Good vid, but didn't realise that Lands End had moved to North Devon?? When you plan the Lands End(Proper Lands End) to John O'Groats, give me a shout, I'd be up for that
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Culmstock area - Devon TRF Group member - KTM 690 Enduro
I thought Dover was on the English Channel not the North Sea? I know Lands End is at least another 100 miles West. However,putting the suspect map reading aside,you look to have had fun.
The overgrown lane certainly needs more traffic but I am glad you did not pass near where I live because I am apprehensive of the consequences of your plan to publish your route.
Overuse of unmaintained highways causes unsustainable problems and concentrating riding along one particular route will do us no favours in the public eye. The lie that trail riding harms the countryside is fed fuel when people are able to point definitively to rutted lanes being heavily used by bikes,no matter that nature frequently erases one rut and erodes another overnight by water erosion without any wheeled interference.
Better to spread the word about how to find lanes everywhere than encourage everyone to go down one route and overuse it.Occasional traffic is a fact of life,constant traffic detracts from ones enjoyment.
Discouraging mapreading initiative by handing out routes does not lend itself to sustainable use because it is concentrating riding on just a few lanes rather than spreading the load evenly across the network.
Devon TRF have done Coast to Coast runs in the past but the routes have not been published for reasons that had seemed quite self evident.
Sven,if you are tempted to go Lands End to John O'Groats you should talk to the ladies who took Yamaha Serow's that way and wrote of their journey in Trail magazine a number of years ago.One of them is Devon TRF 's Keeper of the Maps.
I have considered publishing routes but decided to avoid the whole can of worms the thing becomes when people get lost and blunder on.Face it,if they could map read at all they would not need your route because they could simply do as you did and link lanes together in the chosen direction.Handing a route to suchlike encourages them to run before they can walk and is likely to piss people off along the way.Numerous local sensitivities exist in the countryside and friction results from clashes however innocent and well meaning the intentions.
We actually aimed to count the number of other users we passed as an evidence gathering exercise.
From memory it was <17 groups of ramblers. Two horses. Two sets of landrovers, three sets of bikers (two of them being illegal motocross bikes) and two tractors.
We had two happy farmers giving us directions, one neutral tenant at a farm confused. One unhappy home owner.