Some good looking gravel route have been launched by Marcus Stitz under the banner of Perthshite Gravel.
Makes me want to do some exploring...
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Cycling News
Perthshire Gravel
(46 posts)-
Posted 3 years ago #
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Ermmm.... Are you sure that is what they have called their website Hank m'boy? It isn't really selling the area to me.
Posted 3 years ago # -
It might get some clicks from the aggregate industry, but yes, it is a genuine site.
On trend with the kids given the move to gravel bikes...
Posted 3 years ago # -
Read back your comment carefully!
Posted 3 years ago # -
“but yes, it is a genuine site”
Yes
But
stiltskin wasn’t referring to the SITE name.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Borderline Rule 2
Posted 3 years ago # -
Mybad...
What is the punishment for an infringement of Rule 2?
How many laps of Arthur's Seat are required while chanting "Mea Culpa"?
Posted 3 years ago # -
Depends how charitable admin or mods are feeling. :-)
Posted 3 years ago # -
An excellent initiative. (But these are not drove roads.)
Posted 3 years ago # -
Hmm, someone has managed to squeeze money out of funders to have a jolly in the countryside (I'm actually quite jealous at that part), but they can't even afford a decent web host that does LetsEncrypt https certs for free?
They do realise that's their search index ranking tanked these days, yeah? Not to mention if someone manages to sniff the admin account login credentials…
Posted 3 years ago # -
“
The idea for the Highland Perthshire gravel trails project started in February 2018, when -
“
https://www.kinesisbikes.co.uk/Blog/Archive/July-2020/Drovers-gravel-and-loads-of-smiles
Posted 3 years ago # -
I hear Sustrans have adopted these trails for the NCN.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Final report on the launch phase published.
Take-away message seems to be:1) Lovely idea
2) Mapping is great, but not enough
3) The terrain is actually really hard and needs bridges, easier climbs and so on for ordinary peopleAs ever I find it hard to imagine what the group of people is who couldn't ride these trails under their own steam but would do so with gpx files and difficulty grades.
Still, baby steps and all that. This is something to build on.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Yeah some of the hills are absolutely killer, my threshold for 'challenging climb' has changed substantially since doing it.
However, there were some great hidden gems in there, and particularly when dealing with 'gravel' it's very handy to know which lines on the map (and gaps between them) actually go. Hard to convince yourself up the hill if you've no idea if you'll be able to get down the other side.
I haven't really looked at them, but I assume the associated shorter routes make the most of these gems without the need to do fiddly/climby/muddy things to get between them.
Posted 3 years ago # -
@jonty
Did you do a ride report? Would read.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Regrettably I didn't at the time. Because the route turns back on itself and isn't really going anywhere, it felt less like a journey and more like a race - perhaps better than a report would be a grand tour-style race map with sections of climb, descent and hike-a-bike marked, categorised by the number of times "STIIITZ!" was yelled during traversal.
However, I started writing a "short summary" for this post which escalated a tad. I don't think it will quite end up publishable but might not be finished until tomorrow. When it is I'll post it here.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Excellent, thank you. For what it's worth a member of this forum cursed my name on a gravel ride I had instigated.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Day 1: Dunkeld - Blair Atholl (we swivelled the start a bit)
A relatively friendly climb, in retrospect, out of Dunkeld - rewarded by great wind farm/forestry tracks with awesome views of the journey to come, punctuated by a short (but time-consuming) pathless and boggy hike-a-bike. It was fun to see where we'd be tomorrow while briefly on the Grandtully road. Quite long but rideable climb out of the valley with less views. I've no real recollection of descent into Pitlochry but it must have been fine. (We were in a hurry for lunch after a lot of punctures.)
We skipped the fiddly bit out of Moulin, taking the road all the way to the turn-off. Tarmac became decent gravel for a nice ride along a pretty valley in anticipation of another hellish climb which didn't (quite) come. The sense of wildness was briefly shattered when we met a taxi driving very carefully the other way three quarters of the way up. Quick bit of descent (rocky, I think) but turning back on ourselves after crossing the river there was very little riding all the way to the top of Glen Tilt. A gravel bike didn't really feel like the right tool for dipping a toe into this part of the Cairngorms. The river crossing before Falls of Tarf was at the lower end of sketchy. Glen Tilt descent very pleasant as you'd expect. OK pub in Blair Atholl with smallish portions. There are no good camping spots above Blair Atholl!
Day 2: Blair Atholl - Grandtully
A delay to the forecast monsoon made packing up in the morning far more pleasant. Completing the rolling climb towards the top of Glen Bruar was OK - quite a few little river crossings followed by a quite rocky descent to a more complicated crossing of Allt Sheicheachan. We were happy to find going back down it to the bothy much more rideable than expected - quite narrow and exciting - but realised we'd probably got the route description mixed up and there followed a fairly long and unpleasant boggy hike to Bruar lodge during which the rain started. Glen Bruar descent was perfectly nice - a collosal herd of deer crossed in front of us and lept down the river valley at one point - but didn't feel "worth" the hike accompanied as it was with rain and puncture stop. The comparatively insignificant deviation to get over to House of Bruar felt much harder than it was in the circumstances, though the incongruous re-connection with civilisation in the form of dog-walking motorists was fun as we came back down.
Neither the speed of service nor the temperature in the House of Bruar orangery was particularly friendly to our soggy bodies, but it was fun watching the absolutely bizarre Covid systems they'd put in place which involved waiters doing running jumps over rope barriers, a man whose sole role seemed to be telling everyone it was very busy and a woman turning people without bookings away from the queue for making bookings.
The rain had pretty much stopped for the day while we were eating and we warmed up quickly through Calvine to find a rideable, shortish climb into really nice rolling forestry with good descent into Loch Tummel. We took the opportunity of a sunny snack at Queen's View and then a quiet road with very patient drivers wiggled and wound to the foot of the next climb.
The climb here was probably the crux of the whole route. The first section was maybe half-unrideable purely owing to the gradient. Quite a few river crossings as well, some rideable with others not (or at least we weren't brave enough.) Once clear of the trees you could get some proper riding in, and in the sun I remember that it felt quite spectacular. I should perhaps have been paying less attention to the alpine splendour and more to my pace and fuelling because after it steepened up and became unrideable again, I started to feel very strange and was presumably bonking harder than I ever had before. Even if I hadn't been, the final hike would have been really tough and seemed to just go on. Fortunately I'd put enough things in my mouth by the top that I was able to enjoy the brilliant descent that seemed to go on forever, with the only real stop being to negotiate some highland cows.
It briefly chucked it down again on the road to Grandully but I don't think I've ever felt so welcomed as at the Inn on the Tay afterwards.
Day 3: Grandtully - Glen Turret
Standard overgrown summer railway path nonsense (particularly "exciting" in the dark the night before) to Aberfeldy but certainly preferable to the main road with a fun little section right by the river. Having not had breakfast we took our largest detour here, making a road beeline for the Highland Safari with its generous full veggie Scottish for riders and hose for bikes.
Back on route by Ardtalnaig, we embarked on the closest competitor for crux climb. It was a little softer around the edges than yesterday's though and we were certainly better fuelled. The first section was very steep but almost completely rideable, and led to a more rolling, stream crossingy, secluded section which is one of my fondest memories of the whole thing. Being August, the purple heather was gorgeous throughout but it was particularly special here. The good gravel gave up at the holiday cottage(!) by the Almond, but the singletrack alongside was fine for our bikes with a just-rideable tributary crossing. From the dam it was simply half an hour's a walk up a very steep land rover track to a sharp turn, followed by the most pathless hike-a-bike of the whole trip - if the ones before were "boggy", this was simply "bog" - although we found enough tussocks to stay mostly dry.
Eventually we caught sight of the gravel out, and it was another pretty good descent with another incongruous civilisation moment passing all the day trippers heading up Ben Chonzie and the rammed car park. Once we left the car park road, there was a lot of wiggling, longer than we expected, mostly rideable but often muddy, and a proper socks-off river crossing. The steep deviation of the A85 when we could almost smell the Comrie Croft cafe felt a bit unnecessary but the approach felt deservedly like we were coming in from "the wild" rather than a main road.
The route finds a nice woodland trail once off the A85 and we found a very chill puncture stop, with the sun glinting through the trees. I saw a deer poking its head up out of a field of wheat as we dropped into Crieff. We squeezed whatever meal deal food and beer we could find space for onto our bikes and headed straight for Glen Turret, fearing the loop round the Hydro grounds might totally pulverise our dinners.
"Gravel" as a concept gets a lot of stick but I just see it as a way of making sure you can have as much fun on the road as off it. It's fitting therefore that one of the high points of our "gravel ride" was the road ascent to Glen Turret dam. The sun was out and slowly setting, we had zero time pressure and, honestly, cycling up a tarmac road where you didn't always need to use your bottom gear was indulgent luxury. Had Covid not happened we'd have been in the Alps, and for a moment it felt like they'd come to us instead.
Unfortunately, our luxury tarmac road still had some pretty huge potholes, and I absent-mindedly managed to catch my back wheel in one of them. I had been (smugly) running tubeless, but the pothole knocked all the air out of my leaky, under-inflated tyre. There wasn't enough sealant to get the tyre to seat with a mini pump but there was enough to make putting in a tube a thoroughly unpleasant job, especially as the sun faded and the wind grew and the pump nozzle pulled out the valve core just when you thought you'd finished.
Fortunately it wasn't dark by the time we finally emerged at the dam and by that time we had the place to ourselves. We found an extemely scenic place to camp and had some extremely scenic dinner and beers and when the wind got too cold we went to sleep soundly in our extremely scenic beds.
Day 4: Glen Turret - Dunkeld
I never stopped to think whether the riding off Glen Turret was "worth" the climb in the same way that I did for other bits, because the climb was so enjoyable. (Perhaps the climb was only quite so enjoyable because of the difficulty of the previous climbs, which would make this whole system of "worthiness" even more complicated.) But it would have been worth a pretty nasty climb. It was really a rolling plateau followed by steep descent, but was pretty nice. I think the detour off the road was worth it too. Looking at the photos, it was certainly very purple.
The long section of road felt odd - one thing you can say for Stitz is that he is good (too good, perhaps, in some cases?) at avoiding roads. It was nice and quiet and I envied the roadies we passed for whom this was presumably their back yard. It didn't last of course and soon we were back to the old routine - steep, steeper, time to get off and walk. An hour later we were on a winding, farmy descent with descent if slightly muddy tracks. Eventually the tracks turned into roads and the roads got bigger and then we were in Bankfoot.
My first ever really long ride went through Bankfoot, and I remember seeing the steep fork up Cairneyhill Road and the relief I felt when I realised we wouldn't have to go up it. We didn't have to go up it this ride either, because Stitz had found an even steeper way. It took us to some overgrown, muddy, but OK singletrack where we fortunately only met one other person. It got a bit wider (perhaps part of the A9 works?) and skirting Murthly we really were on the home straight.
Our eagerness to get home may have clouded our opinions but Birnam Wood did not seem like a great place to ride a gravel bike. Admittedly our route swiveling meant that our final straight was not the intended one and a lot of that section was probably fine, but a lot of it was unrideable, too narrow, and had families of walkers coming the other way at perfectly inconvenient movements. (I suppose it might be fun at quieter times on a mountain bike.)
The final drop into Birnham, past the Victorian holiday cottages and under the railway bridge was good fun though and suddenly, with an Arts Centre cake and cuppa, it was all over. We met some other cyclists there - ready to quietly boast, we instead discovered to our horror that they had been on the road for far longer than us and were doing Land's End to John o' Groats. Useless. Fortunately the lady outside whose house we'd parked our cars had only been to the shops and was much more impressed with our efforts.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Really good read jonty.
Posted 3 years ago # -
@jonty
Magnificent. You should certainly offer that to them as an article on their website. Few pictures, jobs a good'un.
Thanks!
Posted 3 years ago # -
Thanks Jonty, you have sold me......on tarmac :-)
Posted 3 years ago # -
Yes, the idea that the descent from the east into the head of Glen Tilt is a recreational gravel ride is, errrr....simply not correct.
This is the major flaw in all these mapping exercises. These are not cycle paths in any conventional sense.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Thanks all very kind.
Yes, I think to call this a route of 'cycle paths' is certainly to misunderstand it. I certainly found the bit before Glen Tilt the most perplexing inclusion, but realistically it's the only way of getting to the top of a really nice descent. You have a lot of time to think when pushing a bike up a hill, and I thought a lot about what you're trying to achieve when putting together a 'gravel route'. This route stays off roads as much as possible, whereas for me a good 'gravel ride' might even just be a mostly road loop made possible by a linking forestry track. (I think my philosophy fits more with the Badger Divide and I intend to find out next year.)
Even though it's mostly 'gravel' I think you can tell it was designed by a mountain biker. This isn't just because some of the longer hikes would be more rideable on one, but because the route seems to be designed from a downhill mountain biking mindset. There are quite a few sections which clearly aren't in there for their own sake but are to be suffered for getting you to the next fun bit. This strikes me as a MTB "thing" whereas I think gravel - with its arguably less exciting descents - is probably more about the whole ride, like road. Nobody takes a mountain bike to Glentress just to go up the fire road and nobody takes a road bike to the Alps to put it on a ski lift.
(Talking in tribes like this might all sound really strange and prescriptive, but for me it's just a way of trying to understand what factors make a ride enjoyable based on the subconscious expectations you might have.)
I sometimes wonder if the full loop really just a marketing tool, created out of necessity within artificial constraints, with the real deal being all the day-rides? Certainly, as I alluded to before, I think the route would be slightly more useful as a directory of 'nice bits' - whether downhill, flat, or uphill - and then an explanation of any horrors required to get there. Yes, horrors are subjective, but I think a lot of people might then come to sensible conclusions like "the best way to do the Glen Tilt descent is by going up it first". But of course if we had then we probably wouldn't have been convinced to do our four day adventure and I wouldn't have come out with all these stories and opinions.
Posted 3 years ago # -
It is a suggestion of an adventurous route, is how I would put it. Like the "Cape Wrath Trail" which has no signs on the ground. Not like an NCN route which is intended to be signed.
See the "Capital Trail" (also a Marcus Stitz route) where mr fimm and his friend lugged their bikes up an evil hike-a-bike for a descent that they didn't think was particularly worth the effort (and they were on mountainbikes and are both fit and competent).
Posted 3 years ago # -
Indeed. Thing being that adventurous people don't need route suggestions. So this suits the intersection of the set of people physically capable of doing it with the set of people who wouldn't do it without a .gpx file.
I don't know how many that would be. Could be quite a few.
Posted 3 years ago # -
IWRATS:
As ever I find it hard to imagine what the group of people is who couldn't ride these trails under their own steam but would do so with gpx files and difficulty grades.
That's a bit harsh, IMHO. When you were planning your "Overlander" trip, you came on here and asked if anyone knew if one could get a bike through <here> and <there>. In the days before web forums, what would you have done? You might have gone anyway, you might have taken time to go and look at the questionable sections, you might have decided to play safe and re-route. I don't know, and it doesn't matter.These days the internet is a place that we look for information. Yes there are books too, and there are many advantages to books. But there is a greater expectation that there will be information and that information will be more detailed than it used to be. I can see this in the various hillwalking books that I own - the older ones are less detailed and assume a greater ability to match the route to the map and think about what you are doing on the ground.
And if the information is out there, why would one not use it? And if someone is thinking "Can I get through there with a bike, or will I get to the top and find an enormous deer fence with a rickety stile?" then is the information that no, there is no impassable obstacle not going to make it more likely that people will go? And once you've done something like that, and find that you can, might you try something more adventurous next time?
(I'm a case in point. First backpacking trip: the West Highland Way. Have since backpacked in to Fisherfield, Ben Alder area, Knoydart etc etc. Would like to walk from Achnasheen to Spean Bridge over the summits (that's a week in an area with one inhabited house (actually a Youth Hostel) on the actual route).)
Posted 3 years ago # -
That turned into a bit of an essay/rant, sorry.
Posted 3 years ago # -
I suppose that there's a continuum here - although my experience is more with diving.
There are only a few people competent and capable of planning and executing safe diving in an uncharted area - never mind the risk of finding it to be boring/not worth the effort (negative results of experiments are still results!).
Charts/maps increase the number of folk competent and capable of planning it, and reduce the risk to the return on investment of time/effort/money.
Trip reports further increase the number of folk competent/capable and allow better assessment of the personal RoI.
Signposting/guides/managed trips make it all the more accessible.
Even with the above, competency to accomplish a novel expedition doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with being so time/resource rich that risks are worth taking of a poor experience with a muddy bottom!
There's great comfort in knowing that it's a highly technical challenge only for the most competent and there is a pristine shipwreck to explore...
Robert
Posted 3 years ago # -
Roibeard exactly the point I was trying to make.
Posted 3 years ago # -
“That turned into a bit of an essay/rant, sorry.“
Not at all, useful insights.
I’ve never been that adventurous.
Once tagged along with two others on an ‘adventure’ which was mostly ‘head west’.
Not off road. Not entirely well equipped. Tent for two. Some camping plus youth hostels. I was on a small 5 speed as my bike had just been stolen.
Various ferries including the small (then no cars) one to Ardnamurchan.
I came back after Skye, they went on to Lewis.
Pre-internet. I presume they must have done more planning than I realised, but it didn’t show...
Glad I went, mostly fine (apart from the midgies). Done cycletouring holidays since: no camping.
Posted 3 years ago #
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