B

Ye Olde English Charm

We had been in Darlington less than a week when Gerry announced that we should bike to Nottingham about 130 miles away. Undeterred by the strange shade of puce that Jan's face took on, the project's future was augured by the exhaustion we felt after our first hour long excursion from Lucknow Street to the edge of Darlington. Fairly quickly our ambitions were reduced to biking to York and back, a mere 49 miles each way, with an overnight stop in Northallerton.

But first, we had to get in shape. Given our inauspicious beginnings, we actually did fairly well. We quickly worked up to an hour and a half each way, which meant that we could actually venture out of town. For our first out of town expedition, we rode the three and a half miles (map) to Walworth Castle (yes, it's a real castle) for their all-you-can-eat carvery lunch. The weather was perfect, sunny but cool with a good breeze that kept the clouds on the move. Jan could hardly believe she’d made it and needed the entire lunch hour to recover. Gerry ate an absolutely humongous meal which interfered not one whit with his ability to pedal home. Coming home was tough for half of us, but we had no deadline and managed it fairly easily by mid-afternoon.

The Bridge in Piercebridge

Sign to Roman Fort

Having recovered from Walworth, we doubled our so far meager efforts by riding the six miles to Piercebridge, a village on the River Tees just southwest of Darlington. The modern village, only 30 or so homes, is on the site of an ancient Roman fortress that guarded the now ruined Roman bridge. That bridge became useless only a few decades after it was built in the first century because the Tees changed course. Another bridge was built and ultimately washed away. The "modern" bridge, shown in the photo, is already a few hundred years old. Gerry thinks it alone is worth the trip. By the way, the cottage pictured at the beginning of this article abuts the bridge.  Isn't it pretty?

This day we were mostly out for the ride, having already seen the field where the remants of the Roman bridge are located. But we discovered to our surprise another part of the remains of the village's Roman fort that we had not known about. We were alerted to it by a sign when we stopped to check our map just inside the village. We immediately spent a pleasant half hour exploring them. Then surprisingly fresh, we set out for home. We were both feeling stronger, but we were still far from our goal.  It was time to be a bit more adventurous.
 

Millennium Bridge, Stockton-on-Tees

Our next expedition therefore was a ride to Stockton and back. Stockton is the next town downstream on the Tees from Darlington. From home we rode out to the A66 and along to Sadberge where we left the main road and took Norton Back Lane and Darlington Back Lane (yes, that is what they are called on the map) to the outskirts of Stockton and then rode along Bishopton Road West into the town center. [It should be written  centre of course, since we are writing about the mother country, but I'll let it pass just this once!] After a wander around, we parked the bikes and explored the high street until we settled on some BBQ chicken and salad for a picnic lunch by the river. Spent a lovely hour on the riverside walk, in the shade of the new Millennium Bridge that carries pedestrians across the Tees. The sun was shining and we each enjoyed an hour of reading before climbing back on our bikes and heading back to Darlington. Alas there is a reverse correlation between the ease of the outward journey and that of the return. The outward journey had been eased by some long downhill runs which meant of course that the return journey involved climbing those hills. By the time we got back to the church at Sadberge, Jan was as tired and grumpy as a grinch. But after a rest a drink and a snack, she was able to tough it out and was inordinately proud to have done so. We were now up to nine miles each way, triple our Walworth efforts.
 

But time was running out. It was more or less a week after our Stockton trip before we decided to try for Bishop Auckland. Bishop Auckland is the town where the Bishops of Durham have had their home for nearly a millennium; they moved into town in about 1080 A.D. The town is about 13 miles to the northwest of  Darlington. It was our toughest ride yet, made inadvertently tougher. We took backroads in order to avoid the heavy traffic of the main roads. That took us through the small village of Heighington, which we learned is well named, being at a local maximum which so wearied our calf muscles that we were forced to walk the last couple of hundred yards uphill. A few miles later Shildon was the same and did the same, even without such a name to forewarn us.

South Church, Bishop Auckland, Sept 11,  2001

In Bishop Auckland we sat in the Bishop's park and had our picnic lunch while we read our newspapers. Just as we were coming back through the center of town it was exactly the one-year anniversary of 9/11 and we stopped outside the McDonald's on the main pedestrian street to participate in two minutes of silence. Riding back to Darlington this time, we bypassed the hills of Heighington and Shildon and once we had climbed out of the Weir valley that Bishop sits in and back over into the Tees valley, we found ourselves on a long straight run slightly downhill almost all the way back to town.

Alas, by this time we realized that we had left it too late to fulfill our ambitions.  We had tentatively planned one more training trip, this time to Barnard Castle, before trying our luck to York, but it was not to be. Our calendar was too full and as September waned, the weather did not cooperate.  We had failed, but in the process got a little bit of our former shape back and a much better appreciation of the lovely countryside around Darlington.