CYCLE WEST MIDLANDS: The Long Mynd – Shropshire Hills

Long Mynd – Park at Carding Mill Valley, Cardington, Tinklerton or one of the approved parking along the way.

40km – Mostly Road. The Gravel sections will require perseverence and strength. Gradients up to 25%. Suitable for experienced cyclists with Gravel/MTB and who acknowledge this could take much longer than your Garmin may predict!!

Toilets are available at Church Stretton. Coffee & Cake are available at meny places. There is also a small refuelling hut on the outskirts of Church Stretton

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We are a couple of pensioners based in the South East of the UK that love to travel and take day-trips on our tandem. The channel is a means of sharing those routes and experiences with others – you don’t need to ride a tandem to do the rides….. but it is much more fun if you do

Our tandems:
Dawes Horizon from early 1980s
Orbit Velocity Sport Disk provided by JD Tandems of Gargrave in Yorkshire

Links:
Our Website: [under construction]
JD Tandems: https://www.tandems.co.uk/
The Tandem Club: https://www.tandem-club.org.uk/

Follow us on Komoot:
https://www.komoot.com/user/2178756993263?ref=wud

[Music] Oh, hi. This is a great ride up the Long Mind in Shropshire and it goes through a range of different road types and slopes and different riding conditions. So, we’re going to start in the top right hand corner up there in Cardington and that’s a lovely little village. I would start by the pub and then we’re going to work our way south. wonderful little back roads, a village of Tinkleton, and then we start to engage in a range of different clims. It is really a gravel bike type of ride or a hybrid. You will be off-road for quite a bit of the time. Not more than half, but certainly a reasonable part and all certainly all the difficult bits. Um there’s a lot of steep turns. There’s just a small time when you hit the main road and that’s down there right in the very center at the south as you cross the A49. And then there’s a railway bridge there. Then we head our ward away past and we stopped at the Longwind Adventure Camp to refill with water. They were really kind and helpful there. So, I’ll give them a bit of a shout out. Then there was a bit of a nasty uh difficult gate that we had to cope with and then pushing our bike through a lot of quite difficult uh undergrowth and various things, but it wasn’t officially a officially a bridal path, but um it wasn’t really that accessible. And then we climb our way through that, descend down towards Astton, which is where the wonderful climb begins. Now, it’s really steep. Uh parts of it, 10, 15%. My wife had to get off at 15%. We couldn’t she couldn’t manage any more. And then I was able to keep going on the 20% parts, but even one or two of those were 25%, working our way up the side of the long men ride towards the gliding club. Then we get to the top. There’s the gliding club there. And then we work our way through a bit of level through some Hazard and then drop down towards Church Streathton. And then from Church Streathton we then come out. And we found a really difficult route back. That’s the Kum Road. And then this long gravel climb we’ve got back to the beginning again. Okay. So let’s get started. So, here we are in the village of Cardington, just going past the pub to a lovely church worth visiting. And immediately we found a road closed because they were doing some sewage works. But we follow on up this road and it takes you through some of the really beautiful back villages and we’re just heading now down towards Tickleton really in the the distance. So you’ll see that the roads are completely empty. Unfortunately, it was difficult to see over the tops of some of the hedges, but as we follow this way, you’ll see that the road quality is quite excellent. And that generally applies to nearly all the roads, the the side roads, because they don’t have a lot of buildings up against them. Most of these rural roads, apart from tractor ruts on the very edge, so usually the the left hand edge of the road is falling apart a little bit, but as long as you stay away from that, you can see the quality is excellent. [Music] We’re heading through the village and the key point is where we cross the B4371. That’s going to be the key place that we’re heading for. But we’re going to take a few sort of side roads and other things as we head our way along. So traffic is generally very light, but when it does come, you just got to be aware of the fact that the roads are not particularly wide and is quite often the case when uh riding that the time when a car is passing is also at about the same time that another car is trying to get past you from behind as well. and that can be a bit of a nuisance. Here we are heading down and we’re going to cross the main road in a minute. Again, the hedges are getting taller. So, that foam box indicates that the main road is coming and you’re going to be on that road just for just about a kilometer. So, we descend down the hill. We then turn right onto this main road and then left straight away over the railway. [Music] Now we start climbing up through the hills and this is a very minor back road. The main issue here were all the sticks that were across it when you’re under the trees. But we now work our way up onto the the if you like the top of the hill and it was a beautiful sunny day and you get fantastic views. The hedges are a bit lower and we get a chance to see our way around. But the road is narrow, so if a car does come, you may have to squeeze your way over. But we’re now heading down towards Tickleton. And here we are within the little village. As you see, it’s only half a dozen to a dozen houses. And then we carry on. And we’re finding this very fine uh narrow road that we take out from there. And we head our way up the hill again through darkness. That was where a car passed us. And you see we had to stop and allow it pass. And now we’ve made our way through PH Marshbrook into the Long Mind Adventure Camp. And they were really good. We’d run out of water. It was so hot that day. It was about 37. And they allowed us to stop in, fill up with water, and also use their toilets. And now we’re heading off. And just after here, we’re going to turn left and we go up this little narrow path. So there we go. We’re gonna work our way along. And this road gets really, really narrow. And here’s the lefthand turn. And if we head up this track, it’s actually really steep. And this is where we start to get into the gravel section. So we’re now in the gravel. And we get to this first gate. And you can see it is the Ride UK pathway. But we’ve got to actually work our way along here. We were able to ride a little bit, but it was very narrow in places. There’s a lot of building work going on in the farms and it wasn’t particularly friendly place because of all the gates. So, we stopped a little just there for lunch uh where it says on the map difficult gate and path. And then after that, we headed on down. But again, it was still pushing quite a lot. And then we get to this big plane where you’re literally pushing through the the brambles and the bracken the whole time. Wasn’t very easy to ride on. And I suspect this is one of the routes that Simon Richardson took when he cycled across Shropshire. But wonderful views from the top here, but it’s not really very accessible. If you certainly if you had a road bike, you’d be in trouble. It’s fine for most solo gravel bikes. And if you’ve got a mountain bike, then you’ll laugh at it. We then come out across this field that’s rather open and flat. It’s a very wide path. And we stopped and the kimoot wanted us to turn left, but we then realized that actually if we carried on, we’d eventually get to the gateway and that will take us to the next main road. So, we work our way along across the fields. And you can see the main road down the bottom in the inset picture at the top there. And we’ve just got to work our way down the road. We come out of the bottom there. We turn right at this road. And now we’ve got a a kilometer and a half, maybe two kilometers of the main road. Be careful because it has got some large lorries on it. And these lorries do actually rattle along at quite a high speed. And there were also tractors. So, we’re on here for a while and then we’re going to head right up this tiny little road. And it really is small. And this is where you can see at the bottom that we’re now starting to head up that long hill. So, we’re now really into the beginning of the climb. It’s a fantastic long climb. Recommend it for anybody who likes climbing because it starts off at about 5% and then it suddenly shoots up to about 25%. So, fantastic views over the valley to our left as we ascend up the hill here. Watch out for the occasional sheep that runs across the road. It is getting steeper all the time, but the main part is when we get into Astton and we have to turn right through a small lane. So, here we go. Occasional car coming through that have driven over the top. There is parking at the top actually near the glider club and maybe that’s a good place to start this ride if you don’t mind ending it with a beast of a climb, but it is quite savage later on. So, we follow up this long road and it is generally pretty quiet. Most of the vehicles you meet will be twin cab four-wheel drives. And so, we turn right here in the village of Astton. And now the steepness begins. And I confess that we had to stop fairly regularly. These fantastic views out across the valley. But you know when it was 15% we could actually ride on the tandem then my wife would jump off and I would carry on cycling till it got to about 20% and then I just lose traction on the back wheel because there was no nobody sitting over the back wheel. So that made it a bit difficult. On a solo bike you can usually manage about 25 but you’ll see here it’s too steep. So I’m literally just pushing. So, I apologize for the helmet slamming in front of the camera, but that’s just the way it had to go. [Music] So, we pushed up the last little bit of the hill. It doesn’t look as steep in the video, but I can tell you it was exhausting. Also, the temperature was about 34° C, and so that’s why the helmet came off because I was overheating. I was about to pass out. It was just so hot managing that steep hill. But we get near to the top and then at that point we sort of follow around. There’s a couple of tight bends near the top. You can see just by the gliding club. This is where the parking is. And there’s a lot of people that park up here. And you can see the gliders uh where they’re landing. And that’s a good amount of parking. And as I say, that might be a good place to start, but there are a few parking spaces further on. [Music] And so we carry on now along the top of the ridge, which is the very top of Long Mind. It’s pretty level actually. There’s a very slight gradient in it, but not enough to really worry about and just as many ups as there are downs, but they’re all fairly minor. And there’s a lot of parking spaces along here where you can stop, although I think they recommend that you stop in the National Trust car park way over in Carding Valley. So, we’re now working our way along the top and then we’re going to get to the point where it starts to go down. So, after this little what looks like an abandoned holly plantation on the left, we stopped for a cup of tea and a piece of flapjack, which is our chosen way of recovering from Big Hills. [Music] We then work our way on across the the last bit of the top and then the descent comes incredibly rapidly. So whereas it takes you maybe 30 minutes to get to the top when cycling on a tandem, it takes you about 3 minutes to get back down. So we stopped here just to have a good look around and you can see the hills. They’re breathtaking shops hills stretching out for miles. Probably on a good day you can see Shrosbury and Swindon. But we now start to descend and we’re at the top and some of these are savage descents. Do check your brakes more than anything. You cannot afford to do this with dodgy back brakes. You can see we’re just about at the bottom now. We’re in the town. So, we’ve made it into uh the town of Church Streathton and we stopped off at the co-op and then we came out and this is where we now get another gravel bit. There is an alternative route back via Ha, but we decided that we wanted to take the route that was recommended. We got to this point and there’s a place called U Kums Road and this is it. It’s a hollowway but it’s an abandoned hol. It was it had fallen trees, great big piles of rocks. It wasn’t really possible to ride it on a tandem. It would be a bit of a struggle on a gravel bike. I was picking and carrying the bike. You could do it on a mountain bike, but it was not easy at all. You can see there was a pile of logs just lying lengthwise. Uh and then you come out at the other end and you’re on the edge of this field and suddenly it’s easy again. So we follow along the field through another gate, but we’re not out of the woods yet. So this is now a farm track that runs through the edge of the woods and then it goes through the edge of like rough grazing and heathland and I will confess we were tired. We’d done best part of 40k and it had been a roasting hot day. We’d had a lot of climbs and the tandem the the traction from the rear wheel doesn’t always go well. So, we met up with a couple of walkers there were chatting with and sometimes they overtook us and sometimes we overtook them. But, it was really bad. And there are times like this little slope here, which is another little short 25 center where we just had to push up. We just couldn’t get the traction from the rear wheel. And we’re following this. This is quite a long long gravel climb. It goes up and up for a long time. You can see it’s now getting dark because the resolution on the camera is beginning to decline. And we work our way to the top. And then almost as quickly when we get to the other side, we start descending rapidly down back towards Cardington. So the road suddenly becomes a proper road. It’s got some uh proper tarmac on the top. We zip down the hill. There we go. Cardington Church. And now back into the valley. So, just to summarize, it’s about a 40k ride. 900 m of ascent and descent, but some parts of it are at 25%. Uh there’s about 15% typically on the gravel. Some parts you will have to push and carry. But it’s a great ride. Make sure you’ve got plenty of water. So, if you want to navigate your way through, then uh download our GPX file that you can find on our commute page. That’s Paul and Diane on Tandem. Download that. We’ve got plenty of rides across the country. This is a great one. We enjoyed this and we’ll do a little short summary actually of just going along the top. But thank you for joining us and we look forward to joining you on our next ride which could be more in Shropshire or we could be way out in Glstershare where we went sooner afterwards. All the best. See you again soon. Bye for now. [Music]