Four riders parked up in a quiet residential street in Upper Halling at 09:30hrs for the exploratory ride. Adam Domaingue, Bill Kent, and myself with Bill Martin leading, cause he had an OS map. Second map reader was Bill Kent who had the map on a mobile phone do-wacky thing. In June a group of us are riding from London to Canterbury over two days using the old, Pilgrim’s Trail’ as our guide.
The weather was pleasant, bright and at the start could’ve been a little warmer as it was hovering around 13°C. The quartet set off for Rochester to find the location and access route to our June digs at the Premier Inn. After crossing the Medway via the cycle path next to the motorway we found it.
Satisfied with its location we headed into Rochester via the older town bridges into some very confusing one way systems and obscure cycle paths which luckily we won’t need to use in June. Eventually we got back to the east side of Rochester, near the castle ruins and serendipitously found a boat yard cafe.
After elevenses it was time to find and follow a section of the ‘Pilgrim’s Trail.’ After leaving the center of town we picked up the trail. A small, quiet side road, closed to traffic, following alongside the M2. Soon after it turns to a gravel path before going up and over the Channel Tunnel high speed line and disappearing into a leafy dirt path with a gradual (mostly!) ascent. On the top we came out on a country lane by the Robin Hood pub, alas it was a little early for lunch so we decided to push on to a hill top scenic view the Bill Martin had spotted on his trusty, dusty map.
We were not disappointed, and the weather helped, clear skies and not too much of a breeze. A lovely spot, but sadly also tragic in the past.
Next was a tricky, steep bridleway descent from the top of this ridge down to hopefully one of three pubs spotted on the trusty, dusty map. At the bottom, one pub had little access for bikes, the next had disappeared completely, along with the telephone box shown on the map and so we went a couple of miles further on. This had us retrace the start of our ride loop to a pub spotted on our way out. Nice pub, nice beer garden and various nice liquids were consumed.
After this it was back across the river via a fairly new bridge named ‘Ferry Bridge’ which presumably put said ferry out of business as soon as it was built! At this point we were only about two miles from Upper Halling and after a gentle gradient ascent we were back at the cars.
24 miles and @ 1700ft of climbing.