches of Mastiles consist of parallel drystone walls curving seductively up, over and round the hills.
I hope the drovers heading for the market had a more pleasant final ten miles than me, as I headed south from Kilnsey to Skipton train station. The B road there through Cracoe and Rylstone was full of impatient cars passing me too close.
I wonder if the populist governments of the 18th century appealed to the herding demographic with pro-droving rhetoric: hard-working drovers, the war on drovers etc. I pondered such matters over a quick pre-train pint.
Wetherspoon’s patio tables were packed with a herd of hen parties on this lovely summer afternoon. Herd of hen parties? Of course I’ve heard of hen parties.