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Day 8 Strines Moor – Blackhills (Nr Bradford)
Weather – Cold and windy.
Dr Pepper – Good: average prices no German cans found.
Terrain – Hard work all day not as bad as yesterday.
Campsite – Highly recommended: Blackhills Scout Campsite, Lee lane, Cottingley, Bingley W. Yorkshire, BD16 1UB 01535 272509. May be scouts only.
An uneventful day today, but still hard cycling to get to our campsite not particularly early (and of course 2 days late). Setting off in the morning after half an hour or so, we hit the biggest hill of the ride so far – but first the longest and best downhill we had encountered. I just wish we had a working speedo because we were flying down the hill so fast with the heavy bags on the back that sometimes it was lucky nothing was coming the other way (having said this we didn’t so much as see a car until we got back on the main road).
At the river at the bottom of the hill we took this unspectacular picture that looked really good at the time. On the right you can just about see the gradient of the road we had just came done which had gone on for some distance before that. We stopped at the bottom to take the picture but also because we couldn’t carry any speed up the hill since there was a hairpin bend as the road crossed the river for which we were only just able to stop in time. The next hour and a half was spent then walking up the other side of this huge hill, which was hard work in itself given the weight of the bikes.
Finally we were off of the white road and onto the A616 into West Yorkshire and all the way to Huddersfield. At New Mill, near to Holmfirth, we had lunch including a cheap Easter egg between us as it was Easter Sunday. The route did intend to pass through Holmfirth, where Last of the Summer Wine is filmed, but we forgot and followed the main road up to Huddersfield, which was the most dingy place we visited during this trip, inheriting this honour from Birmingham. Sad to say the parts we cycled through were all a bit of a dump and we didn’t hang around in the town centre that looked equally unappealing. Instead we tried to go round the bypass, with only partial success as we had to take a big detour at one point to get on the slip road. After reluctantly passing a Halfords without going in since it is difficult to guess which part will go wrong next we pressed on to Brighouse and towards Haworth.
At Brighouse we were at a junction checking the map when we had three small surprises in the space of a couple of minites. By coincidence we ahd pulled up next to a motorbike shop, which was obviously shut (It being Easter Sunday). The lights were off and we looked through the window as Rich pointed out some of the best ones. Don’t tell him I said so but I think motorbikes are very uninteresting, not to mention all exactly the same to look at, but I was nodding in agreement when we got a shock as there was a bloke in there staring back at us!
He must have been there the whole time and he was on his own in an empty closed shop doing nothing behind a desk. Weird. Anyway we were soon distracted but a bunch of losers in a Citroen Saxo who thought it appropriate to shout abuse at us, and finally as we moved on and crossed the road we were shouted at by another bloke who kindly told us we’d dropped something back on the pavement. In fact it was one of my (new) gloves that I’d taken off, left on the back of the bike and forgotten to put back on. It seems therefore that this town is home to all extremes of the friendliness spectrum! It was around here that we mistakenly decided that the campsite was not much further and bought loads of drinks for the evening, which we then had to lug past several other shops that would have done equally as well.
Eventually we approached the Thornton, which is where we turned off of the main road and started looking for the campsite. Unfortunately, after a bit we were once again lost as navigating with the road map was impossible while we were not yet on the tiny OS map. What the road map fails spectacularly to show is that there was a huge valley between where we were and where we wanted to be, and with the roads not corresponding to the map (or at least plenty of unmarked roads confusing us). We found a man wandering around who we first thought was nuts because it took us ten minutes to persuade him we were on the right page of the atlas.
He seemed convinced that we needed the next page of the atlas but presumably he did not realise the scale of it and once we showed him the area we were in he gave us directions across the valley to Wilsden, the nearest village to the campsite. Eventually having climbed the hill we were directed to the actual campsite by a Wilsden resident, we would never have found it ourselves because it is nowhere near where the postcode finder on the Ordnance Survey website showed it.
At the campsite after a brief search we found two cheerful blokes who seemed to be running the place and showed us where to camp, which turned out to be anywhere since we were the only visitors to the site, although a bunch of kids from a university child psychology ‘experiment’ would be turning up later. Suitably worried we put the tent up and tried to light a fire, without success.
All of us have been scouts for a number of years and lit a lot of fires but this one would not co-operate and I remember at one point we actually almost gave up. Everything was wet and the two lighters we had brought with us both expired during the attempts to get it started. The tuck shop was opened just for us and we bought some unhealthy stuff and a new lighter, which we promptly also broke and had to go back again for another. Finally we lit the fire after cheating by using some of the meths from the stove and later it was going well although as you can see in the picture the grate was clearly not designed for the scale of fire we had in mind. Not letting this put us off we had a great night playing cards and eating marshmallows. The campsite was great and only charged us £3.75, the second cheapest of all and certainly the best value, although Martin was conned into paying another £3 for definitely less than 300 penny marshmallows. We have no idea why Lister was bending over like that when I took the photo.