A Ride Through the Woods from Swanley

There's a good little café at Swanley station that seems to be open all day. I had a flask of coffee with me and a roll for lunch, but I was drawn to the Halloween iced doughnuts so I bought one and ate it when I stopped for coffee at the same church in Horton Kirby where I stopped for lunch last time. It was still closed, as was every other church I tried today.  

The sun came out while I was drinking my coffee, just like last time, then I headed off into the hills via a very nice valley road called Maplescombe. It rose gently towards the woods at the head of the valley with harvested fields on either side. There was very little traffic. Past Knatts Valley the woods began and the road climbed more steeply, topping out at about 200m before dropping steeply down towards Otford. 

I crossed the Darenth yet again, and went as far as the M25 before turning north towards Shoreham which was a well kept country village with quite a few shops and pubs. Then I went steeply downhill to Lullingstone country park where there's a cafe and shop and I ate my lunch. From there it was a VERY steep climb back out of the valley, over the M25 and then up and down at first before a long and smooth descent back to Swanley.

The map is here.

South of the Thames at Erith

It's taken me a while to get around to this third loop from the edge of London't Freedom Pass zone. In case you don't know about it, once a London resident is over a certain age they get a pass which allows them free off-peak travel all over London on most rail, underground and bus services. I made up some rules for myself. Each ride must start from a different station and at some point each loop must touch the previous loop. I thought I'd be drawing a large sunflower on the ground with my bike.

The Dartford crossing from the River Darent

The sluice at the mouth of the Darent

Well, it didn't take me long to break that rule. The River Thames meant that the nearest I could get to my previous loop was Erith, and planning a 40km loop from here which also got me out into the countryside wasn't easy, so I headed from Erith to Dartford using part of National Cycle Route 1 up the Darent valley to Dartford from where I did a loop into the country.

To the east of Erith there is a wilderness of industrial estates and potholed roads. After a while it's possible to join the Thames Path along the river, with the QE2 bridge visible ahead. At the point where the Darent flows into the Thames there's a sluice and the path turns south to follow the banks of the smaller river upstream towards Dartford. This cycle path has narrow barriers at both ends and in the past I've met touring cyclists cursing at having to unload their bikes to get through. In fact, at the Dartford end you have to do this twice in 100 metres.

There are a lot of these . . .

. . . and a lot of this kind of stuff

This wasn't an especially pleasant ride until I finally reached the southern end of Dartford's suburbs and the village of Darenth, where a side road called Roman Villa Road led directly into a landscape of fields and woods. Up here I saw a lapwing and a pair of buzzards and a whole lot of squirrels. This is also horse country, as in riding stables. In fact just about any openspace inside the M25 is very likely to see riding stables and fields full of horses.

The road to the countryside

London on the skyline

After a ride though woods and some very muddy roads I rode down a long hill with views back over London and ended up in the village of Horton Kirby where I ate lunch in brief sunshine in the churchyard (church closed) and almost thought I was in a village miles from London. A couple of crossings of the M25 put paid to that idea, and then I followed the River Darent back into Dartford, partly on footpaths that weren't exactly designed for Bromptons.

Horton Kirby

Here's the route on AllTrails.

On the Banks of the Thames

My second Brompton ride from the edge of the Freedom Pass zone started from Upminster. The C2C train that I took from West Ham to Upminster had helpful posters everywhere telling you just where you could and couldn't go with your Freedom Pass so I knew I was safe.

In South Ockenden the roadworks that had blocked my progress last time out had been completed so I had the pleasure of cycling along Fen Lane past the golf club. I don't know what the workers were doing here for all those weeks but it involved digging up the road for more than a mile and refilling it very badly.

Bulphan church

A few miles of flat open farmland took me to the village of Bulphan where the small church was open. I sat on a bench outside and drank coffee, then went south towards Orsett. Sitting by the church it was possible to imagine I was in a small country village, but as soon as I turned down Church Lane I found a ribbon development of oversized detached houses, some of them in the process of construction. Orsett had suffered a similar fate, but here there were snowdrops in the churchyard.

Just outside Orsett a cycle path appeared, though I couldn't see why. I followed it down into Thurrock and then went through the quiet back streets of Grays down to the River Thames.

A cycle path runs along the sea wall for a few miles, and then turns into a public footpath with a series of small sets of steps to traverse. As long as you can you can carry your bike over the steps it's all perfectly cyclable. Every inch of the sea wall is spray painted, and I met a couple of pairs of graffiti artists as I made my way along under the QE2 bridge. And then there were the Stressers.

I was nearly at Purfleet, where the footpath crosses the railway before returning to the river at the Rainham Marshes RSPB reserve when I saw the signs and the huge machines blocking the path. It would have been a long way back, but the man in the first van couldn't have been more helpful, guiding me past the machines, helping to carry my bag, enlisting his mates to help. But I was lucky. If I'd come from the other direction there were loads of very serious signs that I might have been expected to have noticed. They're going to be working there for 6 months, testing the piling on the sea wall.

I stopped for coffee and a cake at the the RSPB reserve, a wonderful patch of open marshland that you glimpse from the Eurostar or the A13, then carried on along the river past the artificial hills of the huge landfill site behind Coldharbour Point. The Ingrebourne River  meets the Thames here, near where the concrete barges built in WW2 as part of D-Day preparations were towed in 1953 to help shore up the flood defences here. 

From here to Upminster I followed the Ingrebourne Trail which stays close to the river and away from the road apart from one section through Rainham. This was a very flat ride on a very sunny day at the end of January.

Route on AllTrails is here.

Wild Deer and Bad Roads in Essex

It occurred to me a while back that it might be fun to do a series of bike rides on my Brompton from all of the most distant stations in London that I could reach free of charge using my Freedom Pass. For my first ride I decided to travel to Harold Wood, mainly because I could get there on the Elizabeth Line. It was a cold day, one of the first really cold days of winter. I hadn't done much planning beyond drawing an approximate route on my Ordnance Survey map, and shortly after departing from the station at Harold Wood I remembered coming there when I was walking around the London Loop, the long-distance path that encircles London.

Solitary deer in 2022

I remembered as soon as I saw the deer—it was calmly grazing on a bit of open green land on a housing estate, close to the narrow ribbon of woodland that skirts the River Ingrebourne. I've seen them three times now, those deer, though the people who live here must see them every day. The first time was ten years ago when I first walked the London Loop, and then we saw quite a large herd on a track just north of this point. The second time I saw them, walking with some friends, I looked them up on the internet when I got home. There are plenty of stories about the deer, which the newspapers like to call 'urban deer', and which roam the area around Harold Hill and nearby Dagnam Park. And although they move in the usual stealthy deer-like way, able to vanish easily almost before your eyes, they aren't uncomfortable around people and the newspapers have photos of full antlered stags reclining on suburban lawns.

Solitary deer in 2011

I carried on towards the outer reaches of Brentwood on roads that must once have been pleasant country lanes, winding up and down hills with views towards the Thames estuary. Now they are not so pleasant to cycle along. The road surface is disintegrating and the traffic is heavy and continuous. Maybe the two things are related. 

From the little village of South Weald I cycled south to cross the A12 and then circled around Brentwood's southern edge. It was pleasantly wooded and lots of people were walking dogs and then in Little Warley I deviated foolishly for my plan and took a direct line towards the A127, because the tiny road looked less busy. Well, it was less busy because of the difficulty of getting onto the A127. And as for crossing it . . .

Everyone should cross a busy dual carriageway at some point in their life, just so they understand exactly how fast a distant dot travelling at 80mph transforms itself into a hurtling missile of metal. In 5 seconds it will travel 178 metres, in 10 seconds nearly a quarter of a mile. When you're crossing it's the vehicles in the outside lane you need to keep an eye on, and you need a really big gap. In short, I wouldn't recommend crossing the A127 at this point.

But once across I was in flat farming country with far less traffic. I went south for a couple of miles and then turned west and saw a sign saying ROAD CLOSED. I always ignore these signs on a bike because there is almost always a way through for cyclists and pedestrians. But in this case I was stopped by a couple of burly bearded workmen. I asked them if there was a way through and they said 'No'. I said not even for a pedestrian and they said 'No'. I said, 'What is it that's blocking the road?' expecting them to tell me the road was completely destroyed or something like that, but they said 'You can't go through because we won't let you.' 

Avoiding the roadworks

Luckily there was a footpath close by which turned out to be a perfectly usable track and was actually better than the road. A short distance on a very busy road took me to a turn-off where I crossed the M25 and the railway and then cycled north along a quiet lane almost to Upminster where, in the centre of town, I joined National Cycle Route 136. 

This section of the route, north past Upminster station, is one of those strange cycle routes where white bicycles are painted on the road surface. The route continues on the road for just over a mile, sharing it with heavy traffic. In Station Road there appeared to be no pedestrian crossings.  All the way up to the station, pedestrians were randomly launching themselves into the traffic. It was madness. And I would love to know if there is any evidence that painting white bicycles on the surface of a road alters driver behaviour in any way.

A few more miles and I was back in Harold Wood, admiring the old station building which is dwarfed now by the new ramped and stepped plaza for access to the Elizabeth Line. I should have taken a picture but my hands were cold. 

Here's the Route on AllTrails